The Hero And The Crown

Chapter 1

SHE COULD NOT REMEMBER a time when she had not known the story; she had grown up knowing it. She supposed someone must have told her it, sometime, but she could not remember the telling. She was beyond having to blink back tears when she thought of those things the story explained, but when she was feeling smaller and shabbier than usual in the large vivid City high in the Damarian Hills she still found herself brooding about them; and brooding sometimes brought on a tight headachy feeling around her temples, a feeling like suppressed tears.

She brooded, looking out over the wide low sill of the stone window-frame; she looked up, into the Hills, because the glassy surface of the courtyard was too bright at midday to stare at long. Her mind ran down an old familiar track: Who might have told her the story? It wouldn’t have been her father who told her, for he had rarely spoken more than a few words together to her when she was younger; his slow kind smiles and slightly preoccupied air had been the most she knew of him. She had always known that he was fond of her, which was something; but she had only recently begun to come into focus for him, and that, as he had told her himself, in an unexpected fashion. He had the best—the only—right to have told her the story of her birth, but he would not have done so.

Nor would it have been the hafor, the folk of the household; they were polite to her always, in their wary way, and reserved, and spoke to her only about household details. It surprised her that they still remembered to be wary, for she had long since proven that she possessed nothing to be wary about. Royal children were usually somewhat alarming to be in daily contact with, for their Gifts often erupted in abrupt and unexpected ways. It was a little surprising, even, that the hafor still bothered to treat her with respect, for the fact that she was her father’s daughter was supported by nothing but the fact that her father’s wife had borne her. But then, for all that was said about her mother, no one ever suggested that she was not an honest wife.

And she would not have run and told tales on any of the hafor who slighted her, as Galanna would—and regularly did, even though everyone treated her with the greatest deference humanly possible. Galanna’s Gift, it was dryly said, was to be impossible to please. But perhaps from the hafor’s viewpoint it was not worth the risk to discover any points of similarity or dissimilarity between herself and Galanna; and a life of service in a household that included Galanna doubtless rendered anyone who withstood it automatically wary and respectful of anything that moved. She smiled. She could see the wind stir the treetops, for the surface of the Hills seemed to ripple beneath the blue sky; the breeze, when it slid through her window, smelled of leaves.

It might very well have been Galanna who told her the story, come to that. It would be like her; and Galanna had always hated her—still did, for all that she was grown now, and married besides, to Perlith, who was a second sola of Damar. The only higher ranks were first sola and king; but Galanna had hoped to marry Tor, who was first sola and would someday be king. It was no matter that Tor would not have had Galanna if she had been the only royal maiden available—”I’d run off into the Hills and be a bandit first,” a much younger Tor had told his very young cousin, who had gone off in fits of giggles at the idea of Tor wearing rags and a blue headband and dancing for luck under each quarter of the moon. Tor, who at the time had been stiff with terror at Galanna’s very determined attempts to ensnare him, had relaxed enough to grin and tell her she had no proper respect and was a shameless hoyden. “Yes,” she said unrepentantly. Tor, for whatever reasons, was rather over-formal with everyone but her; but being first sola to a solemn, twice-widowed king of a land with a shadow over it might have had that effect on a far more frivolous young man than Tor. She suspected that he was as grateful for her existence as she was for his; one of her earliest memories was riding in a baby-sack over Tor’s shoulders while he galloped his horse over a series of hurdles; she had screamed with delight and wound her tiny hands in his thick black hair. Teka, later, had been furious; but Tor, who usually took any accusation of the slightest dereliction of duty with white lips and a set face, had only laughed.

But whenever she decided that it must have been Galanna who first told her the story, she found she couldn’t believe it of her after all. Having told it for spite and malice, yes; but the story itself had too much sad grandeur. But perhaps she only felt that way because it was about her mother; perhaps she had changed it in her own mind, made a tragedy of nothing but sour gossip. But that Galanna would deliberately spend enough time in her company to tell her the story was out of character; Galanna preferred whenever possible to look vaguely over the head of the least of her cousins, with an expression on her face indicating that there was a dead fly on the windowsill and why hadn’t the hafor swept it away? When Galanna was startled into speaking to her at all, it was usually from a motive of immediate vengeance. The tale of Arlbeth’s second wife would be too roundabout for her purposes. Still, that it had been one of the cousins was the best guess. Not Tor, of course. One of the others.

She leaned out of the window and looked down. It was hard to recognize people from the tops of their heads, several stories up. Except Tor; she always knew him, even if all she had to go on was an elbow extending an inch or two beyond a doorframe. This below her now was probably Perlith: that self-satisfied walk was distinctive even from above, and the way three of the hafor, dressed in fine livery, trailed behind him for no purpose but to lend to their master’s importance by their presence pretty well assured it. Tor went about alone, when he could; he told her, grimly, that he had enough of company during the course of his duties as first sola, and the last thing he wanted was an unofficial entourage for any gaps in the official ones. And she’d like to see her father pulling velvet-covered flunkeys in his wake, like a child with a toy on a string.

Perlith’s head spoke to another dark head, the hafor waiting respectfully several arms1 length distant; then someone on a horse—she could not distinguish voices but she heard the click of hoofs—emerged from around a corner. The rider wore the livery of a messenger, and the cut of his saddle said he came from the west. Both heads turned toward him and tipped up, so she could see the pale blur of their faces as they spoke to him. Then the horseman cantered off, the horse placing its feet very delicately, for it was dangerous to go too quickly across the courtyard; and Perlith and the other man, and Perlith’s entourage, disappeared from her view.

She didn’t have to hear what they said to each other to know what was going on; but the knowledge gave her no pleasure, for it had already brought her both shame and bitter disappointment. It was either the shame or the disappointment that kept her mewed up in her rooms, alone, now.

She had hardly seen her father or Tor for the week past as they wrestled with messages and messengers, as they tried to slow down whatever it was that would happen anyway, while they tried to decide what to do when it had happened. The western barons—the fourth solas—were making trouble. The rumor was that someone from the North, either human or human enough to look it, had carried a bit of demon-mischief south across the Border and let it loose at the barons’ council in the spring. Nyrlol was the chief of the council for no better reason than that his father had been chief; but his father had been a better and a wiser man. Nyrlol was not known for intelligence, and he was known for a short and violent temper: the perfect target for demon-mischief.

Nyrlol’s father would have recognized it for what it was. But Nyrlol had not recognized anything; it had simply seemed like a wonderful idea to secede from Damar and the rule of Damar’s King Arlbeth and Tor-sola, and set himself up as King Nyrlol; and to slap a new tax on his farmers to support the raising of an army, eventually to take the rest of Damar away from Arlbeth and Tor, who didn’t run it as well as he could. He managed to convince several of his fellow barons (demon-mischief, once it has infected one human being, will usually then spread like a plague) of the brilliance of his plan, while the mischief muddled their wits. There had been a further rumor, much fainter, that Nyrlol had, with his wonderful idea, suddenly developed a mesmerizing ability to sway those who heard him speak; and this rumor was a much more worrying one, for, if true, the demon-mischief was very strong indeed.

Arlbeth had chosen to pay no attention to the second rumor; or rather to pay only enough attention to it to discount it, that none of his folk might think he shunned it from fear. But he did declare that the trouble was enough that he must attend to it personally; and with him would go Tor, and a substantial portion of the army, and almost as substantial a portion of the court, with all its velvets and jewels brought along for a fine grand show of courtesy, to pretend to disguise the army at its back. But both sides would know that the army was an army, and the show only a show. What Arlbeth planned to do was both difficult and dangerous, for he wished to prevent a civil war, not provoke one. He would choose those to go with him with the greatest care and caution.

“But you’re taking Perlith?” she’d asked Tor disbelievingly, when she met him by chance one day, out behind the barns, where she could let her disbelief show.

Tor grimaced. “I know Perlith isn’t a very worthwhile human being, but he’s actually pretty effective at this sort of thing—because he’s such a good liar, you know, and because he can say the most appalling things in the most gracious manner.”

No women rode in Arlbeth’s army. A few of the bolder wives might be permitted to go with their husbands, those who could ride and had been trained in cavalry drill; and those who could be trusted to smile even at Nyrlol (depending on how the negotiations went), and curtsy to him as befitted his rank as fourth sola, and even dance with him if he should ask. But it was expected that no wife would go unless her husband asked her, and no husband would ask unless he had asked the king first.

Galanna would certainly not go, even if Perlith had been willing to go to the trouble of obtaining leave from Arlbeth (which would probably not have been granted). Fortunately for the peace of all concerned, Galanna had no interest in going; anything resembling hardship did not appeal to her in the least, and she was sure that nothing in the barbaric west could possibly be worth her time and beauty.

A king’s daughter might go too; a king’s daughter who had, perhaps, proved herself in some small ways; who had learned to keep her mouth shut, and to smile on cue; a king’s daughter who happened to be the king’s only child. She had known they would not let her; she had known that Arlbeth would not dare give his permission even had he wanted to, and she did not know if he had wanted to. But he could not dare take the witch woman’s daughter to confront the workings of demon-mischief; his people would never let him, and he too sorely needed his people’s good will.

But she could not help asking—any more, she supposed, than poor stupid Nyrlol could help going mad when the demon-mischief bit him. She had tried to choose her time, but her father and Tor had been so busy lately that she had had to watt, and wait again, till her time was almost gone. After dinner last night she had finally asked; and she had come up here to her rooms afterward and had not come out again.

“Father.” Her voice had gone high on her, as it would do when she was afraid. The other women, and the lesser court members, had already left the long hall; Arlbeth and Tor and a few of the cousins, Perlith among them, were preparing for another weary evening of discussion on Nyrlol’s folly. They paused and all of them turned and looked at her, and she wished there were not so many of them. She swallowed. She had decided against asking her father late, in his own rooms, where she could be sure to find him alone, because she was afraid he would only be kind to her and not take her seriously. If she was to be shamed—and she knew, or she told herself she knew, that she would be refused—at least let him see how much it meant to her, that she should ask and be refused with others looking on.

Arlbeth turned to her with his slow smile, but it was slower and less of it reached his eyes than usual. He did not say, “Be quick, I am busy,” as he might have done—and small blame to him if he had, she thought forlornly.

“You ride west—soon? To treat with Nyrlol?” She could feel Tor’s eyes on her, but she kept her own eyes fixed on her father.

“Treat?” said her father. “If we go, we go with an army to witness the treaty.” A little of the smile crept into his eyes after all. “You are picking up courtly language, my dear. Yes, we go to ‘treat’ with Nyrlol.”

Tor said: “We have some hope of catching the mischief-one did not say demon aloud if one could help it—”and bottling it up, and sending it back where it came from. Even now we have that hope. It won’t stop the trouble, but it will stop it getting worse. If Nyrlol isn’t being pricked and pinched by it, he may subside into the subtle and charming Nyrlol we all know and revere.” Tor’s mouth twisted up into a wry smile.

She looked at him and her own mouth twitched at the corners. It was like Tor to answer her as if she were a real part of the court, even a member of the official deliberations, instead of an interruption and a disturbance. Tor might even have let her go with them; he wasn’t old enough yet to care so much for his people’s good opinion as Arlbeth did; and furthermore, Tor was stubborn. But it was not Tor’s decision. She turned back to her father.

“When you go—may I come with you?” Her voice was little more than a squeak, and she wished she were near a wall or a door she could lean on, instead of in the great empty middle of the dining-hall, with her knees trying to fold up under her like an hour-old foal’s.

The silence went suddenly tight, and the men she faced went rigid: or Arlbeth did, and those behind him, for she kept her face resolutely away from Tor. She thought that she could not bear it if her one loyal friend forsook her too; and she had never tried to discover the extent of Tor’s stubbornness. Then the silence was broken by Perlith’s high-pitched laughter.

“Well, and what did you expect from letting her go as she would these last years? It’s all very well to have her occupied and out from underfoot, but you should have thought the price you paid to be rid of her might prove a little high. What did you expect when our honored first sola gives her lessons in swordplay and she tears around on that three-legged horse like a peasant boy from the Hills, with never a gainsay but a scold from that old shrew that serves as her maid? Might you not have thought of the reckoning to come? She needed slaps, not encouragement, years ago—she needs a few slaps now, I think. Perhaps it is not too late.”

“Enough.” Tor’s voice, a growl.

Her legs were trembling now so badly that she had to move her feet, shuffle in her place, to keep the joints locked to hold her up. She felt the blood mounting to her face at Perlith’s words, but she would not let him drive her away without an answer. “Father?”

“Father,” mimicked Perlith. “It’s true a king’s daughter might be of some use in facing what the North has sent us; a king’s daughter who had true royal blood in her veins ....”

Arlbeth, in a very unkinglike manner, reached out and grabbed Tor before anyone found out what the first sola’s sudden move in Perlith’s direction might result in. “Perlith, you betray the honor of the second sola’s place in speaking thus.”

Tor said in a strangled voice, “He will apologize, or I’ll give him a lesson in swordplay he will not like at all.”

“Tor, don’t be a—” she began, outraged, but the king’s voice cut across hers. “Perlith, there is justice in the first sola’s demand.”

There was a long pause while she hated everyone impartially: Tor for behaving like a farmer’s son whose pet chicken has just been insulted; her father, for being so immovably kingly; and Perlith for being Perlith. This was even worse than she had anticipated; at this point she would be grateful just for escape, but it was too late.

Perlith said at last, “I apologize, Aerin-sol. For speaking the truth,” he added venomously, and turned on his heel and strode across the hall. At the doorway he paused and turned to shout back at them: “Go slay a dragon, lady! Lady Aerin, Dragon-Killer!”

The silence resettled itself about them, and she could no longer even raise her eyes to her father’s face.

“Aerin—” Arlbeth began.

