The Hero and the Crown (9 page)

and things like old axe handles and sticks of wood that might make new axe

handles, and she had never gotten around to sweeping the floor. Her hands were

shaking so badly that she dropped the candle again when she tried to pick it up,

and missed when she went to stamp out the thread of smoke that rose from the

floor where the candle had fallen.

She checked her notes to be sure she could read what she had written about

the proportions of this particular attempt; then blew out the candle and went off

in a daze to darn stockings.

Teka asked her twice, sharply, what was the matter with her, as she tried to

help her dress for the court dinner. Aerin’s darns were worse than usual—which

was saying a good deal, and Teka had said even more when she saw them, but as

much out of worry for her sol’s extraordinary vagueness as from straightforward

exasperation at yet another simply homely task done ill. Usually, big court dinners

made Aerin clumsy and rather desperately here-and-now. Teka finally tied

ribbons around both of Aerin’s ankles to hide the miserable lumps of mending

and was even more appalled when Aerin did not object. Ankle ribbons were all

the fashion among the higher-born young ladies this year; when this first became

apparent Teka had had a difficult time convincing Aerin not to lengthen all her

skirts eight inches, that they might drag on the floor and render all questions of

ankle adornment academic; and Teka was fairly sure the only reason she’d won

the argument was that Aerin couldn’t face the thought of all the sewing such a

project would entail.

Teka hung a tassel at the front of one ankle, to fall gracefully over the high arch

of Aerin’s long foot (not that it would stay there; Galanna and the others had

developed a coy little hitch and skip to their walk, to make their tassels fall

forward as they should), and pinned a small silver brooch bearing the royal crest

on the other, and Aerin didn’t even fidget. She was dreamily staring into space;

she was even wearing a slight smile. Could she have fallen in love? Teka

wondered. Who? Thorped’s son—what was his name? Surely not. He was half a

head shorter than she and wispy.

Teka sighed and stood up. “Aerin—are you sure you’re not ill?” she said.

Aerin came back to herself with a visible jerk and said, “Dear Teka, I’m fine.

Truly I am.” Then she looked down with a scowl and wiggled her ankles. “Ugh,”

“They hide your—dare I call them—darns,” Teka said severely.

“There’s that,” said Aerin, and smiled again, and Teka thought, What ails the

girl? I will look for Tor tonight; his face will tell me something.

TOR THOUGHT that night she looked radiant and wished, wistfully, that it had

something to do with him, while he was only too certain it did not. When, daring

greatly, he told her as they spun through the figures of the dance that she was

beautiful, she laughed at him. Truly she has grown up, he thought; even six

months ago she would have blushed scarlet and turned to wood in my arms. “It’s

the ribbons round my ankles,” she said. “My darning surpassed itself in atrocity

today, and Teka said it was this or going barefoot.”

“I am not looking at your feet,” said Tor, looking into her green eyes; and she

said without flinching: “Then you should be, dearest cousin, for you have never

seen me thus bedecked previously, nor likely are ever to see me so again.”

“I am not looking at your feet,” said Tor, looking into her green eyes; and she

said without flinching: “Then you should be, dearest cousin, for you have never

seen me thus bedecked previously, nor likely are ever to see me so again.”

But then so was he. Neither of them would ever forget it for a moment.

Aerin floated through the evening. Since she was first sol, she never had the

embarrassment (or the relief) of being able to sit out. She wasn’t particularly

aware that—most unusually—she had stepped on no one’s feet that night; and

she was accustomed to the polite protests, at the end of each set when partners

were exchanged, of what a pleasure it was to dance with her, and her thoughts

were so far away that she failed to catch the unusual ring of truth in her dancing

partners’ voices. She didn’t even mind dancing three figures with Thorped’s son

(what was his name again?), for while his height did not distress her, his

chinlessness, on another occasion, would have.

She did notice when she danced with Perlith that there was an unwonted

depth of malignance in his light remarks, and wondered in passing what was

biting him. Does the color of my gown make his skin look sallow? But Perlith too

had noticed Thorped’s son’s admiration of the king’s only daughter, and it

irritated him almost as much as it irritated Galanna. Perlith knew quite well that

when Galanna had stopped playing hard to get back in the days when he was

punctiliously courting her it was because she had decided to make a virtue of

necessity after it became apparent that a second sola was the best she was going

to get. But a second sola was an important personage, and Perlith wanted

everyone to envy him his victory to the considerable extent that his blue blood

and irresistible charm—and of course Galanna’s perfect beauty-deserved. How

dare this common runt admire the wrong woman?

Being Perlith, he had, of course, timed his courtship to coincide with the

moment that Galanna admitted defeat on the score of future queenship; but he’d

never been able to bring himself to flirt with Aerin. He had as much right to the

king’s daughter as anyone—what a pity she had to have orange hair and

enormous feet—and while he would never have married her, king’s daughter or

no, with that commoner for a mother, it might have been amusing to make her

fall in love with him. In his conscious mind he preferred to think that he hadn’t

made her fall in love with him by choice; in a bleaker moment it had occurred to

him that Aerin probably wouldn’t like being flirted with, and that his notorious

charm of manner (when he cared to use it) might have had no effect on her

whatsoever. He had banished the thought immediately, and his well-trained self-

esteem had buried it forever.

