The Hero And The Crown

 

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.

It began with a confrontation with Galanna, as so much of Aerin's worst trouble did. Galanna was the youngest of the royal cousins, but for Aerin, and she had been about to turn seven when Aerin was born. Galanna had become quite accustomed to being the baby of the family, petted and indulged; and she was a very pretty child, and learned readily how best to play up to those likeliest to spoil her. Tor was nearest her in age, only four years her elder, but he was always trying to pretend that he was just as grown up as the next lot of cousins, Perlith and Thurny and Greeth, who were six, seven, and ten years older than he was. Tor was no threat. The next-youngest girl cousin was fifteen years older than Galanna, and she, poor Katah, was plain. (She was also, very shortly after Aerin's birth, married off to one of the provincial barons, where, much to Galanna's disgust, she thrived and became famous for settling a land dispute in her husband's family that had been the cause of a blood feud for generations.)

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 webwork 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 her face to her lips, that no one might see her ravaged features), and Aerin had been banished to her private rooms for a fortnight.

Aerin was as tall as Galanna already, for Galanna was small and round and compact, and Aerin was gangly and awkward; and Aerin's pale skin came out in splotches when she was angry, and her fiercely curly hair - which when wet from the bath was actually longer than Galanna's - curled all the more fiercely in the heat of her temper, and for all the pins that attempted to keep it under control. They were alone in the garden; and whatever happened Galanna had no fear that Aerin would ever tale-bear (which was another excellent reason for Galanna to despise her), so when Aerin spun around, pulled half a branch off the surka, and stuffed most of it into her mouth, Galanna only smiled. Her full lips curved most charmingly when she smiled, and it brought her high cheekbones into delicate prominence.

Aerin gagged, gasped, turned a series of peculiar colors which ended with grey, and fell heavily to the ground. Cabana noticed that she was still breathing, and therefore waited a few minutes while Aerin twitched and shook, and then went composedly to find help. Her story was that she had gone for a walk in the garden and found Aerin there. This, so far as it went, was true; but she had been planning to find Aerin alone in the garden for some time, that she might say certain things to her. She had thought of those certain things while she had been keeping to her rooms while her eyelashes grew out again.

Aerin was sick for weeks. Her mouthful had given her mad hallucinations of men with translucent blue skin and six-legged riding beasts, and of a pale face terribly like her own with a dull grey band wound about its temples, bending down at her through clouds of smoke, and of a cave with five walls that glittered as though it were walled with rubies. The worst of these then began to wear off, and she could again see the walls of her own room around her, and Teka's face bending over her, half angry and half frightened; but she still had dizzy spells and stomachaches, and these lasted a very long time. She knew this was not how it should be for a king's daughter, just as Galanna had said; and a depression she would not admit further slowed her recovery.

"You idiot!" Tor yelled at her. "You bonehead, you mud-brain, you oozog, you stzik! How could you do such a thing?" He tried to remind her of the stories of the surka; he said did she remember by chance that the stuff was dangerous even to those of the royal house? True, it did not kill them; true, a leaf of it bestowed superhuman strength and the far-seeing eyes of a bird of prey to one of royal blood, or, if the Gift were strong enough, true visions; although this last was very rare. But when the effect wore off, in several hours or several days, the aftereffects were at best mortal exhaustion and blurred sight - sometimes permanent. Had she forgotten the tale of King Merth the Second, who kept himself on the battlefield for a fortnight, never resting, by the virtue of the surka, pausing only to chew its leaves at need? He won the battle, but he died even as he proclaimed his victory. He looked, when they buried him, like an old, old man, though he was only a year past twenty.

"You must have eaten half the tree, from the size of the scar of the branch you took off. Enough for two or three Merths. Are you really trying to kill yourself?" Here his voice almost broke, and he had to get up and stamp around the room, and kick over a handy chair, which he then picked up again so that Teka wouldn't notice and ban him from the sickroom. He sat on the edge of Aerin's bed and brooded. "It must have been Galanna. It always is Galanna. What did she do this time?"

Aerin stirred. "Of course it's Galanna. I've been desperate to think of an excuse to get out of attending her wedding. It's only a little over a season away, you know. This was the best that occurred to me."

Tor laughed - grudgingly, but it was a laugh. "Almost I forgive you." He reached out and grabbed one of her hands. She refrained from telling him that his bouncing on the edge of her bed was making her feel sick, and that every time he moved she had to refocus her eyes on him and that made her feel more sick, and she squeezed his hand. "I guess she dared you to eat a leaf. I guess she told you you weren't royal and wouldn't dare touch it." He looked at her sternly. She looked back, her face blank. He knew her too well, and he knew she knew, but she wouldn't say anything; he knew that too, and he sighed.

