The Hero And The Crown

 

IT TOOK THEM three days of Talat's careful walking to come to the crossroads where they had parted with their guide to go on and face the dragon; three days complicated by the fact that Aerin didn't dare dismount till she found something near a campsite that would let her remount in the morning.

She was deadly tired each evening; her ankle throbbed from hanging vertical so long; and she realized how much weaker she was even than she had thought. It was hard to make herself eat; she was never hungry, and eating hurt, and she ate dutifully because eating was something one did; but she got more pleasure out of watching Talat graze. He had eaten everything edible along the banks of their stream, including some of the bark off the trees, and he tore with great enthusiasm into the fresh grass they now camped beside.

Not infrequently during the day she would come to herself again and look around and realize that she had drifted away. Sometimes it would take her a minute or two just to recognize the trees around her, common Damarian trees whose shapes and leaf patterns had been familiar to her since childhood. Occasionally she woke up and found herself collapsed forward on Talat's neck. But he would not let her fall off, and she didn't. He carried her steadily, his ears pricked and cautious; and he seemed to feel no hesitation about their direction.

"Well, my friend, you know what you are doing," she whispered to Talat, his ears cocked back to listen, when at last they reached the crossroads. "It wasn't I that got us here."

When they set out from the crossroads again the next morning, the way opened up. She had not remembered that the narrow path became a small roadway so soon; but that had been when she still had her hair and the use of all her limbs, and open spaces had held no terrors for her. The mountains climbed steeply to their left, but on their right she looked through hedgerows to planted fields, crops waving green and gold in the sunlight. She tried to make herself feel better by thinking that had she not killed Maur - whatever it may have cost her personally - the crops would have been black by now, and the farmers, dragon's meat. But the comfort was cold, and she could not feel it; she was too deep in dread for what was to come.

She was drifting in and out of awareness again that afternoon, her good hand wrapped in Talat's mane that she might not fall forward and hurt her burnt arm, when Talat suddenly came to a halt and stiffened - and neighed. Aerin shook herself awake with the sound; and he neighed again, and trembled, and she knew he would have reared to cry greeting and challenge as the Damarian warhorses were taught, but he did not for her sake, and she closed her eyes briefly on tears of exhaustion and self-pity.

She could not see who approached; Talat told her that it was not merely someone, but someone that he knew, and thus it was necessarily someone from the City. But her vision had never quite cleared since she had fallen through the dragon-fire, and her left eye burned and leaked tears as she squinted and tried to look down the road. The effort made her dizzy, and the road leaped and heaved under her eyes. But she then saw that it was not the road that heaved, but riders on the road who galloped toward her; and when Talat neighed again, someone answered, and she saw the lead horse's head toss upward as he neighed, and finally she recognized him: Kethtaz. And Tor's mare, Dgeth, galloped beside.

Aerin threw her own head up .in panic, and the scabs on her face pulled and protested. Her right hand scrabbled at the collar of her tunic, and pulled a fold of her cloak up over her head for a hood; and her fingers briefly touched the left side of her head where a determined stubble grew.

Her father and her cousin and the riders with them were upon her almost at once, and Arlbeth called out to her, but she did not answer, for her croaking voice could not have been heard above the sound of the hoofbeats; and then Tor rode up beside her and said anxiously, "Aerin, it is you?" but she delayed answering him till he reached over and seized her - by her left forearm. She screamed, except that she could not scream, but she made a hoarse awful sound, and Tor dropped his hand and said something she did not hear, for her scream made her cough, and she coughed and could not stop, and the bleeding began, and flecks of her blood dripped down Talat's neck, and her body shook, and the cloak fell away from her and onto the ground, and Tor and Arlbeth sat frozen on their horses, helplessly watching.