The gentleness of his voice told her all she needed to know, and she turned away and walked toward the other end of the hall, opposite the door which Perlith had taken. She was conscious of the length of the way she had to take because Perlith had taken the shorter way, and she hated him all the more for it; she was conscious of all the eyes on her, and conscious of the fact that her legs still trembled, and that the line she walked was not a straight one. Her father did not call her back. Neither did Tor. As she reached the doorway at last, Perlith’s words still rang in her ears: “A king’s daughter who had true royal blood in her veins ... Lady Aerin, Dragon-Killer.” It was as though his words were hunting dogs who tracked her and nipped at her heels.

Chapter 2

HER HEAD ACHED. The scene was still so vividly before her that the door of her bedroom was half open before she heard it. She spun round, but it was only Teka, bearing a tray; Teka glanced once at her scowling face and averted her eyes. She was probably first chosen for my maid for her skill at averting her eyes, Aerin thought sourly; but then she noticed the tray, and the smell of the steam that rose from it, and the worried mark between Teka’s eyebrows. Her own face softened.

“You can’t not eat,” Teka said.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Aerin replied, realizing this was true.

“You shouldn’t sulk,” Teka then said, “and forget about eating.” She looked sharply at her young charge, and the worried mark deepened.

“Sulking,” said Aerin stiffly.

Teka sighed. “Hiding. Brooding. Whatever you like. It’s not good for you.”

“Or for you,” Aerin suggested.

A smile touched the corners of the worry. “Or for me.”

“I will try to sulk less if you will try to worry less.”

Teka set the tray down on a table and began lifting napkins off of plates. “Talat missed you today.”

“He told you so, of course.” Teka’s fear of anything larger than the smallest pony, and therefore the fact that she gave a very wide berth to the stables and pastures beyond them, was well known to Aerin. “I’ll go down after dark.” She turned back to the window. There were more comings and goings across the stretch of courtyard that her bedroom overlooked; she saw more messengers, and two men racing by on foot in the uniform of the king’s army, with the red divisional slash on their left forearms which meant they were members of the supply corps. Equipping the king’s company for its march west was proceeding at a pace presently headlong and increasing toward panicky. Under normal circumstances Aerin saw no one from her bedroom window but the occasional idling courtier.

Something on the tray rattled abruptly, and there was a sigh. “Aerin—”

“Whatever you’re going to say I’ve thought of already,” Aerin said without turning around.

Silence. Aerin finally looked round at Teka, standing with head and shoulders bowed, staring at the tray. The plates were heavy earthenware, handsome and elegant, but easily replaced if Aerin managed to break one, as she often did; and she had not the small Gift to mend them. She stared at the plates. Tor had mended her breakages when she was a baby, but she was too proud to ask now she was far past the age when she should have been able to fit the bits together, glower at them with the curious royal Gifted look, and have them grow whole again. It did not now help her peace of mind or her temper either that she had been an unusually large and awkward child who seemed able to break things simply by being in the same room with them; as if fate, having denied her something that should have been her birthright, wanted her never to forget it. Aerin was not a particularly clumsy young woman, but she was by now so convinced of her lack of coordination that she still broke things occasionally out of sheer dread.

Teka had silently exchanged the finer royal plates for these earthenware ones several years ago, after Galanna had found out that the red-and-gold ones that should only be used by members of the first circle of the royal house—which included Aerin—were slowly disappearing. She had one of her notorious temper tantrums over this, caused crisis and dismay in the whole hierarchy of the hafor, and turned off three of the newest and lowliest servant girls on suspicion of stealing—and then, when no one could possibly overlook the commotion she was making, contrived to discover that the disappearances were merely the result of Aerin being clumsy. “You revolting child,” she said to a mutinous Aerin; “even if you are incapable”—there was inexpressible malice lurking behind the word—”of mending the settings yourself, you might save the pieces and let one of us do it for you.”

“I’d hang myself first,” spat Aerin, “and then I’d come back and haunt you till you were haggard with fear and lost all your looks and people pointed at you in the streets—”

At this point Galanna slapped her, which was a tactical error. In the first place, it needed only such an excuse for Aerin to jump on her and roll her over on the floor, bruise one eye, and rip most of the lace off her extremely ornate afternoon dress—somehow both the court members and the hafor witness to this scene were a little slow in dragging Aerin off her—and in the second place, both the slap and its result quite ruined Galanna’s attempted role of great lady dealing with contemptible urchin. It was generally considered—Galanna was no favorite—that Aerin had won that round. Of the three serving girls, one was taken back, one was given a job in the stables, which she much preferred, and one, declaring that she wouldn’t have any more to do with the royal house if saying so got her beheaded for treason, went home to her own village, far from the City.

Aerin sighed. Life had been easier when her ultimate goal had been murdering Galanna with her bare hands. She had continued to use the finer ware when she ate with the court, of course; when she was younger she had rarely been compelled to do so, fortunately, since she never got much to eat, but sat rigidly and on her guard (Galanna’s basilisk glare from farther down the high table helped) for the entire evening. But at least she didn’t break anything either, and Teka could always be persuaded to bring her a late supper as necessary. On earthenware plates.

She lifted her eyes to Teka, who was still standing motionless behind the tray. “Teka, I’m sorry I’m so tiresome. I can’t seem to help it. It’s in my blood, like being clumsy is—like everything else isn’t.” She walked over and gave the older woman a hug, and Teka looked up and half smiled.

“I hate to see you ... fighting everything so.”

Aerin’s eyes rose involuntarily to the old plain sword hanging at the head of her tall curtained bed.

“You know Perlith and Galanna are horrid because they’re horrid themselves—”

“Yes,” said Aerin slowly. “And because I’m the only daughter of the witchwoman who enspelled the king into marrying her, and I’m such a desperately easy butt. Teka,” she said before the other had a chance to break in, “do you suppose it was Galanna who first told me that story? I’ve been trying to remember when I first heard it.’’

“Story?” said Teka, carefully neutral. She was always carefully neutral about Aerin’s mother, which was one of the reasons Aerin kept asking about her. ‘ “Yes. That my mother enspelled my father to get an heir that would rule Damar, and that she turned her face to the wall and died of despair when she found she had borne a daughter instead of a son, since they usually find a way to avoid letting daughters inherit.”

Teka shook her head impatiently.

“She did die, “Aerin said.

“Women die in childbed.”

“Not witches, often.”

“She was not a witch.”

Aerin sighed, and looked at her big hands, striped with callus and scarred with old blisters from sword and shield and pulling her way through the forest tangles after her dragons—Dragon-Killer—and from falling off the faithful Talat. “You would certainly think she wasn’t from the way her daughter goes on. If he was going to turn out like me, it wouldn’t have done my poor mother any good to have had a son.” She paused, brooding over her last burn scar, where a dragon had licked her and the ointment hadn’t gone on quite evenly. “What was my mother like?”

Teka looked thoughtful. She too looked toward Aerin’s sword and dragon spears, but Aerin was pretty sure she did not see them, for Teka did not approve of her first sol’s avocation. “She was much like you but smaller—frail almost.” Her shoulders lifted. “Too frail to bear a child. And yet it was rather as though something was eating her from the inside; there was a fire behind that pale skin, always burning. I think she knew she had only a little time and she was fighting for enough time to bear her baby.” Teka’s eyes refocused on the room, and she looked hastily away from the dragon spears. “You were a fine strong child from the first.”

“Do you think she enspelled my father?”

Teka looked at her, frowning. “Why do you ask so silly a question?”

“I like to hear you tell stories.”

Teka laughed involuntarily. “Well. No, I don’t think she enspelled your father—not the way Galanna and her lot mean, anyway. She fell in love with him, and he with her; that’s a spell if you like.”

They had had this conversation before; many times since Aerin was old enough to talk and ask questions. But over the years Teka sometimes let fall one more phrase, one more adjective, as Aerin asked the same questions, and so Aerin kept on asking. That there was a mystery she had no doubt. Her father wouldn’t discuss her mother with her at all, beyond telling her that he still missed her, which Aerin did find reassuring as far as it went. But whether the truth behind the mystery was known to everyone but her and was too terrible to speak of, particularly to the mystery’s daughter, or whether it was a mystery that no one knew and therefore everyone blamed her for endlessly reminding them of, she had never been able to make up her mind. On the whole she inclined to the latter; she couldn’t imagine anything so awful that Galanna would recoil from using it against her. And if there were something quite that awful, then Perlith wouldn’t be able to resist ceasing to ignore her long enough to explain it.

Teka had turned back to the tray and poured a cup of hot malak, and handed it to Aerin, who settled down cross-legged on her bed, the hanging scabbard just brushing the back of her neck. “I brought mik-bars too, for Talat, so you need not go to the kitchens if you don’t wish to.”

Aerin laughed. “You know me too well. After sulking, I sneak off to the stables after dark—preferably after bedtime—and talk to my horse.”

Teka smiled and sat down on the red-and-blue embroidered cushion (her embroidery, not Aerin’s) on the chair by Aerin’s bed. “I have had much of the raising of you, these long years.”

“Very long years,” agreed Aerin, reaching for a leg of turpi. “Tell me about my mother.”

Teka considered. “She came walking into the City one day. She apparently owned nothing but the long pale gown she wore; but she was kind, and good with animals, and people liked her.”

“Until the king married her.”

Teka picked up a slab of dark bread and broke it in half. “Some of them liked her even then.”

“Did you?”

“King Arlbeth would never have chosen me to nurse her daughter else.”

“Am I so like her as folk say?”

Teka stared at her, but Aerin felt it was her mother Teka looked at. “You are much like what your mother might have been had she been well and strong and without hurt. She was no beauty, but she ... caught the eye. You do too.”

Tor’s eye, thought Aerin, for which Galanna hates me even more enthusiastically than she would anyway. She is too stupid to recognize the difference between that sort of love and the love of a friend who depends on the particular friendship—or a farmer’s son’s love for his pet chicken. I wonder if Perlith hates me because his wife hoped to marry Tor, or merely for small scuttling reasons of his own. “That’s just the silly orange hair.”

“Not orange. Flame-colored.”

“Fire is orange.”

“You are hopeless.”

Aerin grinned in spite of a large mouthful of bread. “Yes. And besides, it is better to be hopeless, because—” The grin died.

Teka said anxiously: “My dear, you can’t have believed your father would let you ride in the army. Few women do so—”

“And they all have husbands, and go only by special dispensation from the king, and only if they can dance as well as they can ride. And none at all has ridden at the king’s side since Aerinha, goddess of honor and of flame, first taught men to forge their blades,” Aerin said fiercely. “You’d think Aerinha would have had better sense. If we were still using slingshots and magic songs, I suppose we’d still all be riding with them. They needed the women’s voices for the songs to work—”

“That’s only a pretty legend,” said Teka firmly. “If the singing worked, we’d still be using it.”

“Why? Maybe it got lost with the Crown. They might at least have named me Cupka or Marli or—or Galanna or something. Something to give me fair warning.”

“They named you for your mother.”

“Then she has to have been Damarian,” Aerin said. This was also an old argument. “Aerinha was Damarian.”

“Aerinha is Damarian,” said Teka, “and Aerinha is a goddess. No one knows where she first came from.”

There was a silence. Aerin stopped chewing. Then she remembered she was eating, swallowed, and took another bite of bread and turpi. “No, I don’t suppose I ever thought the king would let his only, and she somewhat substandard, daughter ride into possible battle, even though sword-handling is about the only thing she’s ever gotten remotely good at—her dancing is definitely not satisfactory.” She grunted. “Tor’s a good teacher. He taught me as patiently as if it were normal for a king’s child to have to learn every sword stroke by rote, to have to practice every maneuver till the muscles themselves know it, for there is nothing that wakes in this king’s child’s Wood to direct it.” Aerin looked, hot-eyed, at Teka, remembering again Perlith’s words as he left the hall last night. “Teka, dragons aren’t that easy to kill.”

“I would not want to have to kill one,” Teka said sincerely. Teka, maid and nurse, maker of possets and sewer of patches, scolder and comforter and friend, who saw nothing handsome in a well-balanced sword and who always wore long full skirts and aprons.

Aerin burst out laughing. “No, I am not surprised.”

Teka smiled comfortably.

Aerin ate several of the mik-bars herself before dusk fell and she could slip privately out of the castle by the narrow back staircase that no one else used, and into the largest of the royal barns where the horses of the first circle were kept. She liked to pretend that the ever observant men and women of the horse, the sofor, did not notice her every time she crept in at some odd hour to visit Talat. Anyone else of the royal blood could be sure of not being seen, had they wished to be unseen; Aerin could only tiptoe through the shadows, when there were shadows, and keep her voice down; and yet she knew she was simply recognized and permitted to pass. The sofor accepted that when she came thus quietly she wished to be left alone, and they respected her wishes; and Hornmar, the king’s own groom, was her friend. All the sofor knew what she had done for Talat, so the fact that they were being kind by ignoring her hurt her less than similar adaptations to the first sol’s deficiencies did elsewhere in the royal court.

Talat had been wondering what had become of her for almost two days, and she had to feed him the last three milk-bars before he forgave her; and then he snuffled her all over, partly to make sure she was not hiding anything else he might eat, partly to make sure she had in fact returned to him. He rubbed his cheek mournfully along her sleeve and rolled a reproachful eye.

Talat was nearly as old as she was; he had been her father’s horse when she was small. She remembered the dark grey horse with the shining black dapples on his shoulders and flanks, and the hot dark eye. The king’s trappings had looked particularly well on him: red reins and cheekpieces, a red skirt to the saddle, and a wide red breastplate with a gold leaf embroidered on it; the surka leaf, the king’s emblem, for only one of the royal blood could touch the leaves of the surka plant and not die of its sap.

He was almost white now. All that remained of his youth were a few black hairs in his mane and tail, and the black tips of his ears.

“You have not been neglected; don’t even try to make me think so. You are fed and watered and let out to roll in the dirt every day whether I come or not.” She ran a hand down his back; one of Hornmar1 s minions had of course groomed him to a high gloss, but Talat liked to be fussed over, so she fetched brushes and groomed him again while he stretched his neck and made terrible faces of enjoyment. Aerin relaxed as she worked, and the memory of the scene in the hall faded, and the mood that had held for the last two days lightened and began to break up, like clouds before a wind.

