The Hero And The Crown

 

IT WAS A SILENT journey back, and seemed to take forever. When they finally entered the City gates it was still daylight, although Aerin was sure it was the daylight of a week since hearing the villagers1 petition to her father for dragon-slaying. The City streets were thronged, and while the sight of seven of the king's men in war gear and carrying dragon spears was not strange, the sight of the first sol riding among them and looking rather the worse for wear was, and their little company was the subject of many long curious looks. They can see me just fine coming home again, Aerin thought grimly. Whatever shadow it was that I rode away in, I wish I knew where it had gone.

Hornmar himself appeared at her elbow to take Talat off to the stables when they arrived in the royal courtyard. Her escort seemed to her to dismount awkwardly, with a great banging of stirrups and creak of girths. She pulled down the bundles from behind Talat's saddle and squared her shoulders. She couldn't help looking wistfully after the untroubled Talat, who readily followed Hornmar in the direction he was sure meant oats; but she jerked her attention back to herself and found Gebeth staring at her, frozen-faced, so she led the way into the castle.

Even Arlbeth looked startled when they all appeared before him. He was in one of the antechambers of the main receiving hall, and sat surrounded by papers, scrolls, sealing wax, and emissaries. He looked tired. Not a word had passed between Aerin and her unwilling escort since they had left the village, but Aerin felt that she was being herded and had not tried to .escape. Gebeth would have reported to the king immediately upon his return, and so she must; it was perhaps just as well that she had so many sheepdogs to her one self-conscious sheep, because she might have been tempted to put off the reckoning had she ridden back alone.

"Sir," she said. Arlbeth looked at Aerin, then at Gebeth and Gebeth's frozen face, then back at Aerin.

"Have you something to report?" he said, and the kindness in his voice was for both his daughter and his loyal, if scandalized, servant.

Gebeth remained bristling with silence, so Aerin said: "I rode out alone this morning, and went to the village of Ktha, to ... engage their dragon. Or - um - dragons."

What was the proper form for a dragon-killing report? She might have paid a little more attention to such things if she'd thought a little further ahead. She'd never particularly considered the after of killing dragons; the fact that she'd done it was supposed to be enough. But now she felt like a child caught out in misbehavior. Which at least in Gebeth's eyes she was. She unwrapped the bundle she carried under her arm, and laid the battered dragon heads on the floor before her father's table. Arlbeth stood up and came round the edge of the table, and stood staring down at them with a look on his face not unlike Gebeth's when he first recognized what was lying in the dust at his horse's feet.

"We arrived at the village ... after," said Gebeth, who chose not to look at Aerin's ugly tokens of victory again, "and I offered our escort for Aerin-sol's return."

At "offered our escort" a flicker of a smile crossed Arlbeth's face, but he said very seriously, "I would speak to Aerin-sol alone." Everyone disappeared like mice into the walls, except they closed the doors behind them. Gebeth, his dignity still outraged, would say nothing, but no one else who had been in the room when Aerin told the king she had just slain two dragons could wait to start spreading the tale.

Arlbeth said, "Well?" in so colorless a tone that Aerin was afraid that, despite the smile, he must be terribly angry with her. She did not know where to begin her story, and as she looked back over the last years and reminded herself that he had set no barriers to her work with Talat, had trusted her judgment, she was ashamed of her secret; but the first words that came to her were: "I thought if I told you first, you would not let me go."

Arlbeth was silent for a long time. "This is probably so," he said at last. "And can you tell me why I should not have prevented you?"

Aerin exhaled a long breath. "Have you read Astythet's History?"

Arlbeth frowned a moment in recollection. "I ... believe I did, when I was a boy. I do not remember it well." He fixed her with a king's glare, which is much fiercer than an ordinary mortal's. "I seem to remember that the author devotes a good deal of time and space to dragon lore, much of it more legendary than practical."

