The Hero and the Crown (29 page)

shoulder at Aerin as she strapped the saddle in place, rather than doing his usual

morning imitation of a war-horse scenting his enemy just over the next hill.

She did not mount at once but turned back to Luthe, and he held out his arms,

and she rushed into them. He sighed, and her own breast rose and fell against his.

“I have put you on a horse—that same horse—and watched you ride away from

me before. I thought I should never get over it that first time. I think I followed

you for that; not for any noble desire to help you save Damar; only to pick up

whatever pieces Agsded might have left of you .... I know I shall never get over it

this time. If you do it, someday, a third time, it will probably kill me.” Aerin tried

to smile, but Luthe stopped her with a kiss. “Go now. A quick death is the best I

believe.”

“You can’t scare me,” Aerin said, almost succeeding in keeping her voice level.

“You told me long ago that you aren’t mortal.”

“I never said I can’t be killed,” replied Luthe. “If you wish to chop logic with me,

my dearest love, you must make sure of your premises.”

There was a little silence, and Luthe said, “You need not try to dazzle me.”

“I must go,” Aerin said hopelessly, and flung herself at Talat just as she had

done once before. “I will see you again.”

Luthe nodded.

She almost could not say the words: “But it will be a long time—long and long.”

Luthe nodded again.

“But we shall meet.”

Luthe nodded a third time.

“Gods of all the worlds, say something,” she cried, and Talat startled beneath

her.

“I love you,” said Luthe. “I will love you till the stars crumble, which is a less idle

threat than is usual to lovers on parting. Go quickly, for truly I cannot bear this.”

She closed her legs violently around the nervous Talat, and he leaped into a

gallop. Long after Aerin was out of sight, Luthe lay full length upon the ground,

and pressed his ear to it, and listened to Talat’s hoofbeats carrying Aerin farther

and farther away.

SHE RODE IN A DAZE of misery, unconscious of the yerig and folstza who

pressed closely around Talat’s legs and looked anxiously up into her face; and she

stopped, numbly, at nightfall. She might have gone on till she dropped in her

tracks, were she on foot; but she was not, and so at nightfall she stopped, and

stripped her horse, and rubbed him down with a dry cloth. Talat was a little sore;

that sudden gallop to begin a long day had done his weak leg no good, and so she

unwrapped some ointment that would warm the stiffness, and massaged it in

vigorously, and even smiled a little at the usual grimaces of pleasure Talat made.

When she lay down by the fire she sprang up again almost at once, and paced

back and forth. She was dizzy with exhaustion and stupid with unhappiness, and

she was riding to the gods knew what at the City; and as she remembered that,

she remembered also flashes of what she had seen, deep in the Lake of Dreams.

But that brought her back to Luthe again, and the tears ran down her face, and,

standing before the campfire, she bowed her face in her hands and sobbed.

This would not do. She had the Crown, and she carried an enchanted sword;

she was coming home a warrior victorious—and a first sol worthy of respect. She

felt like dead leaves, dry and brown and brittle, although leaves were probably

not miserable; they were just quietly buried by snow and burned by sun and

harried by rain till they peacefully disintegrated into the earth .... She found

herself staring at the earth under her feet. She had to get some sleep.

She turned despairingly back to her blanket and found two furry bodies already

there. The dog queen smiled at her and moved her feathery tail an inch at least;

the cat king flattened his ears and half-lidded his eyes. Neither paid the least

attention to the other.

She laughed, a cracked laugh, half a choke. “Thank you,” she said. “Perhaps I

shall sleep after all,” She pillowed her head on a cat flank, and a dog head lay in

the curve between her ribs and pelvis, and a dog tail curled over her feet. She

slept at once, and heavily; and she woke in the morning hugging the queen’s neck

with her face buried in her ruff, and the big yerig had a look of great patience and

forbearance on her face that no doubt she wore when bearing with a new litter of

puppies.

Aerin also woke with a sense of urgency; urgency so great that it broke through

the numbness. “Soon,” she said aloud to Talat, and he cocked his ear at her and

grunted only a little at the indignity of having his girth tightened. “They need us

soon.”

He was stiff this morning as well, but Aerin paid attention and was careful, and

he worked out of it. Before the darkness came upon them a second time they had

nearly passed the Airdthmar on their right hand; and by the third evening Aerin

could see the fault in the top line of the Hills that was the pass to the forested

plain before the City, for her way home was short when she knew where she was

going.

Tomorrow, perhaps, they would stand in that pass.

“If we had had the Crown,” another voice, higher pitched: Perlith. “If we had

had the Crown, we would not be so badly off in the first place.”

“At least,” said Galanna in a voice so low that Arlbeth would not hear her, “we

do not have our little bad-luck token with us. Thank the gods for that much.”

Thank the gods ... thank the gods she’s not here ... not here ... the Crown,

please the gods, we need the Crown, it is not here ....

She woke up. Dawn was just creeping above the mountains’ crests. She did not

want to be awake yet, for today she would come in sight of her City, and she was

afraid of what she would find; afraid that she came too late; afraid that even the

Crown was not enough. Afraid that they would not accept the Crown from her

hands. Afraid that they would read in her face whom she had wrested the Crown

from.

Afraid that they would read in her face that she knew, now, .that she did not

belong to Damar. She would love it all her life, and that life was likely to be a long

one; and she had a duty to it that she might fulfill some part of, if she tried as

hard as she could.

She told herself that she did not think of Luthe.