Chapter 3

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.

Chapter 4

TEKA FOUND HER OUT very soon; she’d been keeping a very sharp eye on her wayward sol since she first crawled out of bed after the surka episode. She’d been appalled when she first discovered Aerin under the tree in the vicious stallion’s paddock; but she had a bit more sense than Aerin gave her credit for (“Fuss, fuss, fuss, Teka! Leave me alone!”) and with her heart beating in her mouth she realized that Talat knew that his domain had been invaded and didn’t mind. She saw him eat his first mik-bar, and when they thereafter began disappearing at an unseemly rate from the bowl on Aerin’s window seat, Teka only sighed deeply and began providing them in greater quantity.

The book with the interesting binding was a history of Damar. Aerin had had to learn a certain amount of history as part of her royal education, but this stuff was something else again. The lessons she’d been forced to learn were dry spare things, the facts without the sense of them, given in the simplest of language, as if words might disguise the truth or (worse) bring it to life. Education was one of Arlbeth’s pet obsessions; before him there hadn’t been a king in generations who felt much desire for book learning, and there was no precedent for quality in royal tutors.

The book was faded with age, and the style of lettering was strange to her, so she had to puzzle out some of the words; and some of the words were archaic and unfamiliar, so she had to puzzle out the meanings. But it was worth it, for this book told her stories more exciting than the ones she made up for herself before she fell asleep at night. And so, as she read, she first learned of the old dragons.

Damar had dragons still; little ones, dog-sized, nasty, mean-tempered creatures who would fry a baby for supper and swallow it in two gulps if they could; but they had been beaten back into the heavy forest and the wilder Hills by Aerin’s day. They still killed an occasional unwary hunter, for they had no fear, and they had teeth and claws as well as fire to subdue their prey, but they were no longer a serious threat. Arlbeth heard occasionally of one—or of a family, for they most often hunted in families—that was harassing a village or an outlying farm, and when that happened a party of men with spears and arrows—swords were of little use, for if one were close enough to use a sword, one was close enough to be badly burned—went out from the City to deal with them. Always they came back with a few more unpleasant stories of the cunning treachery of dragons; always they came back nursing a few scorched limbs; occasionally they came back a horse or a hound the less.

But there was no glamour in dragon-hunting. It was hard, tricky, grim work, and dragons were vermin. The folk of the hunt, the thotor, who ran the king’s dogs and provided meat for the royal household, would have nothing to do with dragons, and dogs once used for dragons were considered worthless for anything else.

There were still the old myths of the great dragons, huge scaled beasts many times larger than horses; and it was sometimes even said that the great dragons flew, flew in the air, with wingspreads so vast as to blacken the sun. The little dragons had vestigial wings, but no one had ever seen or heard of a dragon that could lift its thick squat body off the ground with them. They beat their wings in anger and in courtship, as they raised their crests; but that was all. The old dragons were no more nor less of a tale than that of flying dragons.

But this book took the old dragons seriously. It said that while the only dragons humankind had seen in many years were little ones, there were still one or two of the great ones hiding in the Hills; and that one day the one or two would fly out of their secret places and wreak havoc on man, for man would have forgotten how to deal with them. The great dragons lived long; they could afford to wait for that forgetfulness. From the author’s defensive tone, the great dragons even in his day were a legend, a tale to tell on festival days, well lubricated with mead and wine. But she was fascinated, as he had been.

“It is with the utmost care I have gathered my information; and I think I may say with truth that the ancient Great Ones and our day’s small, scurrilous beasts are the same in type. Thus anyone wishing to learn the skill to defeat a Great One can do no better than to harry as many small ones as he may find from their noisome dens, and see how they do give battle.”

He went on to describe his information-gathering techniques, which seemed to consist of tirelessly footnoting the old stories for dragonish means and methods; although, thought Aerin, that could as well be from the oral tale-tellers adapting the ancient dragons to the ways of the present ones as from the truth of the author’s theory. But she read on.

Dragons had short stubby legs on broad bodies; they were not swift runners over distance, but they were exceedingly nimble, and could balance easily on any one foot the better to rip with any of the other three, as well as with the barbed tail. The neck was long and whippy, so that the dragon might spray its fire at any point of the circle; and they often scraped their wings against the ground to throw up dust and further confound their enemies, or their prey.

“It is customary today to hunt the dragon with arrow and thrown spear; but if one of the Great Ones comes again, this will avail his attacker little. As their size has diminished, so has their armament; a well-thrown spear may pierce a small dragon anywhere it strikes. The Great Ones had only two vulnerable spots that might be depended upon: at the base of the jaw, where the narrow head joins the long neck; and behind the elbow, from whence the wings spring. Dragons are, as I have said, nimble; it is most unlikely that a Great One would be so foolish as to lower its head or its wings to make an easy mark. A great hero only may slay a Great One; one who by skill and courage may draw close enough to force the fatal blow.

“It is fortunate for all who walk the earth that the Great Ones bred but rarely; and that mankind has borne Plough heroes to vanquish the most of them. But it is this writer’s most fervid belief that at least one more hero must stand forth from his people to face the last of the Great Ones.

“Of this last—I have said one or two; perhaps there are three or four; I know not. But of one I will make specific remark: Gorthold, who slew Crendenor and Razimtheth, went also against Maur, the Black Dragon, and it he did not slay. Gorthold, who was himself wounded unto death, said with his last strength that the dragon would die of its wounds as he would die of his; but this was never known for a certainty. The only certainty is that Maur disappeared; and has been seen by no man—or none that has brought back the tale to tell—from that day to this.”

In the back of the book Aerin found an even older manuscript: just a few pages, nearly illegible with age, sewn painstakingly into the binding. Those final ancient pages were a recipe, for an ointment called kenet. An ointment that was proof against dragonfire—it said.

It had a number of very peculiar ingredients; herbs, she thought, by the sound of them. She knew just enough of the Old Tongue to recognize a few syllables; there was one that translated as “red-root.” She frowned; there was a thing called redroot that showed up in boring pastoral poems, but she’d always thought it belonged to that classic category known as imaginary, like nymphs and elephants. Teka might know about redroot; she brewed a uniquely ghastly tea or tisane for every ailment, and when Aerin asked what was in the awful stuff, Teka invariably rattled off a list of things that Aerin had never heard of. She had been inclined to assume that Teka was simply putting her off with nonsense, but maybe not.

An ointment against dragonfire. If it worked—one person, alone, could tackle a dragon safely; not a Great One, of course, but the Black Dragon probably did die of its wounds ... but the little ones that were such a nuisance. At present the system was that you attacked with arrows and things from a distance, with enough of you to make a ring around it, or them, so if they bolted at someone he could run like mad while the other side of the ring was filling them full of arrows. They couldn’t run far, and usually a family all bolted in the same direction. It was when they didn’t that horses died.

Aerin had been sitting under the convenient tree by Talat’s pond most afternoons for several weeks when she found the recipe for dragon salve. It made her thoughtful, and she was accustomed to pacing while she thought. The surka was slowly losing its grip on her, and while she couldn’t exactly pace, she could amble slowly without her cane. She ambled around Talat’s pool.

Talat followed her. When she stopped, or grabbed a tree limb for balance, he moved a step or two away and dropped his nose to the ground and lipped at whatever he found there. When she moved on, he picked up his head and drifted after her. On the third afternoon since finding the recipe she was still pacing, not only because she was a slow thinker, but because her four-legged shadow with the dragging hind foot intrigued her. It was on the third day that when she put her hand out to steady herself against the air, a horse’s neck insinuated itself under her outstretched fingers. She let her hand lie delicately on his crest, her eyes straight ahead, ignoring him; but when she took another step forward, so did he.

Two days later she brought a currycomb and some brushes to Talat’s meadow; they belonged to Kisha, her pony, but Kisha wouldn’t miss them. Kisha was the ideal young sol’s mount: fine-boned and delicate and prettier than a kitten. She was also as vain as Galanna, and loved nothing better than a royal procession, when the horses of the first circle would be all decked out in gilt and tassels. The sols’ horses further would have ribbons braided into their manes and tails, and Kisha had a particularly long silky tail. (She would doubtless be cross at missing the mounted salute at Galanna and Perlith’s wedding.) She never shied at waving banners and flapping velvet saddle skirts; but if Aerin tried to ride her out in the countryside, she shied sulkily at every leaf, and kept trying to turn and bolt for home. They thoroughly detested each other. Galanna rode her full sister, Rooka. Aerin was convinced that Rooka and Kisha gossiped together in the stable at night about their respective mistresses.

Kisha had dozens of brushes. Aerin rolled up a few in a bit of leather and hid them in an elbow of her reading tree by the pond.

Talat was still too much on his dignity to admit how thoroughly he enjoyed being groomed; but his ears had a tendency to lop over, his eyes to glaze and half shut, and his lips to twitch, when Aerin rubbed the brushes over him. White hairs flew in a blizzard, for Talat had gone white in the years since he was lamed.

“Hornmar,” she said, several days later, trying to sound indifferent, “do you suppose Talat’s leg really hurts him any more?”

Hornmar was polishing Kethtaz, Arlbeth’s young bay stallion, with a bit of soft cloth. There wasn’t a dust mote on the horse’s hide anywhere. Aerin looked at him with dislike: he was fit and shining and merry and useful, and she loved Talat. Hornmar looked at Arlbeth’s daughter thoughtfully. All of the sofor knew by now of the private friendship between her and the crippled stallion. He was glad for Talat and for Aerin both, for he knew more than she would have wished about what her life was like. He was also, deep down, a tiny bit envious; Kethtaz was a magnificent horse, but Talat had been a better. And Talat now turned away from his old friend with flattened ears.

“I imagine not much any more. But he’s gotten into the habit of favoring that leg, and the muscles are soft, and stiff too, from the scarring,” he said in a neutral voice. He buffed a few more inches of Kethtaz’s flank. “Talat is looking good, this season.” He glanced at Aerin and saw the blood rising in her face, and turned away again.

“Yes, he’s getting fat,” she said.

Kethtaz sighed and flicked his tail; Hornmar had tied it up so it wouldn’t slap him in the face. He worked his way round the stallion’s quarters and started the other side; Aerin was still leaning against the stable wall, watching. “Talat might come back a little more,” Hornmar said at last, cautiously. “He’d never be up, say, to a man’s weight again, though.”

“Oh,” said Aerin, still indifferent. Kethtaz had a black dapple on one shoulder; she rubbed it with a finger, and he turned his head around and poked her with his nose. She petted him for a moment, and then she quietly slipped away.

The next day she rode her crippled stallion. She brushed him first, and when she was done, she dropped the grooming things together in a pile. She ran a finger along one wide cheek; Talat, nothing loath for a little more attention, rested his nose against her stomach so she could stroke’ the other cheek with the other hand. After a moment she worked down his left side, and placed her hands on his withers and loins, and leaned on them. He was smaller than most of the royal war-horses, but still too tall for her to put much of her weight into her hands. He flicked his ears at her. “Well,” she said. She rested one hand on his shoulder and he followed her to a rock she had picked out for the purpose some days before. She stepped up on it, and he stood quietly as she slowly eased one leg over his back.

She was sitting on him. Nothing happened. Well, she said to herself crossly, what was supposed to happen? He was broken to saddle while I was still learning to walk. The first time.

Talat cocked his ears back toward her, his head bowed as if he felt the bit in his mouth again. She nudged him with her legs, and he walked away from the mounting stone: thunk-thunk-1hunk-drag. He was bigger than she expected, and her legs ached spanning a war-stallion’s broad back. For all that Talat had done nothing but stand in a field for over two years, the shoulders under her hands were hard with muscle.

She rode him every day after that. At first it was once around his field, starting and stopping at the mounting stone; then it was two and three times: thunk-thunk-thunk-drag, thunk-thunk-thunk-drag. He walked when she squeezed with her legs, and went right or left when she bumped him with the outside knee; and after a few tries he realized she meant him to stop when she dug her hipbones into his back. She ran her hands over the bad leg every day after she dismounted: there was no heat, no swelling, no tenderness. One day she banged the long ugly scar with her closed fist, said, “Very well, it really doesn’t hurt, I hope,” got back on him again and wrapped her legs around him till, his ears flicking surprise at her, he broke into a shuffling trot. He limped six steps and she let him stop. Tears pricked at her eyes, and she fed him mik-bars silently, and left early that day.

Nonetheless she returned the next afternoon, though she looked glum, and tried to pick up her book after she’d done grooming him. But he went so expectantly to the mounting stone and stood watching her that she sighed, and climbed on him again, and sent him forward with her legs. But he broke at once into the shuffling trot, and at the end of the six steps he did not stumble to a halt, but strode out a little more boldly; a quarter of the way around the field, halfway—Aerin sat into him and he obediently subsided into a walk, but his ears spoke to her: You see? It was that day that a small but terrible hope first bloomed in Aerin’s heart.

Chapter 5

AERIN WAS GOING to have to take part in Galanna’s wedding after all. The surka was indisputably wearing off—”It’s lasted this long, why couldn’t it have hung on just a little longer?” Aerin said irritably to Tor.

“It tried, I’m sure,” said Tor. “It just wasn’t expecting Galanna.”

Galanna had contrived to have the great event put off an extra half-year because, she said coyly, she wanted everything to be perfect, and in the time remaining it was not possible to drag a sufficient number of things up to meet that standard. Meanwhile Aerin had resignedly begun to take her old place in her father’s court; her presence was not a very necessary one, but her continued absence was noted, and the surka hadn’t killed her after all. “I wonder if I could at least convince her that I’m too woozy to carry a rod and a veil or throw flowers and sing. I could maybe get away with just standing with my father and looking pale and invalid. Probably. She can’t possibly want me around any more than I want to be around.”

“She should have thought more exactingly of the timing involved when she goaded you into eating the surka in the first place.”

Aerin laughed.

