"If you can travel by these...Trumps," Larissa asked her father, freeing a hand to tuck the glassy card into a pocket, "why are we riding these?" She glared balefully down at her horse, which shook its head as though to say it wasn't keen on the arrangement, either.

"You need the practice." Larissa shifted her glare to Eric. The glare was getting quite a workout these past few days. "And I wanted to pick something up while we were in Shadow."

"Oh, what now?" she muttered as he pretended not to hear. The forest around them sat there greenly, offending her. Only this morning they had been riding through a sandy waste, and she was reasonably certain that the horses' blistering five-mile-an-hour pace was insufficent to so thoroughly switch ecosystems in a matter of hours.

The sun shone through the trees, dappling the path with gold. Birds sang in the branches, and a brook ran parallel to the trail, chattering to itself over the rocks. The air smelled of moss and water, and, it must be confessed, of horse. Larissa sulked.

From a distance came the sound of metal on metal. Eric urged his horse to a trot, and Larissa followed suit with only a hint of awkwardness. "Well," Eric said, eyeing her dubiously, "you can always ride in a carriage when we get to Amber." Larissa ignored that with dignity befitting her station.

The metal noises grew louder, and soon Larissa could smell woodsmoke and the tang of hot metal. They drew into sight of a low wooden building with open sides, where a man was beating with a hammer on a glowing chunk of something he held in a pair of tongs. Larissa stared for a long moment until her brain dragged forth an old memory from her training, and she identified the first blacksmith she had ever seen, feeling a frisson as the sheer antiquity of the scene struck her.

Eric dismounted and waited as the man finished his pounding, examined his work, and stuck it back in the fire that dominated the smithy. The smith bowed to Eric from the waist, then disappeared behind a high shelf. Returning quickly, he presented a long, narrow bundle of brown cloth to Eric with another bow. Eric nodded and tucked it under his arm, and the two men turned from each other without having exchanged a word.

"Dismount," Eric told her, as serious as she'd yet seen him. Puzzled, she swung down. The leaf litter of the path was soft beneath her boots. When Eric let the brown cloth fall to the ground, she saw that he was holding a sword wrapped in a black strap, the blade much narrower than his own, coming to a point and sharpened down both sides. "You're not built for a heavier blade," he said, "and a rapier is best in the hands of someone with a quick mind."

Eric balanced the sword on his finger a few inches from the hilt, nodded, then offered it, hilt first, to Larissa. The smith had vanished behind the shelves again, and the forest had fallen strangely silent. She looked at the weapon. Guard and crosstree both were engraved with gold, which patterns chased a little way down the blade itself. It was beautiful and wicked, and the air weighed heavy in her lungs. Larissa made no move to take it.

Her father sighed, and with his free hand, tipped her head up to meet his gaze. "Larissa, I am not trying to turn you into a soldier, but any child of mine will be armed with every weapon, equipped with every advantage it's in my power to give her. Amber is dangerous, my daughter. You must be dangerous, too."

Transfixed by her father's eyes and moving with the slowness of a dreamer, Larissa reached up and wrapped her hand finger by finger around the grip, feeling the moment weigh in her mind as the sword weighed in her hand.

While Larissa was holding her blade, marvelling at how perfectly it fit her hand, how it gleamed in the firelight and the sunlight. Eric knelt and buckled the sword belt around her waist. She looked down at him, surprised. "It's traditional," he said as he stood, brushing leaf bits from his knees. "Now sheathe it and let's be on our way."

Quite conscious of the new strangeness at her side, Larissa urged her horse down the trail. It got easier each time, she noticed.

"You know," Eric said as they rode away from the smithy, "it's also traditional to swear fealty to your liege when he presents you with a sword." Larissa's head snapped around to stare at him so quickly a lesser being might have injured herself. His blue eyes met her blue eyes unwaveringly--but they twinkled, and as she watched, the tiniest of smirks began to play at the corner of his lips. She answered it with her own, and finally, for the first time since she'd met her father, relaxed.