"Yes," said Aerin. "I read it, a while ago, when I was ... ill. There's a recipe of sorts for an ointment called kenet, proof against dragonfire, in the back of it - "

Arlbeth's frown returned and settled. "A bit of superstitious nonsense."

"No," Aerin said firmly. "It is not nonsense; it is merely unspecific." She permitted herself a grimace at her choice of understatement. "I've spent much of the last three years experimenting with that half a recipe. A few months ago I finally found out ... what works." Arlbeth's frown had lightened, but it was still visible. "Look." Aerin unslung the heavy cloth roll she'd hung over her shoulder and pulled out the soft pouch of her ointment. She smeared it on one hand, then the other, noticing as she did so that both hands were trembling. Quickly, that he might not stop her, she went to the fireplace and seized a burning branch from it, held it at arm's length in one greasy yellow hand, and thrust her other hand directly into the flame that billowed out around it.

Arlbeth's frown had disappeared. "You've made your point; now put the fire back into the hearth, for that is not a comfortable thing to watch." He went back behind his table and sat down; the weary lines showed again in his face.

Aerin came to the other side of his table, wiping her ashy hands on her leather leggings. "Sit," said her father, looking up at her; and leaving charcoal fingerprints on a scroll she tried delicately to move, she cleared the nearest chair and sat down. Her father eyed her, and then looked at the ragged gashes in her tunic. "Was it easy, then, killing dragons when they could not burn you?"

She spread her dirty fingers on her knees and stared at them. "No," she said quietly. "I did not think beyond the fire. It was not easy."

Arlbeth sighed. "You have learned something, then."

"I have learned something." She looked up at her father with sudden hope.

Arlbeth snorted, or chuckled. "Don't look at me like that. You have the beseeching look of a puppy that thinks it may yet get out of a deserved thrashing. Think you that you deserve your thrashing?"

Aerin said nothing.

"That's not meant solely as a rhetorical question. What sort of thrashing are you eligible for? You're a bit old to be sent to your room without any supper, and I believe I rather gave you your autonomy from Teka's dictates when I let you and Talat ride out alone." He paused. "I suppose you needed to get far enough away from the City to build a fire big enough to test your discovery thoroughly." Aerin still said nothing. "I can't forbid you Talat, for he's your horse now, and I love him too well to deny him his master."

He paused again. "You seem to be rather a military problem, but as you have no rank I cannot strip you of it, and as you do not bear a sword from the king's hands he can't take it away from you and hit you with the flat of it." His eyes lingered for a moment on Aerin's eighteenth-birthday present hanging by her side, but he did not mention it.

This time the pause was a long one. "Will you teach the making of the fire ointment if I ask it? "

Aerin raised her head. He could command her to explain it, and knew that she knew he could so command her. "I would gladly teach any who ... gladly would learn it," and as she recognized that he did not command her, he recognized that she said gladly would learn from me, the witchwoman's daughter; for he knew, for all that it had never been spoken in his ears, what his second wife had been called.

"I would learn." He reached for the sack of ointment that Aerin had left lying on his table, took a little of the yellow grease on his fingertips, and rubbed thumb and forefinger together. He sniffed. "I suppose this explains the tales of the first sol's suddenly frequent visits to the apothecaries."

Aerin gulped and nodded. "I would - would be honored to show you the making of the kenet, sir."

Arlbeth stood up and came over to hug his daughter, and left his arm around her shoulders, mindless of the sleek fur of his sleeve and the condition of her leather tunic. "Look, you silly young fool. I understand why you have behaved as you have done, and I sympathize, and I am also tremendously proud of you. But kindly don't go around risking your life to prove any more points, will you? Come talk to me about it first at least.

"Now go away, and let me get back to what I was doing. I had a long afternoon's work still ahead of me before you interrupted."

Aerin fled.

