The Hero and the Crown (4 page)

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.

“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.

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.

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 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