She remembered little of the rest of the journey. They tried to rig a sling for her, that she might travel lying down, but while she lay down obediently there was no comfort in it, and at the first stop she struggled out of her litter and went grimly to Talat, who had been hovering nearby wondering what he had done that his lady had been taken away from him. She hung an arm over his neck and hid her face in his mane, ignoring the feel of it wisping against her left cheek. Tor followed her at once. "Aerin - " His voice was full of unshed tears, and her fingers tightened in Talat's mane, dear cheerful Talat who felt that so long as she was riding him there was nothing too serious wrong. She spoke into his neck: "There's no ease in being carried. I would rather ride." And so she rode, and the company all went at Talat's gentlest walking pace, and it was a long time before they reached the City.

When at last the stone City rose up before them from the forest, she felt for her cloak, and pulled it forward to shadow her face again, and her father, who rode at her side, watched her. She looked at him, and let the cloak slip back where it had lain, and straightened herself in the saddle; and she remembered the description of Gorthold's death in Astythet's History, and how he was carried, bleeding from many mortal wounds, into the City, where all folk saluted him as their savior; and he died in the castle of the king, who was his cousin; and all Damar grieved for his death.

A grim sort of smile touched Arlbeth's mouth. "You're riding into the City a hero, you know; word of your victory has gone before you, and the messenger who first brought the tale of the Black Dragon's awakening is there with most of his village, and they are all vying among themselves to describe how great and wicked Maur was."

"How did they know?"

Arlbeth sighed. "I didn't ask. Several of them met us as we rode east toward the City, and we didn't wait for details. Look between Talat's ears; he knows all about this sort of thing; all you have to do is sit up. We're just your honor guard."

"But - " she began, but Arlbeth turned away and, indeed, as they neared the great gates, he and Tor dropped back, and Talat pretended to prance, but only pretended, so as not to joggle his rider. She did as her father told her, sitting straight and still in the saddle, and looking not quite between Talat's ears where she might see something, but at them, and at his poll, where his forelock grew and lifted in the breeze when he tossed his head. The streets were quiet, but many people watched them as they rode by; and from the corners of her eyes she could see many of their audience touching the backs of their hands to their foreheads and flicking out the fingers in the Damarian salute to their sovereign but Arlbeth rode at his daughter's heel. A breeze wandered among them and riffled Aerin's ruined hair, and the sunlight shone pitilessly on her scarred face; but the audience was still silent, and motionless but for the right hands and the flicking fingers.

When they came to the courtyard of the castle-, rows and rows of the king's army stood in a three-sided square, leaving a space large enough for the honor guard to file in behind the king's daughter when Talat came to a halt. Before them on the ground lay Maur's head, and around the head more ash fell and collected in little pools. She blinked at the trophy someone else had brought home for her. The skull around the empty eye sockets was now burnished bare and clean; and the bone was black. Her eyes trailed slowly down the long nasal bones and the ridged jaw, and she realized that much of the bone was showing; shreds only of the tough skin remained, and as the wind sidled along the head and flicked bits of it loose, they fell to the ground as ash. The parted jaws with their black grin leered at her.

She held to Talat's mane with her right hand, and slipped slowly down his side, her left foot touching the ground first. Then Arlbeth was beside her, and he led her past Maur's grinning skull, and the soldiers parted in a silent whiplash, a drill maneuver, and they came to the castle door; and then he turned to her and picked her up in his arms and carried her down the long corridors and up the stairs to her room, and to Teka.

There were healers in plenty who visited her after that; but none of them could do better for her burns than the kenet, and her ankle was healing of its own, and they could do nothing for her cough, nor for her trouble breathing. She spent her time in bed, or in the deep window seat that overlooked the rear of the courtyard, toward the stables. Hornmar led Talat under her window occasionally, and while she could not call down to him, it comforted her to see him. She tried to eat for Teka's sake; she hadn't realized before that there was no flavor to her food since she had tasted dragonfire, but she learned it now. And she took the dragon stone from the pocket she had made from a knot of cloth, and laid it on the table near her bed; it seemed as though when she stared at it, it grew brighter, and red fire shivered deep inside it.