He could admit that she looked better than usual tonight; he’d never seen her

in the fashionable ribbons before, and she had nice trim ankles, in spite of the

feet. This realization did not soften his attitude; he glared at his dancing partner,

and Aerin could feel the glare, though she knew that if she looked into his face his

expression would be one of lazy pleasure, with only a deep glint in his heavy-

lidded eyes to tell her what he was thinking. At a pause in the dance he plucked

several golden specks out of the air that were suddenly there for him when he

reached for them. He closed his fingers around them, smiled, and opened his

hand again, and a posy of yellow and white ring-a-ling flowers—the flowers Aerin

had carried at his wedding—sprang up between his thumb and first finger.

“For the loveliest lady here tonight,” he said, with a bow, to Aerin.

Aerin turned white and backed up a step, her hands behind her. She bumped

into the next couple as they waited for the music for the next figure to begin and

they turned, mildly irritated, to see what was happening; and suddenly the entire

hall was watching. The musicians in the gallery laid down their instruments when

they should have played their first notes; it didn’t occur to them to do anything

else. Perlith, especially when he was feeling thwarted, was formidably Gifted.

Perlith stood, smiling gently at her, his arm gracefully raised and his hand

curled around his posy; the glint in his eye was very bright.

And then the flowers leaped from his fingers and grew wings, and became

yellow and white birds which sang “Aerin, Aerin” as sweetly as golden harps, and

as they disappeared into the darkness of the ceiling the musicians began playing

again, and Tor’s arms were around her, and Perlith was left to make his way out

of the circle of dancers. Aerin stepped on Tor’s feet several times as he helped her

off the dancing-floor, for the magic was strong in her nostrils, and though what

Tor had done had been done at a distance, it still clung to him too. He held her up

by main force till she said, a little shakily, “Let go, cousin, you’re tearing the

waistband right out of my skirt.”

He released her at once, and she put a hand out—to a chair, not to his

outstretched arm. He let the arm drop. “My pardon, please. I am clumsy tonight.”

“You are never clumsy,” she said with bitterness, and Tor was silent, for he was

wishing that she would lean on him instead of on the chair, and did not notice

that most of the bitterness was for Perlith, who had hoped to embarrass her

before the entire court, and a little for herself, and none at all for him. She told

him he might leave her that she was quite all right. Two years ago he would have

said, “Nonsense, you are still pale, and I will not leave you”; but it wasn’t two

years ago, and he said merely, “As you wish,” and left her to find his deserted

partner and make his excuses.

Perlith came to Aerin as she sat in the chair she had been leaning on, sipping

from a glass of water a woman of the hafor had brought her. “I beg most humbly

for forgiveness,” he said, closing his eyes till only the merest glitter showed

beneath his long lashes. “I forgot that you—ah—do not care for such—ah—

tokens.”

Aerin looked at him levelly. “I know perfectly well what you were about this

evening. I accept your apology for precisely what it is worth.”

Perlith blinked at this unexpected intransigence and was, very briefly, at a loss

for a reply. “If you accept my apology for what it is worth,” he said smoothly,

“then I know I need have no fear that you will bear me a grudge for my hapless

indiscretion.”

Aerin laughed, which surprised her as much as it surprised him. “No indeed,

cousin; I shall bear you no grudge for this evening’s entertainment. Our many

years of familiar relationship render us far beyond grudges.” She curtsied hastily

and left the hall, for fear that he would think of something else to say to her;

Perlith never lost verbal skirmishes, and she wanted to keep as long as she could

the extraordinary sensation of having scored points against him.

Later, in the darkness of her bedroom, she reconsidered the entire evening,

and smiled; but it was half a grimace and she found she could not sleep. It had

been too long a day, and she was too tired; her head always spun from an evening

spent on display in the great hall, and tonight as soon as she deflected her

thoughts from Perlith and Tor and yellow birds they immediately turned to the

topic of the dragon fire ointment.

She considered creeping back to her laboratory, but someone would see a light

where only axe handles should be. She had never mentioned that she had taken

over the old shed, but she doubted anyone would care so long as lights didn’t

start showing at peculiar hours—and how would she explain what she was doing?

The castle was the highest point in the City, though the walls around its

courtyard prevented anyone standing at ground level within them from seeing

the City spread out on the lower slopes. But from the third—and fourth-story

windows and balconies overlooking the front of the castle the higher roofs of the

City could be seen, grey stone and black stone and dull red stone, in slabs and thin

shingle-chips; and chimneys rising above all. From fifth—and sixth-story windows

one could see the king’s way, the paved road which fell straight from the castle

gates to the City gates, almost to its end in a flat-stamped earth clearing cornered

by monoliths, a short way beyond the City wails.

But from any point in the castle or the City one might look up and see the Hills

that cradled them; even the break in the jagged outline caused by the City gates

was narrow enough not to be easily recognizable as such. The pass between Vasth

and Kar, two peaks of the taller Hills that surrounded the low rolling forested land

that lay before the City and circled round to meet the Hills behind the castle, was

not visible at all. Aerin loved the Hills; they were green in spring and summer, rust

and brown and yellow in the fall, and white in the winter with the snow they

sheltered the City from; and they never told her that she was a nuisance and a

disappointment and a half blood.

She paced around the balcony and looked at the stars, and the gleam of the

moonlight on the glassy smooth courtyard. Somehow the evening she’d just

endured had quenched much of her joy in her discovery of the morning. That a bit

of yellow grease could protect a finger from a candle flame said nothing about its

preventive properties in dealings with dragons; she’d heard the hunters home

from the hunt say that dragon fire was bitter stuff, and burned like no hearth fire.

On her third trip around the balcony she found Tor lurking in the shadow of

one of the battlemented peaks. “You walk very quietly,” he said.

“Bare feet,” she said succinctly.

“If Teka should catch you so and the night air so chill, she would scold.”