The Hero And The Crown

 

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."

Thorped's wispy son could barely take his eyes off her. He remarked to his father that Aerin-sol was so splendidly large. Thorped, who liked a woman of the size to throw over a shoulder and run lightly off with - not that the opportunity had ever presented itself, but it was an appealing standard of measurement - said ah, hmm. Galanna, who didn't like wispy men, was still furious that anyone should waste time looking at Aerin, and snuggled relentlessly with Perlith. She was about resigned to being married to him; Tor was truly hopeless. If only Perlith would play up a bit more; a little mock despair over her being the center of attention at every gathering (well, nearly); a little jealousy when beautiful young men wrote her poems, as she was able occasionally to persuade them to do. But he had the infuriating attitude that his carefully chosen offer for her hand had conferred upon her a favor. By the gods! She was a good match, after all.

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 ringaling 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.

A little space cleared around Perlith and Aerin, and the focal point of the vast hall was a little bouquet of yellow and white flowers. Tor muttered something, and dropped his partner's hand, much to that lady's annoyance (she would feel resentful of the orange-haired sol for weeks after); but he was on the far side of the hall from Aerin and Perlith, and it was as though the company were frozen where they stood, for he had difficulty threading his way through them, and no one tried to make room. Aerin knew if she touched the magic flowers they would turn to frogs, or burst in an explosion that anyone who might not have noticed the frogs couldn't help but notice; or, worst of all, make her sick on the floor at Perlith's feet. Perlith knew it too. Magic had made her queasy since early adolescence, when her Gift should have been asserting itself and wasn't; and since her illness her reaction to anything to do with other royal Gifts was much more violent. She stood helpless and could think of no words to say; even if she asked him to return the flowers to dust motes, the whiff of magic about his hands and face would remain, and she dared not dance with him again immediately.

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?

At last she climbed wearily out of bed and wrapped herself in the dressing gown Tor had given her, and made her way through back hallways and seldom-used stairs to the highest balcony in her father's castle. It looked out to the rear of the courtyard; beyond were the stables, beyond them the pastures, and beyond them all the sharp rise of the Hills. From where she stood, the wide plateau where the pastures and training grounds were laid out stretched directly in front of her; but to her left the Hills crept close to the castle walls, so that the ground and first-floor rooms on that side got very little sunlight, and the courtyard wall was carved out of the Hills themselves.

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 hearthfire.

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."

"She would; but Teka sleeps the sleep of the just, and it is long past midnight."

"So it is." Tor sighed, and rubbed his forehead with one hand.

"I'm surprised you've escaped so early; the dancing often goes on till dawn."

In spite of the dimness of the light she could see Tor make a face. "The dancing may often go on till dawn, but I rarely last half so long - as you would know if you ever bothered to stay and keep me company."

"Hmmph."

"Hmmph threefold. Has it ever occurred to you, Aerin-sol, that I am not a particularly good dancer either? It's probably just as well we don't dance together often or we would do ourselves a serious injury. Nobody dares mention it, of course, because I am first sola - "

"And a man of known immoderate temper."

"Flattery will get you nowhere. But I leave the dance floor as soon as I've tramped around once with every lady who will feel slighted if I don't."

His light-heartedness seemed forced. "What's wrong?" she said.

Tor gave a snort of laughter. "Having exposed one of my most embarrassing shortcomings in an attempt to deflect you, you refuse to be deflected."

Aerin waited.

Tor sighed again, and wandered out of the shadows to lean his elbows against the low stone wall surrounding the balcony. The moonlight made his face look pale, his profile noble and serene, and his black hair the stuff of absolute darkness. Aerin rather liked the effect, but he spoiled it by rubbing one hand through his hair and turning the corners of his mouth down, whereupon he reverted to being tired and confused and human. "There was a meeting, of sorts, this afternoon, before the banquet." He paused again, but Aerin did not move, expecting more; he glanced at her and went on. "Thorped wanted to talk about the Hero's Crown."