Her army flowed up on her either flank; a sea of furry backs, black and grey and

brindled, golden and ruddy; there was no playfulness in them today. Their ears

pointed in the direction they were going, and their tails were low. She had

unwrapped the Crown, and at first she carried it before her balanced on the

pommel, and then she thought of stowing it away again, but she wanted it close,

where she could touch it and it touch her. She slung it at last up over her arm to

her shoulder, and it warmed, riding there, till when she reached to touch it with

her fingers it was the same temperature as her own skin.

As they rode into the morning the wind sang in her ears, but it carried strange

sounds within it, and she smelled strange odors. It was Talat’s restlessness, at last,

that told her what was happening; for these were the sounds and smells of battle.

They wound their way up the smooth broad track that led between Vasth and

Kar to the low forested hills before the City. As they reached the top of the pass

Talat snorted and shied away and Aerin clung to the saddle, not believing the

glimpse she had had of the scene below them. Grimly she kneed Talat around,

and reluctantly he obeyed her, but still he tried to sidle sideways, to turn and bolt.

Even Maur had not been so bad as what lay before them.

The trees were gone; even, it seemed, the gentle hills were flattened, and

where there had been the greens and browns and deep blue shadows of leaves

and trees there was the grisly heave and thrust of battle. The Northerners were

there, between her and her City. She could see small human bands, the largest

near the City gates, fighting desperately; but they were outnumbered, and they

fought defensively, because their honor demanded it, and because fear of being

captured alive by the Northerners drove them on; not because they had any hope

left. And the Northerners knew this.

Aerin stared numbly at the ragged scarred landscape, and listened to the

terrible cries and the heavy sound of blows, and the fumes of the fighting choked

her, and made her eyes water. It was as though the forest she had daily seen from

the highest towers of her father’s castle had never been; it was as if, when Luthe

dragged her back to her own time, he had miscalculated and she was some other

Aerin on some other world. She waited for panic to take her. Talat quieted and

stood, ears forward, tense, but awaiting her orders; and her army surrounded

her, and made a huge pool behind her that splashed like surf up the rock sides of

the pass.

“Well,” she said aloud, and the calmness of her own voice frightened her.

“Maybe not being quite mortal any more is going to count for less than I

thought.” She settled the Crown more firmly on her shoulder, and drew

Gonturan, who gleamed blue along her edge; the blue rippled up, over the hilt

and grip, and flowed over Aerin’s hand. There was an odd subtle tingle at the

touch of the blue shimmer, but it was not unpleasant; Aerin put it down to the

twitching of her own nerves.

Then Aerin thought that perhaps it wasn’t her nerves after all.

She shook the sword, and the blue light brightened till it lit the air around her,

and the pit below her shimmered with it, and the cat king’s eyes glinted with it as

he looked up at her; and the light made it easier, somehow, to see, for just

beyond where Gonturan’s tip pointed she saw Kethtaz quite clearly, and Arlbeth

on his back; and the blue light seemed to settle around him too, across the eerie

ground so far away. It outlined Tor as well, not far from his king; and she

wondered where the standard-bearer was, for it was this lack that had made her

unsure that she had seen her father aright; but she had no time to think about it

now.

“Listen,” she said, and many pairs of bright eyes turned to her. “The Crown

must fall only into the hands of Arlbeth or Tor. No one else. I will give it to one of

them if I can”—she swallowed—”and if I fail, then you must; or if neither should

leave this battle alive, then you must carry it far from here—far from here, far

from Damar; as far as your feet can bear you.” Her voice echoed oddly, as if the

blue light reflected it or focused it, or held it together; and she had no doubt,

suddenly, of her army, and a great sense of relief came to her, and almost a sort

of joy.

“Come on, then,” she said. “I’d really best prefer to deliver it myself.”

She raised Gonturan, and Talat leaped forward, and the yerig and folstza

fanned out around her; and the first Northerner to feel the teeth of Aerin’s army

fell beneath the dog queen, and the second was beheaded by Gonturan, and the

third was pulled down by the tall black cat.

The Northerners had no scouts looking back over the mountains, for they had

no reason to think a watch was necessary; they had the best strength of Damar

bottled up in the City before them, and what few folk there were stilt scattered in

small towns and mountain villages had been sufficiently terrorized by marauding

bands of Northerners that they could be relied on to stay shivering at home.

Furthermore, the Northern leaders could hear their enemies from afar, and could

tell from whence they came, just as Perlith could turn a handful of nothing into a

bouquet of flowers at a court ball.

Or so they had been able to do. They had had no foreknowledge of Aerin’s

approach, and the Northerners, while no cowards, knew much of magic and

perhaps more of kelar than the Damarians did; and the unexpectedness of this

feat frightened them far more than the simple fact of Aerin’s presence. And so

they did not rally at once, as they should have, for, had they done so, they might

have cut her down and won the day for themselves, and won Damar forever. But

they did not. They wheeled their riding beasts, some of them nearly horses but

most of them nothing like horses at all, and tried more to get out of her way than

to engage her and test her strength.

The common soldiery of the North was more frightened yet. They saw that

their leaders did not like this blue flame that dazzled their eyes and, if it came too

near, parted their queerly jointed limbs from their thick bodies; and so they

scrambled to be free of the thing, whatever it was; and the blue light only rippled

farther and farther out from its center, and spread all around them. Frequently it

felt like teeth at their throats, and their brown-and-purple blood soon tinged the

ethereal blue a darker shade; and sometimes it fell from above them, like the

lashing hoofs of a war-horse; and their own dying cries were in their ears, and a

high singing note as well that they had never heard before, although in it were

also the sharp snarls of the wild mountain cats, and the dangerous baying of a

yerig pack, and the shrill screams of a fighting stallion.

The blue dazzled Aerin’s eyes too, but it was a useful sort of dazzlement