Tor said ruefully, “I almost wish I’d had the forethought to eat a tree myself.” Perlith had asked Tor to stand behind him at the ceremony. The first companion was supposed to hold a sola’s badge of rank during his wedding; but in this particular case there were some interesting politics going on. Perlith was required by tradition to ask the king and the first sola to stand by him for the ceremony, and the king and the first sola by tradition were required to accept the invitation. The first companion’s place was, as attendants go, the most important, but it was also the most attentive; the slang for the first companion’s position was rude, and referred to the companion’s location near his sola’s backside. Asking Tor to stand first companion was a token of Perlith’s unrivaled esteem for his first sola, as the first companion’s place should go to Perlith’s dearest friend. It would also be Perlith’s only chance ever to have the first sola waiting on him.

“You should drop the badge with a clatter just as the chant gets to the bit about family loyalty and the unending bliss of being a member of a family. Ugh,” said Aerin.

“Don’t tempt me,” Tor said.

Fortunately Galanna did not have her future husband’s sense of humor, and she was glad to excuse Aerin from participation on the grounds of the continuing unreliability of the first sol’s health. Galanna was incapable of plotting much of anything over a year in advance, and the surka incident had had nothing to do with the predictable approach of her wedding day. It had had to do with the loss of her eyelashes just when she knew Perlith had decided to offer for her—which offer had then had to be put off till they were long enough again for her to look up at him through them. (She had actually been weak enough to wonder if Aerin was Gifted after all, her timing in this case being no less than diabolical.) But it had occurred to her lately that it would be a boon to find a way to keep Aerin out of the ceremony itself, without giving visible public offense (and since the surka hadn’t killed her off, which, to give Galanna what little credit she deserves, she had not been attempting). Galanna understood as well as Perlith did why Tor had been asked, and would stand as first companion; but Tor was reliable, for all his disgusting sympathy for his youngest cousin. He believed in his first sola’s place as Aerin had no reason to believe in her place as first sol; and Aerin, if dragooned into performing some ceremonial role, would by fair means or foul mess things up. Nothing was going to spoil Galanna’s wedding day. She and Aerin understood each other very well when Aerin, formal and smiling, offered her apologies and regrets, and Galanna, formal and smiling, accepted them.

Galanna and Perlith’s wedding was the first great state event since the celebration of Tor’s coming to manhood, and thus his taking his full place at his uncle’s right hand, less than two years after his own father died. Aerin had been a part of that ceremony, and she had been determined to perform her role with both dignity and accuracy, that Tor would not be embarrassed in front of all the people who had told him not to ask her to be in it. The result was that she remembered very little of the day-long rites. She did remember frantically running her responses through her mind (which she had so firmly committed to memory that she remembered them all her life). When the priests finished naming the three hundred and ten sovereigns before Arlbeth (not that all of them had ruled quite the same country, but the sonorous recitation of all the then-who-came-afters had an impressive ring to it), she had to rename the last seven of them, seven being the perfect number because of the Seven Perfect Gods, and name their Honored Wives or queens (there hadn’t been a ruling queen in a very long time) and any full brothers or sisters. The finish was: And then who came after was Tor, son of Thomar, own brother to Arlbeth; Tor came next. And she had to not squeak, and she had to not squeak three times, for they went through it all once at dawn, once at midday, and once at sunset. She also had to hold his swordbelt, and by the evening she had blisters across both palms from gripping it too hard. But she had done everything right.

Tor had been busier since then, often away from the City, showing himself to the Hillfolk who came rarely or never to the City, that they might one and all know the face and voice of the man who would be their king someday; and it had also been soon after Tor’s coming of age that Aerin had eaten the surka. While it lay heavily on her she had not wished to see much of him even when he was at home, though he had come often to sit by her when she was too sick to protest and even, without her knowledge, put off one or two trips that he might stay near her. But as she got enough better to be surly about not being well, and as his absences of necessity increased, a barrier began to grow up between them, and they were no longer quite the friends they had once been. She missed him, for she had been accustomed to talking to him nearly every day, but she never said she missed him, and she told herself that it was as well, since the surka had proved Galanna three-quarters right about her, that the first sola not contaminate himself with her company too often. When she did see him, she was painstakingly bright and offhand.

A few days after Talat had trotted halfway round his pasture with Aerin on his back, she asked Hornmar what had become of Talat’s tack. She knew that each of the court horses had its own, and Kethtaz would never be insulted by wearing bits of his predecessor’s gear; but she was afraid that Talat’s might have been destroyed when his leg had doomed him. Hornmar, who had seen Talat jogging around his field with Aerin at attention on his back, brought out saddle and girth and bridle, for while he had thought they would never be used again, he had not had the heart to get rid of them. If Aerin noticed that they appeared to have been freshly cleaned and oiled, she said nothing but “Thank you.” The same day that she carried Talat’s gear up to her room and hid it in her wardrobe (where Teka, finding it later, also found that it had left oil spots on Aerin’s best court dress), she saw from her window Tor riding in from one of his rounds of political visits; and she decided it was time to waylay him.

“Aerin,” he said, and hugged her gladly. “I have not seen you in weeks. Have you your dress made yet for the wedding of the century? Who won, you or Teka?”

She pulled a face. “Teka has won more ground than I, but I refused to wear it in yellow at all, so at least it’s going to be a sort of leaf green, and there’s less lace. It’s still quite awful.”

Tor looked amused. When he looked amused she almost forgot she had decided that it was better that they weren’t such good friends any more. “Have supper with me,” he said. “I must have dinner in the hall—I suppose you are still pleading ill health and dining peacefully with Teka? But supper I may have alone in my rooms. Will you come?”

“Pleading ill health indeed,” she said. “Do you really want me to have a dizzy moment and drop a full goblet of wine in the lap of the esteemed guest at my right—or left? I’m less likely to cause civil war if I stay away.”

“A very convenient excuse. I sometimes think if I have to look at Galanna purring over the latest detail of the upcoming event I shall throw an entire cask at her. You’d think we were declaring bloody independence from a genocidal tyrant, the way she goes on about the significance of the seating of the barons’ third cousins twice removed. Did you know that Katah doesn’t want to come at all? Her husband says he may have to put a bag over her head and tie her to her horse. Katah says that she knows Galanna and he doesn’t. Will you come to supper?”

“Of course, if you’ll shut up long enough for me to accept.” She grinned at him.

He looked at her, feeling a twitch of surprise; in her smile for the first time he saw that which was going to trouble his sleep very soon; something very unlike the friendship they’d enjoyed all their lives thus far; something that would raise the barrier between them much faster than anything else could; the barrier that thus far Aerin alone saw growing.

“What’s wrong?” she said; some of the old familiarity still worked, and she saw the shadow pass over his face, although she had no clue to what caused it.

“Nothing. I’ll see you tonight, then.”

She laughed when she saw the place settings for their supper: gold. The golden goblets were fishes standing on their tails, their open mouths waiting for the wine to be poured; the plates were encircled by leaping golden deer, the head of each bowed over the quarters of the one before, and their flying tails made a scalloped edge; the spoons and knives were golden birds, their long tails forming handles. “Highly unbreakable. I can still spill the wine.”

“We’ll have to make do.”

“Where in Damar did you get these?”

Something like a flush crept up his face. “Four settings of the stuff was one of my coming-of-age gifts; it’s from a town in the west known for its metalwork. I only just brought it back, this trip.” It had been given him for his bride, the town’s chief had told him.

Aerin looked at him, trying to decide about the flush; he was brown to begin with, and copper-colored from sunburn, and it was hard to tell. “It must have been a long and gaudy ceremony, and they covered you with glory you don’t feel you’ve earned.”

Tor smiled. “Near enough.”

She didn’t spill anything that evening, and she and Tor reminded each other of the most embarrassing childhood moments they could think of, and laughed. Galanna and Perlith’s wedding was not mentioned once.

“Do you remember,” she said, “when I was very young, almost a baby still, and you were first learning to handle a sword, how you used to show me what you’d learned—”

“I remember,” he said, smiling, “that you followed me around and wheedled and wept till I was forced to show you.”

“Wheedled, yes,” she said. “Wept, never. And you started it; I didn’t ask to get put in a baby-sack while you leaped your horse over hurdles.”

“My own fault, I admit it.” He also remembered, though he said nothing of it, how their friendship had begun. He had felt sorry for his young cousin, and had sought her first out of dislike for those who wished to ostracize her, especially Galanna, but soon for her own sake: for she was wry and funny even when she could barely speak, and loved best to find things to be enthusiastic about; and did not remind him that he was to grow up to be king. He had never quite learned to believe that she was always shy in company, nor that the shyness was her best attempt at a tactful acknowledgement of her precarious place in her father’s court; nor that her defensive obstinacy was quite necessary.

It was to watch her take fire with enthusiasm that he had made a small wooden sword for her, and shown her how to hold it; and later he taught her to ride a horse, and let her ride his own tall mare when the first of her pretty, spoiled ponies had made her wish to give up riding altogether. He had shown her how to hold a bow, and to send an arrow or a spear where she wished it to go; how to skin a rabbit or an oozog, and how best to fish in running streams and quiet pools. The complete older brother, he thought now, and for the first time with a trace of bitterness.

“I can still hunt and fish and ride,” she said. “But I miss the swordplay. I know you haven’t much spare time these days—” She hesitated, calculating which approach would be likeliest to provoke the response she desired. “And I know there’s no reason for it, but—I’m big enough now I could carry one of the boys’ training swords. Would you—”

“Train you?” he said. He was afraid he knew where her thoughts were tending, although he tried to tell himself that this was no worse than teaching her to fish. He knew that even if he did grant her this it would do her no good; it didn’t matter that she was already a good rider, that she was, for whatever inbred or circumstantial reasons, less silly than any of the other court women; that he knew from teaching her other things that he could probably teach her to be a fair swordswoman. He knew that for her own sake he should not encourage her now.

The gods prevent her from asking me anything I must not give, he thought, and said aloud, “Very well.”

Their eyes met, and Aerin’s dropped first.

The lessons had to be at infrequent intervals because of Tor’s ever increasing round of duties as first sola; but lessons still Aerin had, as she wished, and after several months’ time and practice she could make her teacher pant and sweat as they danced around each other. Her lessons were only a foot soldier’s lessons; horses were not mentioned, and she was wise enough, having gained so much, not to protest.

She took pride, in a grim sort of way, in learning what Tor taught her; and he need not know the hours of drill she put in, chopping at leaves and dust motes, when he was not around. She made what she considered to be obligatory protests about the regular hiatuses in her progress when Tor was sent off somewhere, but in truth she was glad of them, for then she had the time to put in, grinding the lessons into her slow, stupid, Giftless muscles. But she was always eager for her next meeting with the first sola, and what he guessed about her private practice sessions was not discussed, any more than the fact that he had not fought unhorsed since he was a little boy and learning his first lessons in swordplay. A sola always led cavalry. Aerin knew pretty well when the time came that if she had been in real training she would have been put on a horse; but this moment too passed in silence.

But there was one good thing that also passed in silence, for Aerin was too proud, for different reasons, to mention it: the specific muscular control and coordination of learning to wield a sword finally sweated the last of the surka out of her system. It had been two years since her meeting with Galanna in the royal garden.

Tor and Aerin’s meetings on the farthest edge of the least used of the practice fields also gave them an excuse to be together, as they had always been together, without having to acknowledge the new restraint between them, without discovering that conversation between them was growing awkward.

Aerin knew that Tor was careful not to use his real strength when he forced her back; but at least, as she learned, he had to be quick to keep her off; and strength, she hoped, would come. She was growing like a weed; her seventeenth birthday had come and gone, with the tiresome pomp necessary to a king’s daughter, and the stiff courtesy inspired by an unsatisfactory king’s daughter, and she was far too old to be suddenly growing taller. Not that she minded towering over Galanna; Galanna’s perfect profile, when seen from above, seemed to beetle slightly at the brows and narrow slightly around the eyes. Aerin also had hopes that she would outgrow the revolting Kisha and be given a real horse.

A real horse. She began to have to close her lips tighter over her determination not to mention horses to Tor. A mounted man’s strength was his horse—or a mounted woman’s. But if she asked Tor to teach her to fight from horseback he would have to admit to knowing how much it meant to her, that it was not only an amusing private game she was playing; and she knew he was troubled about what they were doing already. His curious silence on the cause of her eagerness to learn told her that; and he could still read as many of her thoughts as she could of his.

Chapter 6

TALAT GREW FIT and shining: He was always a little short with the right hind when she mounted, but it took less and less time for him to work out of it. She rode him without gear for weeks, while the saddle and bridle shed oil all over the inside of her wardrobe, for she found herself superstitiously reluctant to use it—as if something would be spoiled, or a gift would become a duty, once tack officiated over their rides together. “I suppose even the pleasantest convalescence must come to an end someday,” she said to him one evening; and the next day she brought all his gear and her boy’s sword out to the pasture. He sniffled them all over, slowly and then with enthusiasm, and danced with impatience while she tacked him up, till she pounded on his shoulder with her fist and yelled at him to behave.

He moved off proudly and obeyed each command at once; and yet she found the jingling of the various bits and buckles annoying, and the reins took up too much of her hands and her concentration. “How does one deal with a sword and these thrice-blasted reins?” she said to the small white ears. “There must also be a way to hang the rotten thing so it doesn’t bang into you when you’re not using it. I carry the reins in my teeth—and accidentally strangle myself in them—and meanwhile I can’t shout blood-curdling war cries of Victory! and For Damar! to bring terror into the hearts of my enemies, with my mouth full of reins.” As they stood, she pulled the sword from its scabbard and swung it experimentally just as Talat turned his head to snap at a fly on his shoulder, and the sword tangled itself in the reins till Talat could not straighten his neck again, but remained with his head bent around and one reproachful dark eye fixed on his rider, and the blunt blade snuggled along his cheek.

“Ah, hells,” she said, and yanked the sword free. One rein parted. Talat stood, either waiting for directions or afraid to move; the short end of the cut rein dangled a few inches beneath his chin, and he ducked his head and grabbed it, and chewed it thoughtfully.

