The Hero and the Crown (3 page)

go to the kitchens if you don’t wish to.”

Aerin laughed. “You know me too well. After sulking, I sneak off to the stables

after dark—preferably after bedtime—and talk to my horse.”

Teka smiled and sat down on the red-and-blue embroidered cushion (her

embroidery, not Aerin’s) on the chair by Aerin’s bed. “I have had much of the

raising of you, these long years.”

“Very long years,” agreed Aerin, reaching for a leg of turpi. “Tell me about my

mother.”

Teka considered. “She came walking into the City one day. She apparently

owned nothing but the long pale gown she wore; but she was kind, and good with

animals, and people liked her.”

“Until the king married her.”

Teka picked up a slab of dark bread and broke it in half. “Some of them liked

her even then.”

“Did you?”

“King Arlbeth would never have chosen me to nurse her daughter else.”

“Am I so like her as folk say?”

Teka stared at her, but Aerin felt it was her mother Teka looked at. “You are

much like what your mother might have been had she been well and strong and

without hurt. She was no beauty, but she ... caught the eye. You do too.”

Tor’s eye, thought Aerin, for which Galanna hates me even more

enthusiastically than she would anyway. She is too stupid to recognize the

difference between that sort of love and the love of a friend who depends on the

particular friendship—or a farmer’s son’s love for his pet chicken. I wonder if

Perlith hates me because his wife hoped to marry Tor, or merely for small

scuttling reasons of his own. “That’s just the silly orange hair.”

“Not orange. Flame-colored.”

“Fire is orange.”

“You are hopeless.”

Aerin grinned in spite of a large mouthful of bread. “Yes. And besides, it is

better to be hopeless, because—” The grin died.

“And they all have husbands, and go only by special dispensation from the

king, and only if they can dance as well as they can ride. And none at all has

ridden at the king’s side since Aerinha, goddess of honor and of flame, first taught

men to forge their blades,” Aerin said fiercely. “You’d think Aerinha would have

had better sense. If we were still using slingshots and magic songs, I suppose we’d

still all be riding with them. They needed the women’s voices for the songs to

work—”

“That’s only a pretty legend,” said Teka firmly. “If the singing worked, we’d still

be using it.”

“Why? Maybe it got lost with the Crown. They might at least have named me

Cupka or Marli or—or Galanna or something. Something to give me fair warning.”

“They named you for your mother.”

“Then she has to have been Damarian,” Aerin said. This was also an old

argument. “Aerinha was Damarian.”

“Aerinha is Damarian,” said Teka, “and Aerinha is a goddess. No one knows

where she first came from.”

There was a silence. Aerin stopped chewing. Then she remembered she was

eating, swallowed, and took another bite of bread and turpi. “No, I don’t suppose

I ever thought the king would let his only, and she somewhat substandard,

daughter ride into possible battle, even though sword-handling is about the only

thing she’s ever gotten remotely good at—her dancing is definitely not

satisfactory.” She grunted. “Tor’s a good teacher. He taught me as patiently as if it

were normal for a king’s child to have to learn every sword stroke by rote, to have

to practice every maneuver till the muscles themselves know it, for there is

nothing that wakes in this king’s child’s Wood to direct it.” Aerin looked, hot-

eyed, at Teka, remembering again Perlith’s words as he left the hall last night.

“Teka, dragons aren’t that easy to kill.”

“I would not want to have to kill one,” Teka said sincerely. Teka, maid and

nurse, maker of possets and sewer of patches, scolder and comforter and friend,

who saw nothing handsome in a well-balanced sword and who always wore long

full skirts and aprons.

Aerin burst out laughing. “No, I am not surprised.”

Teka smiled comfortably.

Aerin ate several of the mik-bars herself before dusk fell and she could slip

privately out of the castle by the narrow back staircase that no one else used, and

into the largest of the royal barns where the horses of the first circle were kept.

She liked to pretend that the ever observant men and women of the horse, the

sofor, did not notice her every time she crept in at some odd hour to visit Talat.

Anyone else of the royal blood could be sure of not being seen, had they wished

to be unseen; Aerin could only tiptoe through the shadows, when there were

shadows, and keep her voice down; and yet she knew she was simply recognized

and permitted to pass. The sofor accepted that when she came thus quietly she

wished to be left alone, and they respected her wishes; and Hornmar, the king’s

own groom, was her friend. All the sofor knew what she had done for Talat, so the

fact that they were being kind by ignoring her hurt her less than similar

adaptations to the first sol’s deficiencies did elsewhere in the royal court.

Talat had been wondering what had become of her for almost two days, and

she had to feed him the last three milk-bars before he forgave her; and then he

snuffled her all over, partly to make sure she was not hiding anything else he

might eat, partly to make sure she had in fact returned to him. He rubbed his

cheek mournfully along her sleeve and rolled a reproachful eye.

Talat was nearly as old as she was; he had been her father’s horse when she

was small. She remembered the dark grey horse with the shining black dapples on

his shoulders and flanks, and the hot dark eye. The king’s trappings had looked

particularly well on him: red reins and cheek pieces, a red skirt to the saddle, and

a wide red breastplate with a gold leaf embroidered on it; the surka leaf, the

king’s emblem, for only one of the royal blood could touch the leaves of the surka

plant and not die of its sap.

He was almost white now. All that remained of his youth were a few black hairs

in his mane and tail, and the black tips of his ears.

“You have not been neglected; don’t even try to make me think so. You are fed

and watered and let out to roll in the dirt every day whether I come or not.” She

ran a hand down his back; one of Hornmar1 s minions had of course groomed him

to a high gloss, but Talat liked to be fussed over, so she fetched brushes and

groomed him again while he stretched his neck and made terrible faces of

enjoyment. Aerin relaxed as she worked, and the memory of the scene in the hall

faded, and the mood that had held for the last two days lightened and began to

break up, like clouds before a wind.

