Read The Hero and the Crown Online
Authors: Robin McKinley
about this sort of thing; all you have to do is sit up. We’re just your honor guard.”
“But—” she began, but Arlbeth turned away and, indeed, as they neared the
great gates, he and Tor dropped back, and Talat pretended to prance, but only
pretended, so as not to joggle his rider. She did as her father told her, sitting
straight and still in the saddle, and looking not quite between Talat’s ears where
she might see something, but at them, and at his poll, where his forelock grew
and lifted in the breeze when he tossed his head. The streets were quiet, but
many people watched them as they rode by; and from the corners of her eyes she
could see many of their audience touching the backs of their hands to their
foreheads and flicking out the fingers in the Damarian salute to their sovereign
but Arlbeth rode at his daughter’s heel. A breeze wandered among them and
riffled Aerin’s ruined hair, and the sunlight shone pitilessly on her scarred face;
but the audience was still silent, and motionless but for the right hands and the
flicking fingers.
She held to Talat’s mane with her right hand, and slipped slowly down his side,
her left foot touching the ground first. Then Arlbeth was beside her, and he led
her past Maur’s grinning skull, and the soldiers parted in a silent whiplash, a drill
maneuver, and they came to the castle door; and then he turned to her and
picked her up in his arms and carried her down the long corridors and up the
stairs to her room, and to Teka.
There were healers in plenty who visited her after that; but none of them could
do better for her burns than the kenet, and her ankle was healing of its own, and
they could do nothing for her cough, nor for her trouble breathing. She spent her
time in bed, or in the deep window seat that overlooked the rear of the
courtyard, toward the stables. Hornmar led Talat under her window occasionally,
and while she could not call down to him, it comforted her to see him. She tried
to eat for Teka’s sake; she hadn’t realized before that there was no flavor to her
food since she had tasted dragonfire, but she learned it now. And she took the
dragon stone from the pocket she had made from a knot of cloth, and laid it on
the table near her bed; it seemed as though when she stared at it, it grew
brighter, and red fire shivered deep inside it.
At last she grew restless, as she had in the dragon’s valley, and she began to
creep about the castle, and visit Talat in the stables. He had his old stall back, and
Arlbeth’s young Kethtaz had actually been moved one stall down to give his
predecessor pride of place. Talat was very conscious of eminence regained. She
investigated his croup carefully with her fingers; the weals from the dragonfire
had disappeared, although she could still see them, for the hair had grown back
lying in the opposite direction from the hair around them.
Her own hair was growing in vigorously if unevenly, and Teka one day combed
it out from a center spot at the top of her skull and cut in a neat arch around her
face, for it was no longer curly. Aerin looked at herself in the mirror and laughed.
“I look like a boy.”
“No,” said Teka, sweeping up the trimmings. “You look like a girl with a boy’s
haircut.”
Aerin stared at herself. She had avoided mirrors as she had avoided everyone
but Tor and Teka and her father, and the healers they sent, who could not be got
rid of; and now that she finally dared herself to look in a mirror she was surprised
at what she saw. The shiny scars across her left cheek—and a few flecks, like
freckles, on the other side of her face, where the hot dragon blood had splashed
her—were visible but not disfiguring. Her scalp was still tender on the left, and
she had to use her hairbrush tentatively; but her hair was coming back as thick as
before, although it was several shades darker and almost straight. But her face
was drawn and pale, except for two spots of red high on her cheekbones; and
there were lines on her face that had not been there before, and her eyes looked
as old as Arlbeth’s, “I look a lot more like my mother now, don’t I?” she said.
Teka paused with the cloth she’d used to gather the hair clippings dangling
from her hand. “Yes,” she said.
The first morning she came to breakfast with her father again. Tor was there
too, and was not able to stop himself from jumping out of his chair and hugging
her. He was so glad to see her walking, and with her hair grown out and combed
smoothly around her face, that he almost managed not to think about how little
there was of her to hug, how frail she felt; how each breath she took seemed to
shake her, like a wind through a sapling. She smiled up at him, and he saw the red
spots on her cheekbones, but he looked only at her smile.
“I have no doubt that we were lured away from the City just then for a
purpose,” said Arlbeth, “and the best I could do then was return as quickly as the
horses could run. I had almost forgotten Maur.”
“I hadn’t,” murmured Tor, and his eyes flicked up to Aerin’s face and away
again, and she knew that he had guessed she would ride back with the messenger
and face the Black Dragon alone.
Arlbeth frowned into his cup. “But if the only purpose was to set the Black
Dragon upon us, why then does the feeling of a dark fate still cling around us? For
it does.”
“Yes,” said Tor.
There was a silence, and Arlbeth said at last: “We can only hope that Aerin-sol
has so disturbed their plans”—and by their his auditors knew he meant the
Northerners—”that we will have time enough to prepare, and strength enough in
reserve.”
Neither Arlbeth nor Tor ever told her what they had thought when they first
saw her, bent and burnt and coughing blood onto Talat’s white neck; and Aerin
did not ask. All else that was said on the subject occurred that same morning: “I
owe you a punishment for carrying the king’s sword without the king’s wishes,
Aerin-sol,” her father said gravely.
She had been thinking much of this herself lately, and she nodded. “I await
your command.”
Tor made a noise, and Arlbeth waved him to silence. “The punishment is that
you remain prisoned in the City and not carry your sword for two seasons, half a
year, and not less. Maur has taken care of that for me.”