“We did just fine without,” she said furiously, dismounted, tore the bridle off and dumped it on the ground, holding her unwieldy sword in the other hand like a marauding bandit. She remounted and dug her legs into Talat’s sides—harder than she meant for the saddle skirts muddled her. Talat, delighted, set off on his first gallop since the day he was wounded; and Aerin had wrought better than she knew, for he had the strength and stamina now to gallop quite a distance.

He tore across his pasture. Aerin failing to collect either her wits or her stomach, which seemed to be lying back on the ground with the bridle; and then she discovered that just as the saddle had made her misjudge how hard to squeeze, so now its bulk made it very easy for Talat to ignore her as she tried to tell him to stop by sitting heavily on his back. The fence loomed up before them; “Oh no,” moaned Aerin, dropped her sword, and grabbed two handfuls of mane; and they were up and over. The take-off was a lurch, but they came down lightly, and Aerin discovered that while her ex-convalescent was still disinclined to stop, he was willing to listen to her legs again; and eventually the circles got smaller, and the gallop more like a canter, and finally when she sat back he came down docilely to a walk.

But his head and tail were still up, and he reared suddenly, and Aerin frantically clutched him around the neck. He neighed, and struck out with his forelegs. Aerin had seen him do this years before, when her father rode him, for war-horses were trained to do battle as well as to carry their riders into it; and she had seen them and others of the cavalry on the practice fields, and at the laprun trials. But it was a lot different, she found, when one was on the horse performing.

“Shh,” she said. “If someone notices we’re out here, there will be trouble.” Talat bounced stiff-legged once or twice and subsided. “And how am I supposed to get you back into your pasture again, dimwit?” she addressed him, and his ears flicked back for her voice. “The gate is right under anyone’s eyes watching from the barn; and there’s always someone in the barn.” His ears twitched. “No, we will not jump back in.” She was shaking all over; she felt that her legs were clattering against Talat’s sides.

She turned him back toward the far side of the pasture again, feeling that anything was better than being seen; and they made their way to the place where Talat had made his leap. Aerin dismounted. “You stay right here or I’ll chop your other three legs,” she told him. He stood still, watching her, as she clambered cautiously up the low rock wall and the wooden rails above it. She cast around a few minutes, and found her discarded sword; came back to the fence and began banging the end of the top rail with the hilt till it slid protestingly out of the post and fell to the ground. The other followed. Aerin examined her blisters grimly, and wiped her sweating face. Talat was still watching her intently, and had not stirred a hoof. Aerin grinned suddenly. “Your war-horse training is no joke, hey? Only the best carries the king.” He wrinkled his nose at her in a silent whicker. “Or even a third-rate first sol, now and then.”

She stepped back from the fence. “Now, you. Come here.” She beckoned him as if he were one of the king’s hunting dogs. He bunched his feet together and sprang over the low stones, the stirrups clanging against his sides. She ground the rails back into the post holes again, picked up the sword, and with Talat following—she felt she’d had enough of riding for one day—they walked back to the pool and the mounting stone, and the heap of bridle and scabbard.

Talat was very lame the next day, and Aerin chased him on foot for three days to make him trot and work the soreness out before mounting him again. She reverted to riding him without saddle or bridle, but she took her sword with her, and slashed at dangling leaves and cobwebs—and fell off occasionally when a particularly wicked swing overbalanced her—and learned to hang on with her legs when Talat reared. They also cantered endlessly to the left to strengthen the weak leg, although some days she had to yell and thump on his shoulders and flanks to make him pick up the left lead at all.

She asked Tor, idly, what cues the war horses knew for their leaps and plunges, and Tor, who did not know about Talat and feared what she might be doing, warily told her. Talat nearly unseated her the first time she asked him these things, and didn’t settle down again for days, hoping for more signals to do what he loved best, going off in corvettes when she only wanted him to trot.

The bridle she did not return to her wardrobe, but instead only threw it under her bed out of sight. (Teka, who had rearranged the wardrobe to allow for saddle oil, wondered about this new arrangement, but on the whole found it preferable, since court dresses were not kept under the bed.) She pulled the stirrups off the saddle and began to wrench the stitching out of its bottom, pulled most of the stuffing out, and sewed what remained back together again.

She put the resulting wreck on Talat’s back, sat on it, said hells, took it off, pulled it entirely to bits, and began painstakingly to redesign it to follow exactly the contours of Talat’s back and her legs, which meant that for several weeks she was putting it on him and climbing into it maybe half a dozen times in an afternoon, and Talat was a bit cross about it. She also had to borrow leather-working tools from Hornmar. Her heart was in her mouth for the questions Hornmar had never asked her but might yet someday; but he gave her the tools silently and willingly.

Her saddle was finished at last. She had left the breastplate links on it so that Talat could still wear the royal insignia; and when she put the saddle and breastplate on him she was surprised at how handsome it looked.

“I did a good job on this,” she said, staring at her handiwork; and she blushed, but only Talat was there to see.

Meanwhile the long-awaited wedding of Galanna and Perlith finally occurred, with Tor performing the functions of first companion to Perlith with a blank and sober face, and Galanna almost transcendent with gratified vanity, for the eyes of the entire country were upon her. She was as beautiful as summer dawn, in rose and gold and turquoise, her black hair bound only with flowers, pink and white and pale blue; but she made up for this uncommon self-restraint by wearing rings on every finger and two on each thumb, so that when she made the ritual gestures her hands seemed on fire as the gems caught the sunlight.

But it was also at this wedding that a new and troubling rumor about the king’s daughter began, a rumor that Galanna did not have to start, for more eyes than hers observed and drew conclusions similar to hers without the spur of wounded pride and jealousy. The king’s daughter, Aerin-sol, stood at her father’s left hand, as was proper; she wore green, a long dress, the skirts nearly as full as Galanna’s, but this was only to show her cousin proper respect. The lace of her bodice was modest, and she wore but two rings, one of the house of the king, and one her father had given her on her twelfth birthday; her hair was bound primly to the back of her neck, and she carried only a small yellow-and-white posy of ringaling flowers. Aerin would not have wished to outshine Galanna even if she could, and had argued with Teka over every stitch of the dress and every braid of her bound hair, and tried to get out of carrying flowers at all.

The king and his daughter stood to the right of the wedding pair, and the first companions stood across from them; and it was obvious to many pairs of eyes that Perlith’s first companion’s gaze rested not on the bride but on the king’s daughter; and the irony was that had he not been standing first companion he would have been on the king’s right hand, where he could not look at Aerin-sol whether he wished to or not, and so his secret might have been kept a little longer.

The rumor began that day, for the people at the wedding feast passed it among themselves, and took it home with them afterward, that the first sola was in love with the king’s daughter; and that the witch’s daughter would entrap the next king of Damar as her mother had entrapped her father; and a little breath of fear was reawakened—for Aerin’s Giftlessness had been reassuring—and accompanied the rumor.

Galanna, who had hoped to make Tor just a little sorry after all that he had not married her, had her day of glory almost ruined when at last she noticed where her new husband’s first companion’s eyes were tending; but anger became her, so long as she kept her tongue between her lips. It was almost worth it, for a few days later one of her dumber but most well-meaning ladies mentioned, worriedly, to her that someone had said that Tor was falling under the spell of the witch woman’s daughter, and that history was to repeat itself. “I don’t quite know what she meant, do you?” said the lady, frowning. “Aerin-sol’s mother was queen; it would be a most suitable match,”

Galanna laughed her most light-hearted laugh. “You are so young,” she said caressingly. “It was a terrible scandal when Arlbeth married Aerin’s mother. Didn’t you know that Aerin’s mother was from the North?”

The lady, who had grown up in a small town to the south, did not know, and her eyes opened wide; Galanna could read her eagerness to have an interesting fresh slice of gossip to slip into the conversation the next time she and her friends gathered together. “Oh, Arlbeth certainly married her,” Galanna said gently, “but she wasn’t exactly queen.” She made it sound as if Arlbeth’s only excuse for such a liaison was misguided passion and, blinded by that passion, perhaps he hadn’t quite married her at all. She let this sink in a moment—the lady was very stupid, and had to be played carefully—and then, seeing dawning comprehension in the lady’s eyes, sent her gently and kindly, that the comprehension would not be joggled loose again, about her business.

Aerin herself bore up under the wedding and the feast afterward as best she could, but as this meant that she withstood them stoically as a martyr might withstand torture, she did not notice either Tor’s eyes or Galanna’s fury—she was only too accustomed to ignoring Galanna whenever possible; the one thing she did observe about the bride was the twelve rings, which were hard to miss—nor did she notice any more than usual stiffness in the courtesy that those around her offered her. And Tor, who was either viewed as dangerously enamored and therefore to be treated with caution, or as pitiably misguided and thus to be protected—or, as a few implausibly simple souls believed, capable of deciding his own fate—did not know till much later all that he had betrayed.

Aerin peeled out of her fancy clothes and fancy manners and pelted off to the barns at the first opportunity, and thought no more about weddings.

She had taken some time away from her leather-working to begin experimenting with the fire ointment. Most of the ingredients she found easily, for they were common things, and a first sol’s education included a little basic herb-lore—which Aerin had learned gladly as an escape from deportment and history. One or two things she asked Hornmar for, from his stock of horse cures; and he, thinking she wished perhaps to try some sort of poultice on Talat’s weak leg, granted her the run of his medicines as he had his tool chest, and again asked no questions. She was aware of the great boon he offered her, and this time she couldn’t help but look at him a little wonderingly.

He smiled at her. “I love Talat too, you know,” he said mildly. “If I can aid you, you need only to ask.”

Teka and the redroot were a little more difficult.

“Teka, what is redroot?” Aerin asked one afternoon as she applied an uneven patch to a skirt she had always detested, and glowered at the result.

“If you spent a quarter of the time about your mending that you have over that old saddle, you would be better turned out than Galanna,” said Teka with asperity. “Rip that out and do it again.”

Aerin sighed, and began to pick at the irregular stitches. “I suppose there’s no point in mentioning that I have no desire to be better turned out than Galanna.” She picked a moment in silence and added, “For that matter, Galanna never wears anything that has a patch or a tear.”

Teka grinned. “No. She takes out a great gash and puts in a whole new panel of different cloth, and it’s a new dress.”

“I would like to make a new floor mop out of this thing,” replied Aerin.

Teka lifted it out of Aerin’s hands and squinted at it. “The color has not worn well,” she explained, “but the cloth is sound. We could re-dye it.” Aerin did not show any marked access of enthusiasm for this plan. “Blue perhaps, or red. Don’t overwhelm me with your gladness, child. You’re always wanting to wear red, in spite of your flaming hair—”

“Orange,” murmured Aerin.

“You could do quite well with this skirt in red, and a golden tunic over—Aerin!”

“It would still have to be patched,” Aerin pointed out.

Teka sighed heavily. “You would try the patience of Gholotat herself. If you will do something useful with that wretched bridle that has been lying under the bed for the last fortnight, I will re-dye your poor skirt, and put a patch on it that not even Galanna will notice—as if you cared.”

Aerin reached out to hug Teka, and Teka made a noise that so sounded like “Hmmph.” Aerin fell off the window seat and made her way over to the bed on her hands and knees and began to scrabble under it. She re-emerged only slightly dusty, for the hafor were dutiful floor-sweepers, held the bridle at arm’s length and looked at it with distaste. “Now what do I do with it?” she inquired.

“Put it on a horse,” Teka suggested in a much-tried tone.

Aerin laughed. “Teka, I am inventing a new way to ride. I don’t use a bridle.”

Teka, who still occasionally watched Aerin and Aerin’s white stallion in secret to reassure herself that Talat would do her beloved child no harm, shuddered. It was the luck of the gods that Teka had not been watching the day Talat had jumped the fence. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Someday,” Aerin went on with a bold sweep of her empty hand, “I shall be famous in legend and story—” She stopped, embarrassed to say such things even to Teka.

Teka, holding the skirt to the light as she made deft invisible stitches around the patch, said quietly, “I have never doubted it, my dear.”

Aerin sat down on the edge of the bed with the bridle in her lap and looked at the fringe on the bed curtains, which were the long golden manes of the embroidered horseheads on the narrow canopy border, and thought of her mother, who had died in despair when she found she had borne a daughter instead of a son.

“What is redroot?” she asked again.

Teka frowned. “Redroot. That’s—um—astzoran. Red-root’s the old term for it—they used to think it was good for some things.”

“What things?”

Teka glanced at her and Aerin bit her lip. “Why do you want to know?”

“I—oh—I read a lot in the old books in the library while I wasn’t ... feeling quite well. There was some herb-lore, and they mentioned redroot.”

Teka considered, and some of her thoughts were similar to Tor’s when Aerin had asked him to teach her swordplay. Teka had never thought about whether Aerin’s fate had more to do with what Aerin was or what Damar was, or for reasons beyond either; Teka merely observed that Aerin’s fate was unique. But she knew, knew better even than the cousin who loved her, that Aerin would never be a court lady; not like Galanna, who was a beautiful termagant, but neither like Arlbeth’s first wife, Tatoria, whom everyone had loved. None of the traditions of Arlbeth’s court could help the king’s daughter discover her fate; but Teka, unlike Aerin herself, had faith that the destiny was somewhere to be found. She hesitated, but she could remember nothing dangerous about the no longer valued redroot.

“Astzoran doesn’t grow around here,” said Teka; “it is a low weedy plant that prefers open meadows. It spreads by throwing out runners, and where the runner touches the earth a long slender root strikes down. That is the redroot.” Teka pretended great concentration upon her patch. “I might take a few days to ride into the meadows beyond the City and into the Hills; I am reminded that there are herbs I need, and I prefer to gather my own. If you wish to come, I will show you some astzoran.”