A week later, when she finally dared face her father at breakfast again, which meant sitting down at the table and risking such conversational gambits as he might choose to begin, Arlbeth said, "I was beginning to feel ogreish. I'm glad you've crept out of hiding." Tor, who was there too, laughed, and so Aerin learned that Tor knew the dragon story as well. She blushed hotly; but as the first rush of embarrassment subsided she had to admit to herself that there was probably no one in the City who did not know the story by now.

Breakfast was got through without any further uncomfortable moments, but as Aerin rose to slink away - she still wasn't recovered quite enough for the receiving-hall, and had been spending her days mending her gear and riding Talat - Arlbeth said, "Wait just a moment. I have some things for you, but I gave up bringing them to breakfast several days ago."

Tor got up and disappeared from the room, and Arlbeth deliberately poured himself another cup of malak. Tor returned swiftly, although the moments were long for Aerin, and he was carrying two spears and her small plain sword, which he must have gone to her room to fetch from its peg on the wall by her bed. Tor formally offered them to the king, kneeling, his body bowed so that the outstretched arms that held the weapons were as high as his head; and Aerin shivered, for the first sola should give such honor to nobody. Arlbeth seemed to agree, for he said, "Enough, Tor, we already know how you feel about it," and Tor straightened up with a trace of a smile on his face.

Arlbeth stood up and turned to Aerin, who stood up too, wide-eyed. "First, I give you your sword," and he held it out to her with his hands one just below the hilt and one two-thirds down the scabbarded blade, and she cupped her hands around his. He dropped the sword into her hands, and then cupped his fingers around her closed fingers. "Thus you receive your first sword from your king," he said, and let go; and Aerin dropped her arms slowly to her sides, the sword pressing against her thighs. She carried the sword of the king now; and so the king could call upon it and her whenever he had need - to do, or not to do, at his bidding. The color came and went in her face, and she swallowed.

"And now," Arlbeth said cheerfully, "as you have received your sword officially by my hand I can officially reprimand you with it." He reached for the hilt as Aerin stood dumbly holding it by the scabbard, and pulled the blade clear. He whipped it through the air, and it looked small in his hands; then he brought the blade to a halt just before Aerin's nose. "Thus,", he said, and slapped her cheek hard with the flat of it, "and thus," and he slapped her other cheek with the opposite flat, and Aerin blinked, for the blows brought tears to her eyes. Arlbeth stood looking at her till her vision cleared, and said gravely, "I am taking this very seriously, my dear, and if I catch you riding off again without speaking to me first, I may treat you as a traitor."

Aerin nodded.

"But since you are officially a sword-bearer and since we take pride in officially praising your recently demonstrated dragon-slaying skills," he said, and turned and picked up the spears Tor still held, "these are yours," Aerin held out her arms, the scabbard strap hitched up hastily to dangle from one shoulder. "These are from my days as a dragon-hunter," Arlbeth said. Aerin looked up sharply. "Yes; I hunted dragons when I was barely older than you are now, and I have a few scars to prove it." He smiled reminiscently. "But heirs to the throne are quickly discouraged from doing anything so dangerous and unadmirable as dragon-hunting, so I only used these a few times before I had to lay them aside for good. It's sheer stubbornness that I've kept them so long." Aerin smiled down at her armful.

"I can tell you at least that they are tough and strong and fly straight from the hand.

"I can also tell you that there's another report of a dragon come in - yesterday morning it was. I told the man I'd have his answer by this morning; he's coming to the morning court. Will you go back with him?"

Aerin and her father looked at each other. For the first time she had official position in his court; she had not merely been permitted her place, as she had grudgingly been permitted her undeniable place at his side as his daughter, but she had won it. She carried the king's sword, and thus was, however irregularly, a member of his armies and his loyal sworn servant as well as his daughter. She had a place of her own - both taken and granted. Aerin clutched the spears to her breast, painfully banging her knee with the sword scabbard in the process. She nodded.

"Good. If you had remained hidden, I would have sent Gebeth again - and think of the honor you would have lost."

