The Hero and the Crown (19 page)

have slain me after all.

Perhaps the man in my dream could cure my cough.

If she could find him. If he existed. She was so tired; she could not imagine

what it was like not to be tired. She fell asleep again, listening to her breath rattle

in her chest like dead leaves, and woke tired. She stared into the canopy over her

head for several minutes, her eyes tracing the graceful embroidered forms of the

galloping horses and their super-naturally long manes and tails, the manes almost

like wings, the grass underfoot almost like clouds.

The fever would not let her go. She could not get out of bed that day, nor the

next. Tor came to see her, and she would not speak to him; but he came again,

and she remembered she had one thing she needed to say to him. “What

happened?” he asked her over and over again.

At last she said, “I grew dizzy,” but would not say more; and Tor fell silent,

holding her hand in a hand almost as feverish as hers.

It was only luck, she had pleaded with Maur. Was it? Maur’s head had

answered her.

“Aerin.” Tor’s voice. What was it she needed to say to him?

“Will you ... take Maur’s head off the wall ... and put it ... somewhere far away

... that no one may see it?”

“Of course,” he said anxiously. “Of course. It shall be done today.”

She remembered little clearly after that; she saw Teka’s face bent over hers,

and Tor’s, and her father’s, and others’ whom she dimly remembered as the

healers who had done her so little good before. She did not know how many days

or weeks she spent this way; and then one night she woke again from an

especially vivid dream of the blond man.

“You stupid woman—climb off your deathbed while you still can, and come to

me.”

The words still rang in her ears. She sat up slowly. She drew on her boots, and

her leggings and tunic; she picked up the red stone on the table by her bed, and

thrust it into the breast of her shirt. She looked at her sword—the king’s sword—

hanging over her bed, and did not touch it, she fumbled for a cloak, and drew it

over her shoulders. She had to sit down on the edge of her bed again and catch

her breath. I must tell them where I am going, she thought. But I don’t know

where I am going.

She stood up again, and made her way slowly into her sitting-room, to the desk

there. The ink was dry; she had to carry a glass from her bed table, filled with

water from the pitcher there, into her sitting-room, to wet it; her hand shook, and

she spilled most of it on the desk, and the ink would not mix, but stayed pale and

uneven. It would have to do. There was nothing to write on. She sat at the desk,

staring at its blank top, as if paper or parchment would appear if she waited for it.

She did not seem able to collect her thoughts, but her hand reached out of its

own accord, and groped in the rear of the small desk cabinet, and drew

something out. It was the note Tor had written her, long ago, asking her to see

the king’s army off the next morning.

She turned it over, and took up a pen; the ink dripped and ran on the page.

“Tor,” she wrote. “I have dreamed of someone who might help me, and I go to

look for him. I will come back as I may.”

Stealthily she made her way to the ground floor and outside. The inner

corridors were pitch dark, but she found she could see her way; there was a soft

silvery light around her—she was glowing, she realized suddenly; and for the first

time since Maur’s head had spoken to her she felt a glimmer of hope, and the

hope warmed her a little, and steadied her footsteps.

Someone should have seen her as she crossed the open courtyard, particularly

as she persisted in glowing like foxfire in a rotting tree; but no one came. She

dragged Talat’s small light saddle from its peg opposite his stall, but left the

trappings of the king’s breastplate as she had left her sword. Talat’s pale head

thrust over the stall half-door at her. His nostrils moved in a silent whicker of

welcome, but from his campaigning days he could recognize secrecy when he saw

it. She had to wrestle the saddle onto his back, for she was too weak to lift it; but

it was on at last, and Talat stepped after his lady as softly and carefully as a lover

going to his beloved’s bed.

They traveled west at first, then north, with the mountains on their right and

the heavy Airdthmar forests on their left, forests that had never been completely

explored, that held creatures no one had ever named. When times were peaceful

the kings of Damar had set up expeditions to drive deeper into the forest, for it

stood in the way of their kingdom’s free trade and concourse from one town to

the next; but the Airdthmar was not kind to the folk who tried to chart it and lay

roads through it. Arlbeth claimed to be fond of it. “It is quiet, it causes no

courteous passer-by any trouble, it keeps its own counsel,” he said. “Would that

all the quarters of the Damarian compass were so civilized.”

Aerin gazed into the trees as she rode, but she saw only blackness looking back

at her. She had thought to go west originally because the Airdthmar seemed like

the obvious place to look for a mysterious mage who visited dreams; but as they

cleared the foothills Talat shied away and veered north, and Aerin half permitted,

half agreed with him.

There was no trail for them to follow; they wove their way back into the

foothills again, away from the smooth way that Arlbeth and his army had gone to

meet with Nyrlol, or that any folk with legitimate business took around the

eastern edge of the Airdthmar; Aerin did not want to meet anyone who might

take word of her back to the City, nor be overtaken by any party sent in pursuit.

They came at last to a pocket valley in the hills, a small undistinguished valley

like many others, well furnished by the thick purple color grass, which did not

grow in the City, and with a few trees. The sun was setting as they paused, and

Aerin, seeing a rock that would do for a mounting block, thought that this would

be a good place to stop for the night; but she made no move to dismount, and

Talat remained standing, ears pricked, uninterested in the lush lolor, which

generally he preferred to anything else. As the sun disappeared it seemed to

Aerin that the light never quite faded; but that might have been the glitter of her

fever.

Talat looked back over his shoulder at her, and Aerin’s knee as if of its own

volition bent him toward the mountains behind the foothills—east again; and

Talat at once found the hidden trail that began at the edge of the pocket valley.