Teka asked no questions when Aerin rolled up a small herb bundle of her own and tied it to Kisha’s saddle during their journey, a bundle that included several long thready roots of astzoran, and if any of the outriders noticed (for Teka only rode at all under duress, and even on her slow, sleepy, elderly pony she felt much safer with several other people around), they said nothing either.

The ointment recipe, Aerin found, was not as exact as it might be. She made one mixture, spread some of it on one finger, and thrust the finger into a candle flame—and snatched it out again with a yelp. Three more mixtures gained her three more burnt fingers—and a terrific lecture from Teka, who was not, of course, informed as to the details of why Aerin seemed intent on burning her fingers off. After that she used bits of wood to smear her trial blends on; when they smoked and charred, she knew she had not yet got it right.

After the first few tries she sighed and began to keep careful notes of how each sample was made. It was not an exercise natural to her, and after she’d filled several sheets of parchment with her tiny exact figures—parchment was expensive stuff, even for kings’ daughters—she began to lose heart. She thought: If this mess really worked, everyone would know of it; they would all use it for dragon-hunting, and-would have been using it all along, and dragons would no longer be a risk—and that book would be studied and not left to gather dust. It is foolish to think I might have discovered something everyone before me had overlooked. She bowed her head over her burnt twig, and several hot tears slipped down her face onto her page of calculations.

Chapter 7

ON HER EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY there was a banquet for the first sol, despite all she could do to prevent it. Galanna shot her glances like poisoned arrows and clung curiously near Tor’s side for someone else’s wife of so few seasons. Perlith made witty remarks at Aerin’s expense in his soft light tenor that always sounded kind, whatever he might be saying. The king her father toasted her, and the faces around the tables in the great hall glittered with smiles; but Aerin looked at them sadly and saw only the baring of teeth.

Tor watched her: she was wearing a golden tunic over a long red skirt; the tunic had embroidered flowers wound round its hem, and petals of many colors stitched drifting down the full sleeves; she wore the same two rings she had at Galanna’s wedding. Her flame-colored hair was twisted around her head, and a golden circlet was set upon it, and over her forehead three golden birds held green stones in their beaks. He saw her wince away from the courtiers’ smiles, and he shook Galanna’s hand from his arm impatiently, and then Galanna no longer even pretended to smile.

Aerin did not notice this, for she never looked at Galanna if she could help it, and if Galanna were near Tor she didn’t look at Tor either. But Arlbeth noticed. He knew what it was that he saw, for better or for worse, and it was not often that he did not know what was best done about the things he saw; but in this case he did not know. What he read in Tor’s face tore at his heart, for it would be his heart’s fondest wish that these two might wed, and yet he knew his people had never loved the daughter of his second wife, and he feared their mistrust, and he had reason to fear it. Aerin felt her father’s arm around her shoulders, and turned to smile up at him.

After the banquet she went to sit in her window seat, staring into the dark courtyard; the torches around its perimeter left great pools of shadow near the castle walls. Her bedroom was dark as well, and Teka had not yet come to be sure she had hung her good clothes up as she should instead of leaving them on the floor where she would step on them. There was a light knock on the door. She turned and said, “Come in,” with surprise; if she had thought about it, she would have been silent and let the visitor leave without finding her. She wished to be alone after the hall full of food and talk and bright smiles.

It was Tor. She could see him outlined in the light from the hall, and she had been sitting in the dark long enough to see clearly. But he blinked and looked around, for her figure was only a part of the heavy curtains that hung around the deep window alcove. She stirred, and he saw the flicker of her red skirt.

“Why do you sit in the dark?”

“There was too much light in the hall tonight.”

Tor was silent. After a moment she sighed, and reached for a candle and flint. It seemed to Tor that the shadows it cast upon her face made her briefly old: a woman with grandchildren, for all her brilliant hair. Then she set the candle on a small table and smiled at him, and she was eighteen again.

She saw that he carried something in his arms: a long narrow something, wrapped in dark cloth. “I have brought you your birthday present—privately, as I thought you might prefer.” And so that I need not do any explaining, he thought.

She knew at once what it was: a sword. She watched with rising excitement as he unrolled the wrappings, and from them, gleaming, came her sword, her very own sword. She reached for it eagerly, and slid it out of its scabbard. It was plain but for some work on the hilt to make the grip sure; but she felt it light and true and perfect in her hand, and her hand trembled with the pride of it.

“Thank you,” she said, her eyes still fixed on the sword, so she did not see the look of hope and pity on Tor’s face as he watched her.

“At dawn you shall try it out,” said Tor, and the tone of his voice shook her out of her reverie, and she raised her eyes to his. “I will meet you at our usual place,” he said, and tried to speak as if this were a lesson like any other lesson; and if he failed, Aerin still did not guess why he failed.

“This is ever so much better than another dressing gown,” she said lightly, and was pleased to see him smile.

“It was a very beautiful dressing gown.”

“If it had been less beautiful, I would not have disliked it so much. You were as bad as Teka, trying to keep me in bed, or trailing about my rooms in a dressing gown forever.”

“And a lot of good it did us, despite the fact that you could not stand on your feet without either fainting or falling over.”

“It was concentrating on my lessons with you that finally sweated the last of the surka out of me,” Aerin said, waving her birthday present gently under his nose.

“I almost believe you,” he replied sadly.

So they were standing, looking at each other, with the naked blade upheld between them, when Teka come through the open door behind them. “Gholotat protect us,” said Teka, and closed the door behind her.

“Is my birthday present not beautiful?” said Aerin, and turned the blade back and forth quickly so that it winked at her old nurse as she stood by the door. Teka looked at her face and then at Tor’s, and then back at Aerin’s, and said nothing.

“I will bid you good night,” said Tor, and because Teka was there he dared reach out his hands to Aerin, and put them on her shoulders, as she slid her sword into its scabbard, and kiss Her cheek as a cousin might; which he would not have dared had they been alone. He bowed to Teka, and left them.

Perhaps it was having a real sword of one’s own. Perhaps it was being eighteen—or that eighteen years’ practice of being stubborn was finally paying off. If she still stumbled over the corners of rugs or bumped into doorways while she was thinking about other things, she no longer bothered looking around anxiously to find out if anyone had seen her: either they had or they hadn’t, and she had other things on her mind; she reveled in those other things. They meant that she did not blush automatically when she caught sight of Perlith, knowing that he would have thought of something to say to her since the last time she had failed to avoid him, and that his little half smile beneath half-lidded eyes would make whatever he said worse. She walked through the halls of the castle and the streets of the City the most direct way instead of the way she would meet the fewest people; and she avoided the surka in the royal garden, but only that it might not make her sick again. She did not cringe from the thought of its presence, or from the shame that she had to avoid it in the first place; nor did she any longer feel that breathing the garden air was synonymous with breathing Galanna’s malice.

She had discovered how to make the dragonfire ointment.

It was, she knew, sheer obstinacy that had kept her at it-over two years of making fractional changes in her mixtures, learning how to find and prepare all the ingredients for the mixtures, for she could not continue raiding Hornmar’s and Teka’s supplies; finding small apothecary shops in the City that might sell the odder ones, and riding out on the reluctant Kisha for the herbs that grew nearby.

At first she had wondered if anyone would try to stop her, and her first visits to shopkeepers, and beyond the City gates, gave her stomachaches of dread. But the shopkeepers attended her respectfully and even helpfully, and slowly the visits stopped seeming so awful. There was no sense in trying to disguise herself; she was the only person in the City with orange hair, and any Damarian who had never in fact seen her would know instantly who she was. She had tried the effect of a scarf over the give-away hair, but as soon as she looked in a mirror she realized this wouldn’t work: the scarf was obviously there to hide her hair, and she still had orange eyebrows. There was stuff Galanna used to blacken her brown lashes, but Aerin had no idea how to get hold of it, and thought that while Teka seemed willing to let her and her peculiar errands alone at present, she would probably throw a fit and spoil everything if she caught her royal charge creeping around with her hair hidden and her brows blackened. And as she wasn’t stopped, her confidence grew, and she swept into the shops she frequented with her head high as a first sol should, and made her purchases, and swept out again. She felt tremendously grand, but the shopmen and women found her charmingly unpretentious, being accustomed to the Perliths and Galannas who never looked anyone in the eye and were never satisfied (it was widely held that the woman who supplied Galanna with her brow-darkener more than earned the fancy price she charged), and who always had lackeys to handle the money and the purchases themselves while they fingered their jewels and looked into the distance. Arlbeth would have been pleased to hear the small new thread of gossip that began to circulate in the City about the witchwoman’s daughter, and how the daughter (like the mother, a few folk now recalled) had a smile for everyone; and this view of the king’s daughter almost eased the fear of her that had begun with the rumor that she was enspelling the first sola. A few of her new supporters decided that Tor, as first sola and king to be, understandably wanted a quiet family life; and the king’s daughter, of all those court ladies, looked the likeliest to give it to him.

There were even those, especially among the older folk, who shook their heads and said that they shouldn’t keep the young first sol mewed up in that castle the way they did; it’d be better if she were let out to mingle with her people. If Aerin could have heard, she would have laughed.

And the things she bought were such harmless things, even if some of them were odd, and even though, as the months passed, she did buy quite a quantity of them. Nothing there that could cause any ... mischief. Hornmar had mentioned, very quietly, to one or two of his particular friends the first sol’s miraculous cure of old Talat; and somehow that tale got around too, and as the witchwoman’s easy smile was remembered, so did some folk also begin to remember her way with animals.

It was a few months before her nineteenth birthday that she put a bit of yellowish grease on a fresh bit of dry wood, held it with iron pincers, and thrust it into the small candle flame at the corner of her work table—and nothing happened. She had been performing this particular set of motions—measuring, noting down, mixing, applying and watching the wood burn-—for so long that her movements were deft and exact with long practice even while her brain tended to go off on its own and contemplate her next meeting of swords with Tor, or the nagging Teka was sure to begin within the next day or two for her to darn her stockings since they all had holes in them and lately she had perforce always to wear boots when she attended the court in the great hall so that the holes wouldn’t show. She was thinking that the green stockings probably had the smallest and most mendable holes, and she had to have dinner in the hall tonight. Since she’d turned eighteen she’d been expected to take part in the dancing occasionally, and there was sure to be dancing tonight since the dinner was in honor of Thorped and his son, who were here from the south; one of Thorped’s daughters was one of Galanna’s ladies. It was difficult dancing in boots and she needed all the help she could get. At this point she realized that her arm was getting tired—and that the bit of yellow-slick wood was peacefully ignoring the fire that burned around it, and that the iron tongs were getting hot in her hand.

She jumped, and knocked over the candlestick and dropped the hot tongs, and the greasy bit of wood skittered over the dusty, woodchip-littered floor, picking up shreds and shavings till it looked like a new sort of pomander. She had set up shop in a deserted stone shed near Talat’s pasture that had once held kindling 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 sat down on a pile of axe handles and took a few deep breaths, and thought fixedly about green stockings. Then she stood up, lit the candle again, and set it quietly back in its holder. She’d learned in the long months past not to waste her time and the apothecaries’ wares by making more than a tiny trial bit of each mixture, and the marble bowl where the final mashing and mixing went on before the experiment with the candle flame was no bigger than an eggcup. There was just enough in the bottom of the cup now to grease one fingertip. She chose the left index finger, which had been the one to get burnt with the result of her very first fire-ointment attempt, what seemed centuries ago. She held the fingertip steadily in the flame, and watched it; the pointed blue-and-yellow oval of the fire parted smoothly around her finger and rejoined above it to prick the shadows of the stone ceiling. She felt nothing. She withdrew the finger and stared at it with awe—touched it with another finger. Skin-heat, no more; and while it had remained stickily apparent on the surface of the wood, the ointment was not greasy on her finger. Kenet. It existed.

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.

Chapter 8

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.

Chapter 9

SHE HAD ALMOST enough of the herb she had been worrying about. After dithering awhile and muttering to herself she decided to go ahead and make as much ointment as she had ingredients for, and fetch more tomorrow. It was a messy business, and her mind would keep jumping away from the necessary meticulousness; and she knocked over a pile of axe handles and was too impatient to pile them up again and so spent several hours tripping over them and stubbing her toes and using language she had picked up while listening to the sofor, and the thotor, who were even more colorful. Once she was hopping around on one foot and yelling epithets when her other foot was knocked out from under her as well by a treacherous rear assault from a fresh brigade of rolling lumber, and she fell and bit her tongue. This chastened her sufficiently that she finished her task without further incident.

She stared at the greasy unpleasant-looking mess in the shallow trough before her and thought, Well, so what do I do now? Build a fire and jump in? The only fireplaces big enough are all in heavily used rooms of the castle. Maybe a bonfire isn’t such a bad idea after all; but it will have to be far enough away that no one will come looking for the source of the smoke.

Meanwhile she did have enough of the kenet to fireproof both hands, and she made a small fire in the middle of the shed floor (out of broken axe handles) and held both hands, trembling slightly, in its heart—and nothing happened. The next day she went to fetch more herbs.

She decided at once that she would have to leave the City to try her bonfire; and she decided just as quickly that she had to take Talat. Kisha would be worse than a nuisance under such circumstances; at very least she would find the bonfire excuse enough to break either her halter rope or her neck in a declared panic attempt to bolt back toward the City.

Teka, however, did not like this plan at all. Teka was willing to accept that Aerin was a good rider, and might be permitted to leave the City alone for a few hours on her pony; but that she should want to go alone, overnight, with that vicious stallion—such an idea she was not willing to entertain. First she declared that Talat was too lame to go on such a journey; and when Aerin, annoyed, tried to convince her otherwise, Teka changed her ground and said that he was dangerous and Aerin couldn’t be certain of her ability to control him. Aerin was ready to weep with rage, and after several weeks of this (she having meanwhile made vast quantities of her kenet and almost set her hair on fire trying to test its effectiveness on various small bits of her anatomy), Teka had to realize that there was more to this than whim.

“You may go if your father says you may,” she said at last, heavily. “Talat is still his horse, and he has a right to decide what his future should be. I—I think he will be proud of what you’ve done with him.”