At last she grew restless, as she had in the dragon's valley, and she began to creep about the castle, and visit Talat in the stables. He had his old stall back, and Arlbeth's young Kethtaz had actually been moved one stall down to give his predecessor pride of place. Talat was very conscious of eminence regained. She investigated his croup carefully with her fingers; the weals from the dragonfire had disappeared, although she could still see them, for the hair had grown back lying in the opposite direction from the hair around them.

Her own hair was growing in vigorously if unevenly, and Teka one day combed it out from a center spot at the top of her skull and cut in a neat arch around her face, for it was no longer curly. Aerin looked at herself in the mirror and laughed. "I look like a boy."

"No," said Teka, sweeping up the trimmings. "You look like a girl with a boy's haircut."

Aerin stared at herself. She had avoided mirrors as she had avoided everyone but Tor and Teka and her father, and the healers they sent, who could not be got rid of; and now that she finally dared herself to look in a mirror she was surprised at what she saw. The shiny scars across her left cheek - and a few flecks, like freckles, on the other side of her face, where the hot dragon blood had splashed her - were visible but not disfiguring. Her scalp was still tender on the left, and she had to use her hairbrush tentatively; but her hair was coming back as thick as before, although it was several shades darker and almost straight. But her face was drawn and pale, except for two spots of red high on her cheekbones; and there were lines on her face that had not been there before, and her eyes looked as old as Arlbeth's, "I look a lot more like my mother now, don't I?" she said.

Teka paused with the cloth she'd used to gather the hair clippings dangling from her hand. "Yes," she said.

The first morning she came to breakfast with her father again. Tor was there too, and was not able to stop himself from jumping out of his chair and hugging her. He was so glad to see her walking, and with her hair grown out and combed smoothly around her face, that he almost managed not to think about how little there was of her to hug, how frail she felt; how each breath she took seemed to shake her, like a wind through a sapling. She smiled up at him, and he saw the red spots on her cheekbones, but he looked only at her smile.

She asked about Nyrlol, and Arlbeth said that he had been humble - no, craven - in a way Arlbeth had disliked even more than Nyrlol's usual overbearing bluster; it was as if the threat of secession had never happened. Nyrlol had seemed nervous, looking behind himself too frequently, starting at sounds no one else heard. He apologized, and claimed that he was not sleeping well; that there was too much raiding on his borders and he seemed able to do too little about it. Arlbeth, with the army at his back, had made the correct noises, and after a visit of the shortest possible length consistent with courtesy, headed for home, leaving a division of his army behind to help watch the Border near Nyrlol's land for him. Nyrlol had seemed honestly grateful, and that made Arlbeth even more uneasy; but there was nothing more he could do.

"I have no doubt that we were lured away from the City just then for a purpose," said Arlbeth, "and the best I could do then was return as quickly as the horses could run. I had almost forgotten Maur."

"I hadn't," murmured Tor, and his eyes flicked up to Aerin's face and away again, and she knew that he had guessed she would ride back with the messenger and face the Black Dragon alone.

Arlbeth frowned into his cup. "But if the only purpose was to set the Black Dragon upon us, why then does the feeling of a dark fate still cling around us? For it does."

"Yes," said Tor.

There was a silence, and Arlbeth said at last: "We can only hope that Aerin-sol has so disturbed their plans" - and by their his auditors knew he meant the Northerners - "that we will have time enough to prepare, and strength enough in reserve."

Neither Arlbeth nor Tor ever told her what they had thought when they first saw her, bent and burnt and coughing blood onto Talat's white neck; and Aerin did not ask. All else that was said on the subject occurred that same morning: "I owe you a punishment for carrying the king's sword without the king's wishes, Aerin-sol," her father said gravely.

She had been thinking much of this herself lately, and she nodded. "I await your command."

Tor made a noise, and Arlbeth waved him to silence. "The punishment is that you remain prisoned in the City and not carry your sword for two seasons, half a year, and not less. Maur has taken care of that for me."