Her father visited her occasionally, but he always sent warning ahead, and as soon as she could creak out of bed without immediately falling down in a heap, she began receiving him in her sitting-room, bolt upright in a straight chair and hands crossed in her lap. To his queries she answered that she was feeling quite well now, thank you. She had learned that no one could tell how badly her vision wandered in and out of focus, so long as she kept still where the dizziness couldn't distract her; and she kept her eyes fixed on the shifting flesh-colored shadows where she knew her father's face was. He never stayed long, and since she closed her eyes when he came near to stoop over her and kiss her cheek or forehead (other people's movements were almost as dizzying as her own) she never saw the anxious look on his face, and he didn't shout at her, like Teka or Tor.

When she was enough better to totter out of bed for a longer stretch than into a chair in her sitting-room, or rather when she hated her bed so thoroughly that Teka could no longer keep her in it, she had to make her way around the castle by feeling along the walls, for neither her eyes nor her feet were trustworthy. Creeping about like one of her father's retired veterans escaped from the grace-and-favor apartments in the rear of the castle did nothing for her morale, and she avoided everyone but Teka, and to some extent Tor, even more single-mindedly than usual; and she stayed out of the court's way altogether.

Especially she avoided the garden at the center of the castle. The surka stood by the main gate, wrapped around one of the tall white pillars. Its presence was symbolic only; anyone might pass the gate without danger of touching its leaves, and there were several other ways into the garden. But she felt that the surka exhaled hallucinations into the very air around it, waiting gleefully for her to breathe them in, and that it clattered its leaves at her if she came too near. She heard it mocking her if she even dared step out on one of the balconies that overlooked the garden from three or four stories up. Her protracted illness more nearly proved Galanna's contention about her heritage than her own, whatever Tor said, but she saw no reason to remind herself of it any oftener than she had to.

It was a kind of trapped restlessness combined with a feeling of kinship for the equally trapped and restless Talat that drew her to his pasture. She had visited him before, or tried to, in the last three years, but he was no politer to her than he was to Hornmar, and it hurt her so much just to look at him that out of cowardice she had stopped going. Now she felt she no longer cared; she couldn't see clearly two feet beyond the end of her nose anyway. But it was a somewhat laborious process to carry out even so simple a plan as to walk to one of the smaller pastures beyond the royal barns. First she wanted a cane, that she might have something to tap her way with; so she persuaded Tor to open the door of the king's treasure house for her, which required a lock-relaxing charm she couldn't perform any more than she could mend plates.

She told Tor only that she wanted to borrow a walking stick to help her up and down stairs. Tor knew perfectly well that she had something further on her mind, but he did it anyway. She chose a cane with a pleasantly lumpy head, since her sense of touch was sometimes a little vague too.

Talat's first impulse had been to charge her. She'd not moved, just looked at him, leaning on her cane and swaying gently. "If I try to run away from you, the earth will leap up and throw me down." Two tears rolled silently down her cheeks. "I can't even walk properly. Like you." Talat dropped his head and began grazing - without much interest, but it gave him something to pretend to be doing while he kept an eye on her.

She went back the next day, and the next. The exercise, or the fresh air, or both, seemed to do her some good; her vision began to clear a bit. And it was quiet and peaceful in Talat's pasture, where no one came, and she went back to the swarming castle more and more reluctantly. Then the thought of the royal library occurred to her. Galanna would never set foot in the library.

She went there the first time only to escape her own rooms, which had begun to seem the size of shoeboxes, and for some of the same imprecise restlessness that had inspired her to visit Talat. But, idly, she ran her fingers over the spines of the books fined up on the shelves, and pulled down one that had an interestingly tooled binding. More idly still she opened it, and found that her poor muddled eyes focused quite nicely on a printed page held not too far from her nose - found that she could read. The next day she took it with her to Talat's pasture.

He didn't exactly meet her with an eager whinny of greeting, but he did seem to spend most of his time on the unmuddy shore of the pool, where she leaned against the bole of a convenient tree and read. "It's funny," she said, chewing a grass gem, "you'd think if I couldn't walk I couldn't read either. You'd think eyes would be at least as hard to organize as feet." She leaned over, and laid a mik-bar down on the ground as far away from her as she could reach, and sat up again, looking only straight before her. Thoughtfully she hefted the big book in her lap and added, "Even carrying it around is useful. It sort of weighs me down, and I don't stagger so much." She could hear his hoofbeats: thunk-thunk-thunk-drag. "Maybe what I need for my feet is the equivalent of the muscular concentration of reading." The hoofbeats paused. "Now if only someone could tell me what that might be."

The mik-bar had disappeared.