Aerin knew how much it cost Teka to say so, and her anger ebbed away and she felt ashamed of herself.

“The journey itself—I do not like it. It is not proper”—and here a smile touched the corners of Teka’s sad mouth—”but you will always be unusual, as your mother was, and she traveled alone as she chose, nor did your father ever try to hinder her. You are a woman grown, and past needing a nursemaid to judge your plans. If your father says you may go—well, then.”

Aerin went off and began to worry about how best to approach her father. She had known she would have to ask his permission at some point, but she had wanted to get Teka on her side first, and had misjudged how alarming the horse-shy Teka would find a war-stallion like Talat, even an elderly, rehabilitated, and good-natured war-stallion. Aerin’s own attitude toward Talat hadn’t been rational for years.

She brooded for days after Teka had withdrawn from the field of combat; but she brooded not only about how to tackle her father, but also about what, precisely, she was setting out to do. Test the fire-repellent properties of her discovery. Toward killing dragons. Did she realty want to kill dragons? Yes. Why? Pause. To be doing something. To be doing something better than anyone else was doing it.

She caught her father one day at breakfast, between ministers with tactical problems and councilors with strategic ones. His face lit up when he saw her, and she made an embarrassed mental note to seek him out more often; he was not a man who had ever been able to enter into a child’s games, but she might have noticed before this how wistfully he looked at her. But for perhaps the first time she was recognizing that wistfulness for what it was, the awkwardness of a father’s love for a daughter he doesn’t know how to talk to, not shame for what Aerin was, or could or could not do.

She smiled at him, and he gave her a cup of malak, and pushed the bun tray and the saha jam toward her. “Father,” she said through crumbs, “do you know I have been riding Talat?”

He looked at her thoughtfully. Hornmar had brought him this information some months back, adding that Talat had looked like pining away and dying before Aerin took him over. Arlbeth had wished that she might bring him the story herself; the sort of fears Teka had did not occur to him.

“Yes,” he said. “And I would have guessed something was up sooner or later when you stopped nagging me to get rid of Kisha and find you a real horse.”

Aerin had the grace to blush. “It’s been ... quite a while. I didn’t think about what I was doing at first.”

Arlbeth was smiling. “I should like to see you ride him.”

Aerin swallowed. “You ... would?”

“I would.”

“Er—soon?”

“As it pleases you, Aerin-sol,” he said gravely.

She nodded wordlessly.

“Tomorrow, then.”

She nodded again, picked up a second bun and looked at it.

“I have guessed that there is some purpose to your joining me at breakfast,” Arlbeth said, as she showed no sign of breaking the silence, “a purpose beyond telling me of something that has been going on for years without your troubling me with it. It has perhaps to do further with Talat?”

She looked up, startled.

“We kings do develop a certain ability to recognize objects under our noses. Well?”

“I should like to ride Talat out of the City. A day’s ride out—sleep overnight, outside. Come back the next day.” She was sorry about the bun, now; it made her mouth dry.

“Ah. I recommend you go east and south—you might follow the Tsa, which will provide you with water as well as preventing you from getting lost.”

“The river? Yes. I’d thought—I’d already thought of that.” Her fingers were crumbling the rest of the bun to tiny bits.

“Good for you. I assume you planned to go soon?”

“I—yes. You mean you’ll let me?”

“Let you? Of course. There’s little within a day’s ride of the City that will harm you.” Momentarily his face hardened. Time had once been, before the loss of the Crown, that any sword drawn in anger within many miles of the City would rebound on the air, twist out of its wielder’s hands, and fall to the earth. “Talat will take care of you. He took excellent care of me.”

“Yes. Yes, he will.” She stood up, looked at the mess on (and around) her plate, looked at her father. “Thank you.”

He smiled. “I will see you tomorrow. Mid-afternoon.”

She nodded, gave him a stricken smile, and fled. One of the hafor appeared to remove her plate and brush the crumbs away.

Aerin was early at Talat’s pasture the next morning. She groomed him till her arms ached, and he loved every minute of it; he preferred being fussed over even to eating.

Maybe she should hang a bridle on him. She’d mended the cut rein on his old bridle the night before, and brought it with her today. But when she offered the bit to him—he who had so eagerly seized it two years before, knowing that it meant he would be really ridden again—he looked at it and then at her with obvious bewilderment, and hurt feelings. He suffered her to lift the bar into his mouth and pull the straps over his ears, but he stood with his head drooping unhappily.

“All right” she said, and ripped the thing off him again, and dropped it on the ground, and picked up the little piece of padded cloth that passed for a saddle and dropped it on his back. He twisted his head around and nibbled the hem of her tunic, rolling his eye at her to see if she was really angry. When she didn’t knock his face away he was reassured, and waited patiently while she arranged and rearranged the royal breastplate to her liking.

Arlbeth came before she expected him. Talat had felt the tension in her as soon as she mounted, but he had cheered her into a good mood again by being himself, and they were weaving nonchalantly around several tall young trees at a canter when she noticed Arlbeth standing on the far side of the stream that ran through the meadow. They forded the water and then halted, and Arlbeth gave them the salute of a soldier to his sovereign, and she blushed.

He nodded at Talat’s bare head. “I’m not sure this would be such a good idea with another horse, but with him ...” He paused and looked thoughtful, and Aerin held her breath for fear he would ask her how it had begun, for she hadn’t decided what to tell him. He said only: “It could be useful to have no reins to handle; but I’m not sure even our best horses are up to such a level of training.” His eyes then dropped to Aerin’s feet. “That’s a very pretty way to ride, with your legs wrapped around his belly, but the first pike that came along would knock you right out of the saddle.”

“You’re not in battle most of the time,” Aerin said boldly, “and you could build a special war saddle with a high pommel and cantle.”

Arlbeth laughed, and Aerin decided that they had passed their test. “I can see he likes your new way.”

Aerin grinned. “Pick up the bridle and show it to him.”

Arlbeth did, and Talat laid back his ears and turned his head away. But when Arlbeth dropped it, Talat turned back and thrust his nose into the breast of his old master, and Arlbeth stroked him and murmured something Aerin could not hear.

Talat did not like the fire ointment at all. He pranced and sidled and slithered out of reach and flared his nostrils and snorted, little rolling huff-huff-huffs, when she tried to rub it on him. “It smells like herbs!” she said, exasperated; “And it will probably do your coat good; it’s just like the oil Hornmar put on you to make you gleam.”

He continued to sidle, and Aerin said through clenched teeth: “I’ll tie you up if you’re not good.” But Talat, after several days of being chased, step by step and sidle by sidle, around his pasture, decided that his new master was in earnest; and the next time Aerin ran him up against the fence, instead of eluding her again, he stood still and let his doom overtake him.

They went on their overnight journey a fortnight after Arlbeth had watched them work together, by which time Talat had permitted Aerin—sometimes with more grace than other times—to rub her yellow grease all over him. Aerin hoped it would be a warm night since most of what looked like a roll of blankets hung behind her saddle was a sausage-shaped skin of kenet.

They started before dawn had turned to day, and Aerin pushed Talat along fairly briskly, that they might still have several hours of daylight left when they made camp. There was a trail beside the little river, wide enough for a horse but too narrow for wagons, and this they followed; Aerin wished to be close to a large quantity of water when she tried her experiment; and not getting lost was an added benefit.

She made camp not long after noon. She unrolled the bundle that had looked like bedding and first removed the leather tunic and leggings she’d made for herself and let soak in a shallow basin of the yellow ointment for the last several weeks. She’d tried setting fire to her suit yesterday, and the fire, however vigorous it was as a torch, had gone out instantly when it touched a greasy sleeve. The suit wasn’t very comfortable to wear; it was too sloppy and sloshy, and as she bound up her hair and stuffed it into a greasy helmet she thought with dread of washing the stuff off herself afterward.

She built up a big bonfire, and then smeared kenet over her face, and last pulled on her gauntlets. She stood by the flames, now leaping up over her head, and listened to her heart beating too quickly. She crept into the fire like a reluctant swimmer into cold water; first a hand, then a foot. Then she took a deep breath, hoped that her eyelashes were greasy enough, and stepped directly into the flame.

Talat came up to the edge of the fire and snorted anxiously. The fire was pleasantly warm—pleasantly. It tapped at her face and hands with cheerful friendliness and the best of good will; it murmured and snapped in her ears; it wrapped its flames around her like the arms of a lover.

She leaped out of the fire and gasped for breath.

She turned back again and looked at the fire. Yes, it was a real fire; it burned on, unconcerned, although her booted feet had disarranged it somewhat.

Talat thrust a worried nose into her neck. “Your turn,” she said. “Little do you know.”

Little did he know indeed, and this was the part that worried her the most. Talat was not going to walk into a bonfire and stand there till she told him to come out again. She’d already figured out that for her future dragon-slaying purposes, since dragons were pretty small, Talat could get away with just his chest and legs and belly protected. But she would prefer to find out now—and to let him know—that the yellow stuff he objected to did have an important use.

She reached up to feel her eyelashes and was relieved to discover that they were still there. Talat was blowing at her anxiously—she realized, light-headedly, that in some odd way she now smelted of fire—and when she swept up a handful of kenet he eluded her so positively that for a bad moment she thought she might have to walk home. But he let her approach him finally and, after most of his front half was yellowish and shiny, permitted her to lead him back to the fire.

And he stood unmoving when she picked up a flaming branch and walked toward him. And still stood when she held the branch low before him and let little flames lick at his knees.

Kenet worked on horses too.

Chapter 10

SHE RODE HOME in a merry mood. The time and the soap (fortunately she had thought to bring a great chunk of the harsh floor-scrubbing soap with her) it had taken to get the yellow stuff out of her hair could not dampen her spirits, any more than had the cold night, and she with only one thin blanket.

Even another dreadful court affair, with an endless diplomatic dinner after it, could not completely quell her happiness, and when the third person in half an hour asked her about her new perfume—there was a slightly herby, and a slightly charred, smell that continued to cling to her—she couldn’t help but laugh out loud. The lady, who had been trying to make conversation, smiled a stiff smile and moved away, for she resented being laughed at by someone she was supposed to pity and be kind to.

Aerin sighed, for she understood the stiff smile, and wondered if she were going to smell of herbs and burning—and slightly of clean floors—forever.

There was an unnatural activity at her father’s court at present; Thorped had been only the precursor of a swelling profusion of official visitors, each more nervous than the last, and a few inclined to be belligerent. The increasing activity on Damar’s northern Border worried everyone who knew enough, or cared to pay attention; there was more traveling among the villages and towns and the king’s City than there had been for as long as Aerin could remember, and the court dinners, always tense with protocol, were now stretched to breaking point with something like fear.

Aerin, after the morning her father had given her permission to take Talat out alone, had begun to visit the king at his breakfast now and then, and always he looked glad to see her. Sometimes Tor ate with the king as well, and if Arlbeth noticed that Tor joined him at breakfast more often now that there was a chance he would see Aerin as well, he said nothing. Tor was home most of the time now, for Arlbeth had need of him near.

Aerin persisted in being unaware of the way Tor watched her, but was acutely aware that conversation between them was awkward at best these days; a new constraint seemed to have come between them since the night Tor had told his cousin of the Hero’s Crown. Aerin decided the new awkwardness probably had something to do with his having finally begged off crossing swords with her. She had perfectly understood that with the current workload he had had to, so she tried to be polite to show she didn’t mind. When this didn’t seem to help, she ignored him and talked to her father. It did seem odd that Tor should take it so seriously—surely he gave her credit for some understanding of what the first sola’s life was like?—but if he wanted to be stiff and formal, that was his problem.

So it was the three of them lingering over third cups of malak one morning when the first petitioner of the day came to speak to the king.

The petitioner reported a dragon, destroying crops and killing chickens. It had also badly burned a child who had accidentally discovered its lair, although the child had been rescued in time to save its life.

Arlbeth sighed and rubbed his face with his hand. “Very well. We will send someone to deal with it.”

The man bowed and left.

“There will be more of them now, with the trouble at the Border,” said Tor. “That sort of vermin seems to breed faster when the North wind blows.”

“I fear you are right,” Arlbeth replied. “And we can ill spare anyone just now.”

“I’ll go,” said Tor.

“Don’t be a fool,” snapped the king, and then immediately said, “I’m sorry. I can spare you least of all—as you know. Dragons don’t kill people very often any more, but dragon-slayers rarely come back without a few uncomfortable burns.”

“Someday,” said Tor with a wry smile, “when we have nothing better to do, we must think up a more efficient way to cope with dragons. It’s hard to take them seriously—but they are a serious nuisance.”

Aerin sat very still.

“Yes.” Arlbeth frowned into his malak. “I’ll ask tomorrow for half a dozen volunteers to go take care of this. And pray it’s an old slow one.”

Aerin also prayed it was an old slow one as she slipped off. She had only a day’s grace, so she needed to leave at once; fortunately she had visited the village in question once on a state journey with her father, so she knew more or less how to get there. It was only a few hours’ ride.

Her hands shook as she saddled Talat and tied the bundles of dragon-proof suit, kenet, sword, and a spear—which she wasn’t at all sure she could use, since, barring a few lessons from Tor when she was eight or nine years old, she was entirely self-taught—to the saddle. Then she had to negotiate her way past the stable, the castle, and down the king’s way and out of the City without anyone trying to stop her; and the sword and spear, in spite of the long cloak she had casually laid over them, were a bit difficult to disguise.

Her luck—or something—was good. She was worrying so anxiously about what she would say if stopped that she gave herself a headache; but as she rode, everyone seemed to be looking not quite in her direction—almost as if they couldn’t quite see her, she thought. It made her feel a little creepy. But she got out of the City unchallenged.

The eerie feeling, and the headache, lifted at once when she and Talat set off through the forest below the City. The sun was shining, and the birds seemed to be singing just for her. Talat lifted into a canter, and she let him run for a while, the wind slipping through her hair, the shank of the spear tapping discreetly at her leg, reminding her that she was on her way to accomplish something useful.