THE YOUNG AERIN had worshipped Talat, her father’s fierce war-stallion, with

his fine lofty head and high tail. She thought it very impressive that he would rear

and strike at anyone but Hornmar or her father, rear with his ears flat back, so

that his long wedge-shaped head looked like a striking snake’s.

But when she was twelve years old her father had gone off to a Border battle: a

little mob of Northerners had slipped across the mountains and set fire to a

Damarian village. Something of the sort happened not infrequently, and in those

days Arlbeth or his brother Thomar attended to such occurrences, riding out

hopefully and in haste to chop up a few Northerners who had stayed to loot

instead of scrambling back across the Border again at once. The Northerners

knew Damarian reprisals were invariably swift, and yet always there were a few

greedy ones who lingered. It was Arlbeth’s turn this time; and there had been

more Northerners than usual. Three men had been killed outright, and one horse;

two men injured—and Talat.

Talat had been slashed across the right flank by a Northern sword, but he had

carried Arlbeth safely through the battle till its end. Arlbeth was appalled when at

last he was free to dismount and attend to it; there were muscles and tendons

severed; the horse should have fallen when he took the blow. Arlbeth’s first

thought was to end it then; but he looked at his favorite horse’s face, with the lips

curled back from the teeth and the white showing around the eye: Talat was

daring his master to kill him, and his master couldn’t do it. Arlbeth thought, If he

is stubborn enough to walk home on three legs, I am stubborn enough to let him

try.

Aerin had been one of the first to run out of the City and meet the returning

company. They were slow coming home, for Talat had set the pace, and while

Aerin knew that if anything had happened to her father a messenger would have

been sent on ahead, still their slowness had worried her—and she felt an awful

fear squeeze her belly when she first saw Talat, his head hanging nearly to his

knees, put three legs slowly down one after the other, and hop for the fourth. She

only then saw her father walking on the horse’s far side.

Somehow Talat climbed the last hill to the castle, and crept into his own stall,

and with a terrible sigh, lay slowly down in the straw there, the first time he had

been off his feet since the sword struck him. “He’s made it this far,” said Arlbeth

grimly, and sent for the healers; but when they came to corner Talat in his stall,

he surged to his feet and threatened them, and when they tried to pour a narcotic

down his throat, it took four of the hafor and a chain twisted around his jaw to

hold him still.

They sewed the leg up, and it healed. But he was lame, and he would always be

lame. They turned him out into a pasture of his own, green with chest-high grass,

cool with trees, with a brook to drink from and a pond to soak in, mud at the edge

of the pond for rolling, and a nice big dry shed for rain; and Hornmar brought him

grain morning and evening, and talked to him.

But Talat only grew thin and began to lose his black dapples; his coat stared

and he didn’t eat his grain, and he turned his back on Hornmar, for Hornmar was

taking care of Arlbeth’s new war-horse now.

Arlbeth had hoped Talat might sire him foals; he would like nothing better than

to ride Talat again. But Talat’s bad leg was too weak; he could not mount the

mares, and so he savaged them, and turned on his handlers when they tried to

prevent him. Talat was sent back to his pasture in disgrace. Had he been any

horse but the king’s favorite, he would have been fed to the dogs.

It had been over two years since Arlbeth had led Talat home from his last

battle, and Aerin was fifteen when she ate some leaves from the surka. While

they had been trying to breed Talat, Aerin had been turning corners that weren’t

there and falling downstairs and being haunted by purple smoke billowing from

scarlet caves.

Galanna was not at all pleased by Aerin’s birth; not only was Aerin a first sol,

which Galanna would never be unless she managed to marry Tor, but her mother

died bearing her, which made Aerin altogether too interesting a figure within the

same household that Galanna wished to continue to revolve around herself.

Aerin was by nature the son of child who got into trouble first and thought

about it later if at all, and Galanna, in her way, was quite clever. Galanna it was

who dared her to eat a leaf of the surka; she dared her by saying that Aerin would

be afraid to touch the royal plant, because she was not really of royal blood: she

was a throwback to her mother’s witch breed, and Arlbeth was her father in name

only. If she touched the surka, she would die.

At fifteen Aerin should already have shown signs of her royal blood’s Gift;

usually the Gift began to make its presence known—most often in poltergeist

fits—years younger. Galanna had contrived to disguise her loathing for her littlest

cousin for several years after her temper tantrums upon Aerin’s birth had not

been a complete success; but lately had occurred to an older Galanna that if Aerin

really was a throw-back, a sport, as she began to appear truly to be, Galanna had

excellent reason to scorn and dislike her: her existence was a disgrace to the royal

honor.

They made a pair, facing off, standing alone in the royal garden, glaring at each

other. Galanna had come to her full growth and beauty by that time: her blue-

black hair hung past her hips in heavy waves, and was artfully held in place by a

golden web work of fine thread strung with pearls; her cheeks were flushed

becomingly with rage till they were as red as her lips, and her huge black eyes

were opened their widest. Her long eyelashes had almost grown back since the

night Aerin had drugged her supper wine and crept into her bedroom later and

cut them off. Everyone had known at once who had done it, and Aerin, who in

general held lying in contempt, had not bothered to deny it. She had said before

the gathered court—for Galanna, as usual, had insisted on a public prosecution—

that Galanna should have been grateful she hadn’t shaved her head for her; she’d

been snoring like a pig and wouldn’t have wakened if she’d been thrown out her

bedroom window. Whereupon Galanna had gone off in a fit of strong hysterics

and had to be carried from the hall (she’d been wearing a half-veil that covered