The way was soon so steep that Aerin worried about Talat’s weak leg; but when

she tried to slip off his back and walk beside him for a while he sidled all around

and rubbed her against the trees that grew close around them, and she at last

gave it up. He was right; climbing uphill would make her cough. He went slowly,

and all four feet hit the ground evenly, and Aerin concentrated on hanging on to

the front of the saddle with both hands. And breathing. It had seemed to her

lately that she had to remember to breathe, that her lungs would prefer to be

still.

By dawn she was light-headed with fever and altitude and exhaustion, for even

though she slept little, lying quietly on the earth was an easier way to pass the

time than clinging to a heaving saddle. Still Talat toiled on, the sweat running

down his shoulders, though the air was cool. Aerin let go the saddle and wound

her cold fingers in his mane to warm them.

The ground leveled abruptly. Talat paused disbelievingly, all four feet braced;

then he went on again, and the trees gave way before them, and the secret track

Talat had followed so trustingly was a plain trail before them, and at the end of a

short way was a small bare courtyard, set round with pillars, and a great grey

stone building. Talat walked into the courtyard and stopped. Aerin unwound her

hands from his mane and stared down past his wet shoulder to the ground, and

thought about dismounting; and then a tall blond man was standing beside her.

She wished to feel alarm, for she had not seen or heard his approach; but Talat

was not disturbed, and she recognized the man’s face from her dreams. He lifted

her bodily from the saddle, and as his arms took her weight, fear crossed his face:

“May all the gods listen—there’s nothing left of you.”

“I am Luthe,” he said. “Drink.”

She took the first sip, obediently, as she had drunk Teka’s draughts when she

was young and had fevers. She did not remember a second sip.

She awoke, pressed down with blankets, in a narrow curtain-less bed. The bed

was one of many, set side by side down a long narrow corridor; the heads were

pushed up against one wall where slit windows high above shed sunlight on their

feet; and beyond the beds was a narrow passage and then the far wall, taller than

the window wall, the roof slanting up sharply from the one to the other. She

blinked drowsily at the far wall; it was blank grey stone, like the rest of Luthe’s

hall. Or not blank: Aerin sat up, shedding blankets, and frowned; etched into the

grey stone were faint relief pictures, but she could not quite decide what they

depicted: men with antlers, women with wings, trees with eyes that watched. She

blinked again; her vision hadn’t been trustworthy in a long time.

Her fever was gone. She felt as weak as when she had first dragged herself to

the stream after Maur’s death, but she felt happy, with a senseless transparent

happiness like that of a very young child. She wrestled cheerfully with the

enshrouding blankets, got feebly to her feet, and began to make her way down

the row of beds by clinging to the foot of each in turn—all of them empty, and all

but hers neatly made up with coarse dark blankets, and pillows wrapped in

smooth dark cloth. She came to an arch of doorway and looked through; the

thickness of the wall it pierced made the entrance dark, but beyond it the great

hall was bright with daylight. There were windows cut high into the two

lengthwise walls of the great chamber, the walls themselves high enough that the

windows looked out over the roofs of the sleeping corridors; and yet far above

them all the ceiling was invisible in darkness.

Luthe saw her and frowned. “You should have slept longer.”

“No, I shouldn’t. I have slept just the right amount; I feel dazzlingly”—she ran

out of breath, and leaned against the threshold—“hungry. I haven’t felt hungry in

a long time.”

“I will claim that as my consolation; but evidently I still have not learned to get

simple sleeping draughts right. Lily would be ashamed of me. Come eat, then.” He

watched her drift toward him; it seemed to be a long way from the sleeping-

chamber door to the table before the hearth, where he was. His hands closed

over the high back of the chair he stood behind as he watched her, but he did not

offer to help her. She fetched up against the table at last; it was a small delicate

table, but she was little more than a wraith, and when she flattened both hands

on the top of it to steady herself it held her slight weight easily.

She looked up at him and smiled: a lover’s smile, sweet and brilliant, but it was

not directed at him; her eyes looked at something invisible that she herself did

not recognize, and yet his heart stirred in a way he did not like. He returned her

smile with a deeper frown, and she chuckled—a little tapping sound, like mouse

feet on a stone floor. “I am not blind, sir, though I do seem to see light where

there is only darkness and strange pictures on a blank wall; and I am quite sure

that I see you scowling furiously at me, like a tutor at a student who persists in

misbehaving. Pray tell me what I have done.”

“You have waited too long to come here.”

Her smile ebbed away. “I have not been thinking clearly for long ... I had so

many strange dreams.”

She thought of Maur’s head speaking to her from a wall in her father’s castle,

and a spasm crossed her face, and she raised one hand from the table to cover it.,

“It was easy,” she said through her fingers, “not to believe there was any use in

them.”

She thought of Maur’s head speaking to her from a wall in her father’s castle,

and a spasm crossed her face, and she raised one hand from the table to cover it.,

“It was easy,” she said through her fingers, “not to believe there was any use in

them.”

“ ... is eating his head off in a meadow among my cattle. You need have no fear

for him.”

“I have none.” Abruptly she asked: “Am I dying?”

“Yes.”

“Can you cure me?”

Luthe sighed. “I’m not sure. I think so. Had not ...”

“Had I not listened to Maur’s head, I would have come here long since,” Aerin

said dreamily. “Had it not told me that I could not win against the Black Dragon,

for no one could, I might have believed that there was enough left of my life to be

worth healing; but I am Dragon-Killer, the least of my family, and if I have done a

great thing, then I must die of it.” Her words floated on the air, half visible, like

spider silk.

“You are not the least of your family,” Luthe said violently; “your mother was