She stopped at a little distance from the dragon-infested village to put on her suit—which was no longer quite so greasy; it had reached its saturation point, perhaps—and then adapted, as well-oiled boots adapt to the feet that wear them. Her suit still quenched torches, but it had grown as soft and supple as cloth, and almost as easy to wear. She rubbed ointment on her face and her horse, and pulled on her long gloves. Shining rather in the sunlight then and reeking of pungent herbs, Aerin rode into the village.

Talat was unmistakably a war-horse, even to anyone who had never seen one before, and her red hair immediately identified her as the first sol. A little boy stood up from his doorstep and shouted: “They’re here for the dragon!” and then there were a dozen, two dozen folk in the street, looking at her, and then looking in puzzlement for the five or six others that should have been riding with her.

“I am alone,” said Aerin; she would have liked to explain, not that she was here without her father’s knowledge but that she was alone because she was dragon-proof (she hoped) and didn’t need any help. But her courage rather failed her, and she didn’t. In fact what the villagers saw as royal pride worked very well, and they fell over themselves to stop appearing to believe that a first sol (even a half-foreign one) couldn’t handle a dragon by herself (and if her mother really was a witch, maybe there was some good in her being half a foreigner after all), and several spoke at once, offering to show the way to where the dragon had made its lair, all of them careful not to look again down the road behind her.

She was wondering how she could tell them delicately that she didn’t want them hanging around to watch, since she wasn’t at all sure how graceful (or effective) her first encounter with a real dragon was likely to be. But the villagers who accompanied her to show her the way had no intention of getting anywhere near the scene of the battle; a cornered dragon was not going to care what non-combatant bystanders it happened to catch with an ill-aimed lash of fire. They pointed the way, and then returned to their village to wait on events.

Aerin hung her sword round her waist, settled the spear into the crook of her arm. Talat walked with his ears sharply forward, and when he snorted she smelled it too: fire, and something else. It was a new smell, and it was the smell of a creature that did not care if the meat it ate was fresh or not, and was not tidy with the bones afterward. It was the smell of dragon.

Talat, after his warning snort, paced onward carefully. They came soon to a little clearing with a hummock of rock at its edge. The hummock had a hole in it, the upper edge of which was rimed with greasy smoke. The litter of past dragon meals was scattered across the once green meadow, and it occurred to Aerin that the footing would be worse for a horse’s hard hoofs than a dragon’s sinewy claws.

Talat halted, and they stood, Aerin gazing into the black hole in the hill. A minute or two went by and she wondered, suddenly, how one got the dragon to pay attention to one in the first place. Did she have to wake it up? Yell? Throw water into the cave at it?

Just as her spear point sagged with doubt, the dragon hurtled out of its den and straight at them: and it opened its mouth and blasted them with its fire—except that Talat had never doubted, and was ready to step nimbly out of its way as Aerin scrabbled with her spear and grabbed at Talat’s mane to keep from falling off onto the dragon’s back. It spun round-it was about the height of Talat’s knees, big for a dragon, and dreadfully quick on its yellow-clawed feet—and sprayed fire at them again. This time, although Talat got them out of the worst of it, it licked over her arm. She saw the fire wash over the spear handle and glance off her elbow, but she did not feel it; and the knowledge that her ointment did accomplish what it was meant to do gave her strength and cleared her mind. She steadied the spear-butt and nudged Talat with one ankle; as he sidestepped and as the dragon whirled round at them again, she threw her spear.

It wouldn’t have been a very good cast for a member of the thotor, or for a seasoned dragon-hunter, but it served her purpose. It stuck in the dragon’s neck, in the soft place between neck and shoulder where the scales were thin, and it slowed the dragon down. It twitched and lashed its tail and roared at her, but she knew she hadn’t given it a mortal wound; if she let it skulk off to its lair, it would eventually heal and re-emerge, nastier than ever.

It bent itself around the wounded shoulder and tried to grip the spear in its teeth, which were long and thin and sharp and not well suited for catching hold of anything so smooth and hard and narrow as a spear shaft. Aerin dismounted and pulled out her sword, and approached it warily. It ignored her, or appeared to, till she was quite close; and then it snapped its long narrow head around at her again and spat fire. It caught her squarely; and dragon fire had none of the friendliness of a wood fire burning by the side of a river. The dragonfire pulled at her, seeking her life; it clawed at her pale shining skin, and at the supple leather she wore; and while the heat of it did not distress her, the heat of its malice did; and as the fire passed over her and disappeared she stood still in shock, and stared straight ahead of her, and did not move.

The dragon knew it had killed her. It was an old dragon, and had killed one or two human beings, and knew that it had caught this one well and thoroughly. It had been a bit puzzled that she did not scream when it burned her arm, and that she did not scream now and fall down writhing on the earth; but this did not matter. She would not trouble it further, and it could attend to its sore shoulder.

Aerin took half a dozen stiff steps forward, grasped the end of the spear and forced the dragon to the ground, swung her sword up and down, and cut off the dragon’s head.

Then there was an angry scream from Talat, and she whirled, the heat of the dead dragon’s fresh-spilled blood rising as steam and clouding her vision: but she saw dragonfire, and she saw Talat rear and strike with his forefeet.

She ran toward them and thought, Gods, help me, it had a mate; I forgot, often there are two of them; and she chopped at the second dragon’s tail, and missed. It swung around, breathing fire, and she felt the heat of it across her throat, and then Talat struck at it again. It lashed her with its tail when it whirled to face the horse again, and Aerin tripped and fell, and the dragon was on top of her at once, the claws scrabbling at her leather tunic and the long teeth fumbling for her throat. The smoke from its nostrils hurt her eyes. She yelled, frantically, and squirmed under the dragon’s weight; and she heard something tear, and she knew if she was caught in dragonfire again she would be burned.

Then Talat thumped into the dragon’s side with both hind feet, and the force of the blow lifted them both—for the dragon’s claws were tangled in leather laces—and dropped them heavily. The dragon coughed, but there was no fire; and Aerin had fallen half on top of the thing. It raked her with its spiked tail, and something else tore; and its teeth snapped together inches from her face. Her sword was too long; she could not get it close enough for stabbing, and her shoulder was tiring. She dropped the sword and struggled to reach her right boot top, where she had a short dagger, but the dragon rolled, and she could not reach it.

Then Talat was there again, and he bit the dragon above its small red eye, where the ear hole was; and the dragon twisted its neck to spout fire at him, but it was still dazed by its fall, and only a little fire came out of its mouth. Talat plunged his own face into the trickle of smoke and seized the dragon by the nostrils and dragged its head back; and still farther back. Its forefeet and breast came clear of the ground, and as the dragon thrashed, Aerin’s leg came free, and she pulled the dagger from her boot and thrust it into the dragon’s scaleless breast. The dragon shrieked, the noise muffled by Talat’s grip on its nose, and Aerin stumbled away to pick up her sword.

Talat swung the dying dragon back and forth, and slashed at its body with one forefoot, and the muscles of his heavy stallion’s neck ran with sweat and smudges of ash. Aerin lifted up the sword and sliced the dragon’s belly open, and it convulsed once, shuddered, and died. Talat dropped the body and stood with his head down, shivering, and Aerin realized what she had done, and how little she had known about what it would involve, and how near she had come to failure; and her stomach rebelled, and she lost what remained of her breakfast over the smoking mutilated corpse of the second dragon.

She walked a few steps away till she came to a tree, and with her hands on its bole she felt her way to the ground, and sat with her knees drawn up and her head between them for a few minutes. Her head began to clear, and her breathing slowed, and as she looked up and blinked vaguely at the leaves overhead, she heard Talat’s hoofbeats behind her. She put out a hand, and he put his bloody nose into it, and so they remained for several heartbeats more, and then Aerin sighed and stood up. “Even dragons need water. Let’s look for a stream.”

Again they were lucky, for there was one close at hand. Aerin carefully washed Talat’s face, and discovered that most of the blood was dragon’s, although his forelock was singed half away. “And to think I almost didn’t bother to put any kenet on your head,” she murmured. “I thought it was going to be so easy.” She pulled Talat’s saddle off to give him a proper bath, after which he climbed the bank and found a nice scratchy bit of dirt and rolled vigorously, and stood up again mud-colored. “Oh dear,” said Aerin. She splashed water on her face and hands and then abruptly pulled off all her dragon-tainted clothing and submerged. She came up again when she needed to breathe, chased Talat back into the water to wash the mud off, and then brushed and rubbed him hard till she was warm and dry with the work and he was at least no more than damp.

She dressed slowly and with reluctance, and they returned to the battlefield. She tried to remember what else she ought to have thought of about dragons. Eggs? Well, if there were eggs, they’d die, for new-hatched dragons depended on their parents for several months. And if there were young dragons, surely we’d have seen them—?

With much greater reluctance she tied together some dry brush and set fire to it from her tinder box, and approached the dark foul-smelling hole in the rock. She had to stoop to get inside the cave at all, and her torch guttered and tried to go out. She had an impression of a shallow cave with irregular walls of rock and dirt, and a pebbly floor; but she could not bear the smell, or the knowledge that the grisly creatures she had just killed had lived here, and she jerked back outside into the sunlight again, and dropped her torch, and stamped out the fire. She didn’t think there were any eggs, or dragon kits. She’d have to hope there weren’t.

She thought: I have to take the heads with me. The hunters always bring the heads—and it does prove it without a lot of talking about it. I don’t think I can talk about it. So she picked up her sword again and whacked off the second dragon’s head, and then washed her sword and dagger in the stream, re-sheathed them, and tied her spear behind the saddle. The dragons looked small now, motionless and headless, little bigger and no more dangerous than rabbits; and the ugly heads, with the long noses and sharp teeth, looked false, like masks in a monster-play for the children during one of the City holidays, where part of the fun is to be frightened—but not very much. Who could be frightened of a dragon?

I could, she thought.

She tied the heads in the heavy cloth she’d carried her leather suit in, and mounted Talat, and they went slowly back to the village.

The villagers were all waiting, over a hundred of them, gathered at the edge of town; the fields beyond the village were empty, and men and women in their working clothes, looking odd in their idleness, all stood watching the path Aerin and Talat had disappeared down only an hour ago. A murmur arose as the front rank caught sight of them, and Talat raised his head and arched his neck, for he remembered how it should be, coming home from battle and bearing news of victory. The people pressed forward, and as Talat came out of the trees they surrounded him, looking up at Aerin: Just the one girl and her fine horse, surely they have not faced the dragon, for they are uninjured; and they were embarrassed to hope for a sol’s burns, but they wished so sorely for the end of the dragon.

“Lady?” one man said hesitantly. “Did you meet the dragon?”

Aerin realized that their silence was uncertainty; she had suddenly feared that they would not accept even the gift of dragon-slaying from the daughter of a witchwoman, and she smiled in relief, and the villagers smiled back at her, wonderingly. “Yes, I met your dragon; and its mate.” She reached behind her and pulled at the cloth that held the heads, and the heads fell to the ground; one rolled, and the villagers scattered before it as if it still had some power to do them harm. Then they laughed a little sheepishly at themselves; and then everyone turned as the boy who had announced Aerin’s arrival said, “Look!”

Seven horsemen were riding into the village as Aerin had ridden in. “You weren’t supposed to get here till tomorrow,” she murmured, for she recognized Gebeth and Mik and Orin, who were cousins of hers a few times removed and members of her father’s court, and four of their men. Gebeth and Orin had been on many dragon hunts before; they were loyal and reliable, and did not consider dragon-hunting beneath them, for it was a thing that needed to be done, and a service they could do for their king.

“Aerin-sol,” said Gebeth; his voice was surprised, respectful—for her father’s sake, not hers—and disapproving. He would not scold her in front of the villagers, but he would certainly give Arlbeth a highly colored tale later on.

“Gebeth,” she said. She watched with a certain ironic pleasure as he tried to think of a way to ask her what she was doing here; and then Orin, behind him, said something, and pointed to the ground where the small dragons’ heads lay in the dust. Gebeth dropped his gaze from the unwelcome sight of his sovereign’s young daughter rigged out like a soldier boy

, who has seen better days, realized what he was looking at, and yanked his eyes up again to stare disbelievingly at red-hatred Aerin in her torn leather suit.

“I—er—I’ve gotten rid of the dragons already, if that’s what you mean,” said Aerin.

Gebeth dismounted, slowly, and slowly stooped down to __stare at her trophies. The jaws of one were open, and the sharp teeth showed. Gebeth was not a rapid nor an original thinker, and he remained squatting on his heels and staring at the grisly heads long after he needed only to verify the dragonness of them. As slowly as he had stooped he straightened up again and bowed, stiffly, to Aerin, saying, “Lady, I salute you.” His fingers flicked out in some ritual recognition or other, but Aerin couldn’t tell which salute he was offering her, and rather doubted he knew which one he wanted to give. “Thank you,” she said gravely.

Gebeth turned and caught the eye of one of his men, who dismounted and wrapped the heads up again; and then, as Gebeth gave no further hint, hesitated, and finally approached Talat to tie the bundle behind Aerin’s saddle.

“May we escort you home, lady?” Gebeth said, raising his eyes to stare at Talat’s pricked and bridleless ears, but carefully avoiding Aerin’s face.

“Thank you,” she said again, and Gebeth mounted his horse, and turned it back toward the City, and waited, that Aerin might lead; and Talat, who knew about the heads of columns, strode out without any hint from his rider.

The villagers, not entirely sure what they had witnessed, tried a faint cheer as Talat stepped off; and the boy who announced arrivals suddenly ran forward to pat Talat’s shoulder, and Talat dropped his nose in acknowledgment and permitted the familiarity. A girl only a few years older than the boy stepped up to catch Aerin’s eye, and said clearly, “We thank you.”

Aerin smiled and said, “The honor is mine.”

The girl grew to adulthood remembering the first sol’s smile, and her seat on her proud white horse.

Chapter 11

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.