Aerin, who seemed to have lost her voice instead, nodded again.

"Another lesson for you, my dear. Royalty isn't allowed to hide - at least not once it has declared itself."

A little of her power of speech came back to her, and she croaked, "I have hidden all my life."

Something like a smile glimmered in Arlbeth's eyes. "Do I not know this? I have thought more and more often of what I must do if you did not stand forth of your own accord. But you have - if not quite in the manner I might have wished - and I shall take every advantage of it."

The second dragon-slaying went better than had the first. Perhaps it was her father's spears, which flew truer to their marks than she thought her aim and arm deserved; perhaps it was Talat's eagerness, and the quickness with which he caught on to what he was to do. There was also only one dragon.

This second village was farther from the City than the first had been, so she stayed the night. She washed dragon blood from her clothing and skin - it left little red rashy spots where it had touched her - in the communal bathhouse, from which everyone had been debarred that the sol might have her privacy, and sleeping in the headman's house while he and his wife slept in the second headman's house. She wondered if the second headman then slept in the third's, and if this meant eventually that someone slept in the stable or in a back garden, but she thought that to ask would only embarrass them further. They had been embarrassed enough when she had protested driving the headman out of his own home. "We do you the honor fitting your father's daughter and the slayer of our demon," he said.

She did not like the use of the word demon; she remembered Tor saying that the increase of the North's mischief would increase the incidence of small but nasty problems like dragons. She also wondered if the headman did not wish himself or his pregnant wife to spend a night under the same roof as the witchwoman's daughter, or if they would get a priest in - the village was too small to have its own priest - to bless the house after she left. But she did not ask, and she slept atone in the headman's house.

The fifth dragon was the first one that marked her. She was careless, and it was her own fault. It was the smallest dragon she had yet faced, and the quickest, and perhaps the brightest; for when she had pinned it to the ground with one of her good . spears and came up to it to chop off its head, it did not flame at her, as dragons usually did. It had flamed at her before, with depressingly little result, from the dragon's point of view. When she approached it, it spun around despite the spear that held it, and buried its teeth in her arm.

Her sword fell from her hand, and she hissed her indrawn breath, for she discovered that she was too proud to scream. But not screaming took nearly ail her strength, and she looked, appalled, into the dragon's small red eye as she knelt weakly beside it. Awkwardly she picked up her sword with her other hand, and awkwardly swung it; but the dragon was dying already, the small eye glazing over, its last fury spent in closing its jaws on her arm. It had no strength to avoid even a slow and clumsy blow, and as the sword edge struck its neck it gave a last gasp, and its jaws loosened, and it died, and the blood poured out of Aerin's arm and mixed on the ground with the darker, thicker blood of the dragon.

Fortunately that village was large enough to have a healer, 'and he bound her arm, and offered her a sleeping draught which she did not swallow, for she could smell a little real magic on him and was afraid of what he might mix in his draughts. At least the poultice on her arm did her good and no harm, even if she got no sleep that night for the sharp ache of the wound.

At home, pride of place and Arlbeth's encouragement brought her to attend more of the courts and councils that administered the country that Arlbeth ruled. "Don't let the title mislead you," Arlbeth told her. "The king is simply the visible one. I'm so visible, in fact, that most of the important work has to be done by other people."

"Nonsense," said Tor.

Arlbeth chuckled. "Your loyalty does you honor, but you're in the process of becoming too visible to be effective yourself, so what do you know about it?"

The most important thing that Aerin learned was that a king needed people he could trust, and who trusted him. And so she learned all over again that she lacked the most important aspect of her heritage, for she could not trust her father's people, because they would not trust her. It was not a lesson she learned gratefully. But she had come out of hiding, and just as she could not scream when the dragon bit her, so she could not go back to her former life.

