might be of use to us? I have been trying to explain to the ladies what our problem is."
"Would you care for breakfast?" Lady Amelia asked without haste, and with her usual placid courtesy. "Charles may be trying to explain, but so far he has not succeeded." In response to her gesture, a maid laid two more places at the table. With a jingling of spurs the two newcomers entered, apologized for their dirt, and were delighted to accept some breakfast. Richard dropped a perfunctory kiss on his sister's cheek on his way to the eggs and ham. After a few minutes of tea-pouring and butter-passing, while Sir Charles strode up and down the room with barely suppressed impatience, it was Lady Amelia who spoke first. "We will leave you to your business, which I can see is very important, and we won't pester you with demands for explanations. But would you answer just one question?"
Colonel Dedham said, "Of course, Melly. What is it?"
"What is it that has suddenly thrown you into this turmoil? Some unexpected visitor, I gather, from what Charles said?"
Dedham stared at her. "He didn't tell you - ? Good God. It's Corlath himself. He's coming. He never comes near here, you know - none of the real Hillfolk do if they can help it. At best, if we want badly enough to talk to him, we can catch one of his men as they pass through the foothills northeast of here. Sometimes."
"You see," broke in Sir Charles, "it makes us hope that perhaps he wishes to cooperate with us - not the Northerners. Jack, did you find out anything?"
Dedham shrugged. "Not really. Nothing that we didn't already know - that his coming here is unprecedented, to say the least - and that it is in fact him. Nobody had any better guesses than ours about why, suddenly, he decided to do so."
"But your guess would be - " prompted Sir Charles.
Dedham shrugged again, and looked wry. "You know already what my guess would be. You just like to hear me making an ass of myself. But I believe in the, um, curious things that happen out there - " he waved the sugar spoon - "and I believe that Corlath must have had some sort of sign, to go to the length of approaching us."
A silence fell; Harry could see that everyone else in the room was uncomfortable. "Sign?" she said tentatively.
Dedham glanced up with his quick smile. "You haven't been here long enough to have heard any of the queer stories about the old rulers of Damar?"
"No," she said.
"Well, they were sorcerers - or so the story goes. Magicians. They could call the lightning down on the heads of their enemies, that sort of thing - useful stuff for founding an empire."
Sir Charles snorted.
"No, you're quite right; all we had was matchlocks and enthusiasm. Even magic wanes, I suppose. But I don't think it's waned quite away yet; there's some still living in those mountains out there. Corlath can trace his bloodlines back to Aerin and Tor, who ruled Damar in its golden age - with or without magic, depending on which version you prefer."
"If they weren't legends themselves," put in Sir Charles.
"Yes. But I believe they were real," said Jack Dedham. "I even believe they wielded something we prosaic Homelanders would call magic."
Harry stared at him, fascinated, and his smile broadened. "I'm quite used to being taken for a fool about this. It's doubtless part of the reason why I'm still a colonel, and still at the General Mundy. But there are a number of us old soldiers whose memories go back to the Daria of thirty, forty years ago who say the same thing."
"Oh, magic," said Sir Charles disgustedly, but there was a trace of uneasiness in his voice as well. "Have you ever seen lightning come to heel like a dog?"
Dedham through his politeness looked a little stubborn. "No. I haven't. But it's true enough at least that the men who have gone up against Corlath's father and grandfather were plagued by the most astonishing bad luck. And you know the Queen and Council back Home would give their eyeteeth to push our border back the way we've been saying we would for the last eighty years."
"Bad luck?" said Lady Amelia. "I've heard the stories, of course - some of the old ballads are very beautiful. But - what sort of bad luck?"
Dedham smiled again. "I admit it does begin to sound