The Hero and the Crown (22 page)

I deserved.”

“Ignored,” said Luthe. “You should be queen after your father. The sober

responsible Tor is no better than a usurper.”

“No,” she replied, stung. “Tor is sober and responsible and he will make a far

better king than I would a queen. Which is just as well, since he’s for it and I’m

not.”

“Why not?” said Luthe. “It is you who is Arlbeth’s child.”

“By his second marriage,” said Aerin. “If Queen Tatoria had borne a child, of

course it would have ruled after Arlbeth—or it would certainly have ruled if it

were a son. But she didn’t. She died. Kings aren’t supposed to remarry anyway,

but they may under extreme duress, like childless widower-hood; but they can’t

marry unknown foreigners of questionable blood. I’m sure it was a great relief to

all concerned when the unknown foreigner’s pregnancy resulted in a girl—they

usually manage not to let even firstborn girls of impeccable breeding inherit, so

shunting me aside was as easy as swearing by the Seven Perfect Gods.

“Galanna prefers to think I’m a bastard, but I’ve seen the record book, and I am

down as legitimate—but not as a legitimate heir. The priests chose to call my

father’s second marriage morganatic—my mother wasn’t even permitted to be

Honored Wife. Just in case she had a boy.”

Aerin’s sense of the passage of time had been uncertain since she met Maur;

and as her health returned in Luthe’s mountain valley, she yet had difficulty in

believing that days and weeks had any meaning. When it occurred to her that one

season had passed and another was passing, and that these were things she

should take note of, she backed away from that knowledge again, for it was then

that what Luthe had told her about the price she had paid to regain her life rose

up and mocked her. Immortality was far more terrible a price than any she might

have imagined.

As the air grew colder and the grass in the meadow turned brown and dull

violet and as the flowers stopped blooming she pretended to notice these things

only as isolated phenomena. Luthe watched her, and knew much of what she

thinking, but had no comfort for her; all he could offer was his knowledge, of

magic, of history, of Damar; of the worlds he had traveled, and the wonders he

brought back. He taught her eagerly, and eagerly she learned, each of them

distracting the other from something each could not yet face. Snow fell, and Talat

and the cattle and sheep spent their days in the low open barn at the edge of

their meadow; and sometimes a few deer joined them at their hay and oats; but

the deer came mostly for the company—and the oats—because winter never fell

harshly where Luthe was, nor did ice ever rime even the shores of the Lake of

Dreams.

Luthe considered her. “I tell you ... some you need to know, and some you have

earned the right to know, and some it won’t hurt you to know—” He stopped.

“And some?” He raised his hands and his eyebrows; smiled faintly. The pale

winter sun gleamed on his yellow hair and glinted in his blue eyes. There were no

lines in his face, and his narrow shoulders were straight and square; but still he

looked old to her, old as the mountains, older than the great grey hall he

inhabited, that looked as though it had stood there since the sun first found the

silver lake. “Some things I tell you only because I wish to tell them to you.”

Aerin’s lessons grew longer and longer, for her brain’s capacity seemed to

increase as the strength of her body did; and she began to love the learning for its

own sake, and not merely for the fact that there was kelar in her blood, and that

the house of the king of Damar need not be ashamed to claim her; and then she

could not learn enough.

“I shall have to give you the mage mark soon,” Luthe said, smiling, one grey

afternoon as the snow fell softly outside.

Aerin stood up and paced restlessly, twice the length of the hall to the open

door and back to the hearth and the table where Luthe sat. It was a wonderful

hall for pacing, for it took several minutes, even for the fidgetiest, to get from one

end of it to the other and back again. The door stood open all year long, for the

cold somehow stayed outside, and the only draughts were warm ones from the

fire. Aerin stared at the glinting white courtyard for a moment before returning to

Luthe and the table before the fire.

“I came here first for healing and second for knowledge—but by the gods and

their hells I do not know if I can bear either. And yet I have no choice. And yet I do

not know even what I wished to know.”

Luthe stood up, but came only a few steps nearer the fireplace. “I tell you all

that I may.”

“May,” said Aerin fiercely. “What can you tell me that you may not? What am I,

now that I am neither human—which I understand I never was—nor mortal,

which I used to be? Why did you heal me? Why did you call me here at all? Why

do you teach me now so much that you threaten me with the mage mark, that all

who look upon me may know to fear me? That will be splendid fun at home, you

know; I’m so popular already. Why? Why don’t you tell me to go away?” She

stopped and looked down at her feet. “Why don’t I just leave?”

Luthe sighed. “I’m sorry. Again. I thought that perhaps it would be easier if you

first had some idea of your own strength.”

She was still staring at her shoes, and he stepped toward her, and hesitantly

touched one shoulder. The shoulder hunched itself up and the face turned away

from him. Her hair was almost shoulder length now, and it fell across her face like

a curtain. Luthe wanted to tell her the reasons she ought to stay—good honest

Damarian reasons, reasons she would understand and acknowledge; reasons that

were born with her as the king’s daughter, however outcast her people made her;

reasons that he had to tell her soon anyway. But he wanted ... “Do you wish so

desperately to leave?” he said almost wistfully.

“It matters little,” said a low voice from behind the hair. “I am not missed.”

“Tor,” said Luthe darkly.

“Oh, Tor,” said the voice, and it unexpectedly gave a choke of laughter, and

then she raised her hands and parted the curtain, rubbing her cheeks hastily with

her palms as she did so. Her eyes were still a little too bright. “Yes, Tor, and

Arlbeth too, and I do feel badly for Teka; but I would guess they live hopefully,

and guess to see me again. I do not mind staying here ... a little longer. I don’t

much care to travel in winter anyway.”