And the reports of dragons did increase, and thus she was oftener not at home, and so her excuse for eluding royal appearances was often the excellent one of absence, or of exhaustion upon too recent return. And she grew swifter and defter in dispatching the small dangerous vermin, and lost no more than a lock of hair that escaped her kenet-treated helmet to the viciousness of the creatures she faced. And the small villages came to love her, and they called her Aerin Fire-hair, and were kind to her, and not only respectful; and even she, wary as she was of all kindness, stopped believing that the headmen asked priests to drive out the aura of the witch-woman's daughter after she left them.

But killing dragons did her no good with her father's court; the soft-skinned ministers who worked in words and traveled by litter and could not hold a sword still mistrusted her, and privately felt that there was something rather shameful about a sol killing dragons at all, even a half-blood sol. Their increasing fear of the North only increased their mistrust of her, whose mother had come from the North; and her dragon-slaying, especially when the only wound she bore from a task that often killed horses and crippled men was a simple flesh wound, began to make them fear her; and the story of the first sola's infatuation, which had begun to fade as nothing more came of it, was brought up again, and those who wished to said that the king's daughter played a waiting game. They knew the story of the kenet, knew that anyone might learn the making of the stuff who wished to learn it; but why was it Aerin-sol who had found it out?

No one but Arlbeth and Tor asked her to teach them.

Perlith one night, after a great deal of wine had been drunk, amused the company by singing a new ballad that, he said, he had recently heard from a minstrel singing in one of the smaller dingier marketplaces in the City. She had been a rather small and dingy minstrel as well, he added, smiling, and she had been traveling through some of the smaller dingier villages of the Hills of late, which is where the ballad came from.

The ballad told of Aerin Fire-hair, whose hair blazed brighter than dragonfire, and thus she stew them without hurt to herself, for the dragons were ashamed when they saw her, and could not resist her. Perlith had a sweet light tenor voice, and the ballad was not so very badly composed, and the tune was an old and venerable one that many generations had enjoyed. But Perlith mocked her with it by the most delicate inflections, the gentlest ironies, and her knuckles were white around her wine goblet as she listened.

When Perlith finished, Galanna gave one of her bright little laughs. "How charming," she said. "To think - we are living with a legend. Do you suppose that anyone will make up songs about any of the rest of us, at least while we are alive to enjoy them?"

"Let us hope that at least any songs made in our honor do not expose us so terribly," Perlith said silkily, "as this one explains why our Aerin kills her dragons so easily."

Aerin knew she must sit still but she could not, and she left the hall, and heard Galanna's laugh again, drifting down the corridor after her.

It was a week after Perlith sang his song that the news of Nyrlol came in. Aerin had been out killing another dragon the day the messenger arrived, and had not returned to the City till the afternoon of the next day. She had had not only a pair of adult dragons this time, but a litter of four kits; and the fourth one had been nearly impossible to catch, for it was small enough still to hide easily, and enough brighter than its siblings to do so. But the kits were old enough that they might forage for themselves, and so she did not dare leave the last one unslain. She would not have found it at all but for its dragon pride that made it send out a small thread of flame at her. It was grim thankless work to kill something so small; the kit wasn't even old enough to scorch human skin with its tiny pale fires. But Aerin concentrated on the fact that it would grow up into a nasty creature capable of eating children, and dug it out of its hole, and killed it.

The town the dragons had been preying upon was large enough to put on a feast with jugglers and minstrels in her honor, and so she had spent the evening, and the next morning had slept late. She could feel the nervous excitement in the City as she rode through it that day, and it made Talat fidgety.

"What has happened?" she asked Hornmar.

He shook his head. "Trouble - Nyrlol is making trouble."

"Nyrlol," Aerin said. She knew of Nyrlol, and of Nyrlol's temperament, from her council meetings.

Six days later Aerin faced her father in the great hall with the sword she had received at his hands hanging at her side, to ask him to let her ride with him; and watched his face as he came back a long long way to be kind to her; and discovered, what the place she had earned in his court was worth. Aerin Dragon-Killer. King's daughter.