She bowed her head; and then a woman of the hafor brought fresh malak and
hot rolls, and they busied themselves with passing and pouring, and that was the
end of it. She put milk in her malak now, to cool it before she drank it, so that she
would not have to wait so obviously for it to grow tepid by itself—a long process
at the king’s castle, where it was served in huge heavy earthenware cups with
wide thick bases and narrow tapered rims. She didn’t like the flavor so well—
malak was supposed to bite, and the milk gentled it—but there were worse
compromises she had to make.
Arlbeth asked her when they might hold the banquet in her honor, and she
blinked stupidly at him, thinking. My birthday isn’t till—?
“Maur,” he said gently. “We wish to honor you for your slaying of Maur.”
Tor and Arlbeth both knew she wanted nothing of the sort, but she said grimly,
“I thank you. Name the day.”
The hush that fell on the great half that evening when she entered it was worse
even than what she had imagined. It should have been little different than it ever
had been, for her father’s court had never been easy in the presence of his
daughter; but it was different nonetheless. Her head buzzed with the silence, and
her dim vision dimmed further, till the people around her were no more than
vague hulks draped in the bright colors of their court clothing. She wore a long
brown dress, high in the collar, and with sleeves that fell past her wrists; and
while there was much embroidery on it, the threads were black and darker
brown, and she went bareheaded, and wore only one ring, on her right hand. She
looked around, and the hulks turned slowly away from her, and she took her
place at her father’s side. The talk started up again, but she did not hear the
words of it; she heard the broken flickering fear beneath it, and calmly she
thought: It is I that they are afraid of.
Maur’s ugly black skull had been hung high on one wall of the great hall, whose
ceilings were three stories tall. It had been placed there by some other direction,
for she had had nothing to do with it, nor would have wanted it there had she
been asked. Even in the great hall it was huge; she looked at it, and it she could
see clearly, and it leered at her. I am the shape of their fear, it said, for you dared
to slay me. I am the shape of their fear, the thing said.
Maur’s ugly black skull had been hung high on one wall of the great hall, whose
ceilings were three stories tall. It had been placed there by some other direction,
for she had had nothing to do with it, nor would have wanted it there had she
been asked. Even in the great hall it was huge; she looked at it, and it she could
see clearly, and it leered at her. I am the shape of their fear, it said, for you dared
to slay me. I am the shape of their fear, the thing said.
The thing laughed; the laugh came as a ripple of heavy silence that muffled the
uncertain conversation in the hall; but only Aerin heard. Ah, but you lived, and
you slew me; that is enough, and more than enough, for I was as big as a
mountain and might have swallowed all of Damar at last. The villagers who saw
me before you came—the man who guided you to me—all say that when I reared
up, my head touched the stars; that nothing human could have stood against me.
They say it who saw me, with awe and gratitude for their deliverance; but that is
not how the story travels.
She heard the rhythm of the voices around her; the broken rhythm of syllables
under the words they said aloud. Witch, they said. Witch woman’s daughter.
But I saved them, she said desperately. I saved them.
The head howled: Better you had not! Better that they lay now in my belly’s
pit!
See how the first sola still looks at the witch woman’s daughter, for all that her
face is haggard and scarred; see how he looks at her, as if he does not wish to
look at anything else.
As if he cannot look at anything else. The old ones among them said:
Remember how the king looked at the witch, how she spelled him to sire her a
child that she might be born again with greater strength, for the blood of Damar
would run in the child’s veins with her own witch’s wickedness!
Witch woman’s daughter. Nothing human could have killed Maur. She will
swallow Damar as the Black Dragon never could have; for we could have hidden
in deep caves till it slept again.
Shall we let her spell the first sola?
We remember the old tales of Maur. We remember.
Witch woman’s daughter.
And the words spoken aloud: The North. The raiders from the North, they
come oftener, stronger. Why is Nyrlol afraid of his own shadow? He, who was
never known for wisdom, was never known either for lack of courage. Mischief.
Witch woman’s daughter.
“You had done better to let me eat you!” the thing on the wall shrieked.
“It was only luck that I slew you!” she cried. I only dared because I knew I was
already dead!
The thing laughed.
Witch woman’s daughter.
It was only luck!
Was it? said Maur’s head. Was it?
Aerin stood up abruptly and said, “You must excuse me.” She turned and
walked, slowly, for she still limped a little, toward the gaping door that would let
her out of the halt. Tor was at her elbow. “Aerin?”
“Let me be!” she cried. “Go talk to your guests! Don’t come near me!” She
began to cough, and still she ran from him, staggering, not caring that she limped
in the sight of the entire hall, through the door and away.
SHE COULD NOT SLEEP, and she coughed, and blood spotted her pillow; and
the fever that came and went, and would not leave her alone even as her burns
healed and her hair grew, came again that night, and light-headedly she relived
the scene in the hall; and she heard the thing laugh, and heard the court say,
Witch woman’s daughter.
Near dawn she dreamed of the tall blond man she had seen once before, while
she slept in the dragon’s valley. He did not speak to her, nor did he seem to know
she watched him. Perhaps he is only a dream, her dreaming self-thought; but she
looked at the way his blond eyelashes caught the sunlight, at the freckles on the
backs of his hands, at the way the little fingers curled under the base of the cup
he held, at the steam that rose from the cup. He blinked when it wafted into his
eyes.
She woke, coughing.
He had said he would help her. How could he help her? He had said he would
tell her how she could aid Damar. Damar didn’t seem to like her aiding it. She
turned onto her back and stretched till her throat and chest lay flat and straight;
sometimes that eased the coughing. She listened to the gurgling rasp of her
breathing; no matter how shallowly she breathed, still the air rustled in her lungs.
She thought dispassionately, This cough will kill me before too long, and Maur will