“Thank you,” Luthe said dryly. “By spring I shall be ready ... to send you on your

way again.”

Aerin said lightly, “And what shall that way be?”

“Agsded?” Aerin said. “I do not know the name.”

“He it is who sends the mischief across your borders; he it is who stirred Nyrlol

to rebellion just long enough to distract and disturb Arlbeth, and he who awoke

your Maur, and who even now harries your City with his minions, whose army will

march south in the spring. Agsded, although none know his name now, and the

Northern generals believe they band together through no impulse but their

mutual hatred of Damar.

“Agsded is a wizard—a master mage, a master of masters. The mark on him is

so bright it could blind any simple folk who look upon it, though they knew not

what they saw. Agsded I knew long ago—he was another of Goriolo’s pupils; he

was the best of all of us, and he knew it; but even Goriolo did not see how deep

his pride went.—. . Goriolo had another pupil of Agsded’s family: his sister. She

feared her brother; she had always feared him; it was fear of what his pride might

do that led her to Goriolo with him, but it was on her own merit that Goriolo took

her.

“And I—I must send you into the dragon’s den again, having barely healed you,

and that at great cost, from your encounter with the Black Dragon. Maur is to

your little dragons what Agsded is to Maur. I teach you what I may because it is

the only shield I may—can—give you. I cannot face Agsded myself—I cannot. By

the gods and hells you have never heard of,” Luthe broke out, “do you think I like

sending a child to a doom like this, one I know I cannot myself face? With nothing

to guard her but half a year’s study of the apprentice bits of magery?

“I know by my own blood that I cannot defeat him; though by some of that

blood I have held him off these many years longer, that the chosen hero, the hero

of his blood, might grow up to face him; for only one of his blood may defeat

him.” Luthe closed his eyes. “It is true your mother wanted a son; she believed

that as only one of his blood might defeat him, so only one of his own sex might,

for to such she ascribed her own failure. She felt that it was because she was a

woman that she could not kill her own brother.”

“Brother?” whispered Aerin.

Luthe opened his eyes. “Had she tried, she might yet have failed,” he went on

as though he had not heard her, “but she could not bear to try; until Agsded, who

knew the prophecy even as she did, from long before there was apparent need to

know it, sought to bring her under his will or to destroy her.

“He could not do the former; almost he did the latter, and in the end she died

of the poison he gave her.” Luthe looked at her, and she remembered the hand

that was not her own holding a goblet, and a voice that was not Luthe’s saying

“Drink.”

“But she had meanwhile fled south, and found a man with kelar in his blood,

and been got with child by him. She had only the strength left to bear that child

before she died.”

Luthe fell silent, and Aerin could think of nothing to say. Agsded beat in her

brain; a moment ago she had told Luthe she did not know the name, and yet now

she was ready to swear that it had haunted all the shadows since before her birth;

that her mother had whispered it to her in the womb; that the despair she had

died of was the taste of it on her tongue. Agsded, who was to Maur what Maur

had been to her first dragon; and the first dragon might have killed her—and

Maur had killed her, for the time she lived now was not her own. Agsded, of her

own blood; her mother’s brother.

She felt numb; even the new sensitivities that had awoken in her since her dive

into the Lake of Dreams and Luthe’s teaching—all were numb, and she hung

suspended in a great nothingness, imprisoned there by the name of Agsded.

After a pause Luthe said, as if talking to himself: “I did not think your kelar

would so hide itself from you. Perhaps it was the hurt you did yourself and your

Gift by eating the surka. Perhaps your mother was not able entirely to protect the

child she carried from the death so close to her. I believed that you had to know

at least something of the truth—I believed it until I saw you face Maur with little

more than simple human courage and a foolhardy faith in the efficacy of a third-

rate healer’s potion like kenet against the Black Dragon. And I knew then not only

that I was wrong about you, but that I was too late to save you from the pain your

simplicity would cause you; and I feared that without your kelar to draw upon,

you would not survive that meeting. And I was terribly near right.

“I believed that you would grow up knowing some destiny awaited you; I

thought what ran in your veins could not help but tell you so much. I thought you

would know the true dreams I sent you as such. I thought many things that were

wrong.”

“The kelar may have tried to tell me,” Aerin said dully; “but the message did get

a little confused somehow. Certainly I was left in no doubt that my destiny was

different than Arlbeth’s daughter’s should have been, but that was a reading

anyone could have done.”

Luthe looked at her, and saw her uncle’s name like a brand on her face. “If you

wish,” he said lightly, “I shall go personally to your City and knock together the

heads of Perlith and Galooney.”

Aerin tried to smile. “I shall remember that offer.”

“Please do. And remember also that I never leave my mountain any more, so

believe how apologetic I must be feeling to make it in the first place.”

Aerin’s smile disappeared. “Am I truly just as my mother was?” she asked, as

she had asked Teka long ago.

Luthe looked at her again, and again many things crowded into his mind that he

might say. “You are very like her,” he said at last. “But you are to be preferred.”

AFTER THIS, suddenly the winter was too short, despite the nightmares of a

man with eyes brighter than a dragon’s, who wore a red cloak. The snow melted

too soon, and too soon the first tight buds knuckled out from the trees, and the

first vivid purple shoots parted the last year’s dry grass. There was a heavy rich

smell in the air, and Aerin kept seeing things in the shadows just beyond the edge

of sight, and hearing far high laughter she could not be sure she did not imagine.

Sometimes when she saw or heard such somethings she would whip around to

look at Luthe, who, as often as not, would be staring into the middle distance with

a vague silly smile on his face.

“You aren’t really alone up here at all, are you?” she said, and was surprised to

feel something she suspected was jealousy.