"Oh." Aerin joined him, leaning her elbows on the wall next to his, and he put an arm around her. She discovered that she was cold and that she was rather glad of the arm and the warmth of his side. "What did he want to know about it?"

"What does anybody ever want to know about it? He wants to know where it is,"

"So do we all."

"Yes. Sorry. I mean he wants to know if we're looking for it now and if not why not and if so by what means and what progress we've made. And if we know how important it is, and on and on."

"I see that you spent a less than diverting afternoon."

"How does he think we're supposed to look for it? By the Seven Gods and Aerinha's foundry! Every stone in Damar has been turned over at least twice looking for it, and there was a fashion there for a while to uproot trees and look for it underneath. We've had every seer who ever went off in a fit or brewed a love potion that didn't work try to bring up a vision of its whereabouts for us."

Including my mother? thought Aerin.

"Nothing. Just a lot of dead trees and misplaced rocks."

Galanna had told her once that there was a Crown that kept mischief away from Damar, and that if Arlbeth had had it when he met Aerin's mother he would never have married her, and if he had found it any time since Aerin was born Galanna would no longer have to put up with having her eyelashes cut off; exactly how the Crown performed its warding functions she did not describe. Aerin also knew that the more strongly Gifted royalty were expected to chew a surka leaf at least once and try to cast their minds toward a sighting of the Crown. She assumed Tor had done so, though it was not something he would have told her about. And all her history lessons had told her was that the current sovereigns of Damar had gone crownless for many generations, in honor of a Crown that was lost long ago.

Aerin said slowly, "I've heard of it, of course, but I'm not entirely sure what the Crown is, or is supposed to do."

There was a silence. "Neither am I," said Tor. "It's been lost ... a long time. I used to think it was only a legend, but old Councilor Zanc mentioned it a few weeks ago - that's when Arlbeth told me that when he was a boy they were looking under trees for it. Zanc's father's father used to tell the story of how it was lost. Zanc thinks the increase of the Border raids is somehow due to its absence; that Northern ... mischief ... did not trouble us when the Hero's Crown lay in the City. And Thorped apparently agrees with him, although he's not quite so outspoken about it."

He shrugged, and then settled her more securely in the curve of his arm. "The Hero's Crown holds much of what Damar is; or at least much of what her king needs to hold his people together and free of mischief. Aerinha was supposed to have done the forging of it. Here we get into the legend, so maybe you know this bit. Damar's strength, or whatever it is about this land that makes it Damar and us Damarians, was thought to be better held, more strongly held, in a Crown, which could be handed from sovereign to sovereign, since some rulers are inevitably better or wiser in themselves than others. Of course this system runs the risk of the Crown's being lost, and the strength with it, which is what eventually happened. Zanc's story is that it was stolen by a black mage, and that he rode east, not north, or the Northerners would have fallen on us long since. Arlbeth thinks ..." His voice trailed away.

"Yes?"

"Arlbeth thinks it has come into the hands of the Northerners at last." He paused a moment before he said slowly, "Arlbeth at least believes in its existence. So must I, therefore."

Aerin asked no more. It was the heaviest time of the night; dawn was nearer than midnight, but the sky seemed to hold them in a closing hand. Then suddenly through the weight of the sky and of her new knowledge, she remembered her dragon ointment, and somehow neither the missing Crown nor Perlith's malice, the reason she had come up to stare at the sky in the middle of the night, mattered quite so much; for, after all, she could do nothing about either Perlith or the Crown, and the recipe for kenet was hers. If she got no sleep, she'd botch making a big trial mixture tomorrow. "I must go to bed," she said, and straightened up.

"I too," said Tor. "It will be very embarrassing to the dignity of the royal house if the first sola falls off his horse tomorrow. Lady, that's a very handsome dressing gown."

"It is, isn't it? It was given me by a friend with excellent taste." She smiled up at him, and without thinking he bent his head and kissed her. But she only hugged him absently in return, because she was already worrying whether or not she had enough of one particular herb, for it would spoil the whole morning if she had to fetch more and she'd be mad with impatience and would botch the job after all. "A quiet sleep to you," she said. "And to you," said Tor from the shadows.