She bowed her head; and then a woman of the hafor brought fresh malak and hot rolls, and they busied themselves with passing and pouring, and that was the end of it. She put milk in her malak now, to cool it before she drank it, so that she would not have to wait so obviously for it to grow tepid by itself - a long process at the king's castle, where it was served in huge heavy earthenware cups with wide thick bases and narrow tapered rims. She didn't like the flavor so well - malak was supposed to bite, and the milk gentled it - but there were worse compromises she had to make.

Arlbeth asked her when they might hold the banquet in her honor, and she blinked stupidly at him, thinking. My birthday isn't till - ?

"Maur," he said gently. "We wish to honor you for your slaying of Maur."

Tor and Arlbeth both knew she wanted nothing of the sort, but she said grimly, "I thank you. Name the day."

The hush that fell on the great half that evening when she entered it was worse even than what she had imagined. It should have been little different than it ever had been, for her father's court had never been easy in the presence of his daughter; but it was different nonetheless. Her head buzzed with the silence, and her dim vision dimmed further, till the people around her were no more than vague hulks draped in the bright colors of their court clothing. She wore a long brown dress, high in the collar, and with sleeves that fell past her wrists; and while there was much embroidery on it, the threads were black and darker brown, and she went bareheaded, and wore only one ring, on her right hand. She looked around, and the hulks turned slowly away from her, and she took her place at her father's side. The talk started up again, but she did not hear the words of it; she heard the broken flickering fear beneath it, and calmly she thought: It is I that they are afraid of.

Maur's ugly black skull had been hung high on one wall of the great hall, whose ceilings were three stories tall. It had been placed there by some other direction, for she had had nothing to do with it, nor would have wanted it there had she been asked. Even in the great hall it was huge; she looked at it, and it she could see clearly, and it leered at her. I am the shape of their fear, it said, for you dared to slay me. I am the shape of their fear, the thing said.

But I am lame and crippled from our meeting, she replied; I am human like them, for I was sorely wounded.

The thing laughed; the laugh came as a ripple of heavy silence that muffled the uncertain conversation in the hall; but only Aerin heard. Ah, but you lived, and you slew me; that is enough, and more than enough, for I was as big as a mountain and might have swallowed all of Damar at last. The villagers who saw me before you came - the man who guided you to me - all say that when I reared up, my head touched the stars; that nothing human could have stood against me. They say it who saw me, with awe and gratitude for their deliverance; but that is not how the story travels.

She heard the rhythm of the voices around her; the broken rhythm of syllables under the words they said aloud. Witch, they said. Witchwoman's daughter.

But I saved them, she said desperately. I saved them.

The head howled: Better you had not! Better that they lay now in my belly's pit!

See how the first sola still looks at the witchwoman's daughter, for all that her face is haggard and scarred; see how he looks at her, as if he does not wish to look at anything else.

As if he cannot look at anything else. The old ones among them said: Remember how the king looked at the witch, how she spelled him to sire her a child that she might be born again with greater strength, for the blood of Damar would run in the child's veins with her own witch's wickedness!

Witch woman's daughter. Nothing human could have killed Maur. She will swallow Damar as the Black Dragon never could have; for we could have hidden in deep caves till it slept again.

Shall we let her spell the first sola?

We remember the old tales of Maur. We remember.

Witchwoman's daughter.

And the words spoken aloud: The North. The raiders from the North, they come oftener, stronger. Why is Nyrlol afraid of his own shadow? He, who was never known for wisdom, was never known either for lack of courage. Mischief.

Witchwoman's daughter.

You had done better to let me eat you! the thing on the wall shrieked.

It was only luck that I slew you! she cried. I only dared because I knew I was already dead!

The thing laughed.

Witchwoman's daughter.

It was only luck!

Was it? said Maur's head. Was it?

Aerin stood up abruptly and said, "You must excuse me." She turned and walked, slowly, for she still limped a little, toward the gaping door that would let her out of the halt. Tor was at her elbow. "Aerin?"

"Let me be!" she cried. "Go talk to your guests! Don't come near me!" She began to cough, and still she ran from him, staggering, not caring that she limped in the sight of the entire hall, through the door and away.