The Hero and the Crown (34 page)

her first City litter in the middle of Aerin and Tor’s bed. “Oh, gods,” said Aerin,

who found her, or them: five excellent puppies, and a very proud Kala. “Teka will

flay you alive.” Teka, so far from flaying anyone alive, adopted one of the puppies,

named it Ursha after a small pink wild flower, and it grew up to be a great hulking

beast, bigger than its mother, with a singularly wicked look, and a disposition as

gentle as a featherbed.

Tor had been king less than three years when he was first called the Just, for

the even-handedness of his wisdom; a wisdom, they said, that was never cold,

and that sat strangely in the eyes of a man not yet forty. Aerin knew where some

of that old wisdom came from, for she had first seen it the afternoon that he had

told her she should be queen, had asked her to marry him; the same afternoon

that he had not asked her about Luthe. She hoped that she might never be

careless of Tor’s feelings: Tor, who had been her best friend all her life, and

sometimes her only friend. Perhaps the memory of the reek of Maur’s despair

made her a little forgetful too, for she began to think of the wide silver lake as a

place she had visited only in dreams, and of the tall blond man she had once

known as a creature of those dreams; for the not quite mortal part of her did

sleep, that she might love her country and her husband.