The Hero and the Crown (32 page)

opened her mouth she discovered it was a laugh.

AERIN WOKE TWO DAYS later in her own bed in her father’s castle—Tor’s castle

now. It was turning over that woke her; her muscles were so sore and stiff that

her weariness was finally less than her aches and pains, and as she rolled onto her

right shoulder she woke with a groan.

There was an immediate rustle from somewhere just beyond the bed curtains,

and the curtains themselves were pushed back and daylight flooded in. Aerin

couldn’t imagine where she was for a moment; her first thoughts were that

wherever it was it was doubtless dangerous, and she groped vaguely for

Gonturan’s hilt; instead her fingers buried themselves in a heavy fur ruff, and a

long tongue licked her hand. She tried to sit up, and a voice, attached to the

hands that had just parted the curtains, said brokenly, “Oh, my lady.” Aerin

recognized Teka first, and then realized where she was, and then Teka bent down

and buried her face in the bedclothes and sobbed.

“Teka,” Aerin said, horrified by her tears.

“My lady, I thought I should never see you again,” Teka muttered without

lifting her face, but when Aerin tentatively patted a shoulder and smoothed the

sleek black-and-grey head, Teka sat back on her heels, sniffed, and said, “Well, I

am seeing you again, and have been seeing you again now for two and a half

days, and I am very sorry to have been so silly. You’ll want food and a bath.”

“Two and a half days?” Aerin repeated.

“Two and a half days. Tor-sola is not awake yet.”

Aerin smiled. “And, of course, you’ve been sitting in that chair”—she nodded at

a high-backed wooden chair with a pillow propped up for the waiter’s back and

neck, and a cushioned footrest, and a small table with sewing paraphernalia tidily

arranged on it—“the whole time.”

Teka opened her eyes wide in the old way that had so terrorized the very

young Aerin caught out at some misbehavior. “Of course. Bath or a meal first?”

Aerin considered. Even the muscles that made her tongue move and her jaw

open and shut to speak and her lips smile hurt. “Malak, very hot, and a very hot

bath first, and then food.” There was a thrashing behind her and a long pointed

face poked over her shoulder. “And food for this one, too. She’ll skip the bath.

Where are the rest of them?”

Teka scowled. “Wherever it pleases them to lay themselves. I did manage to

herd them all into your rooms, lady, and the back hall; they terrify all the staff and

most of the court. But they won’t leave—and, well, I for one am capable of

acknowledging that we owe them a debt, and loyalty is very admirable even in

mute beasts, but,” she said in a tone of suppressed rage. “I do not approve of

animals sharing their sol’s bed.” The yerig queen yawned widely, and then a long

piece of black shadow stood up from the still curtained foot of the bed, stretched

himself, and flowed off the bed to the floor. He leaned against the backs of Teka’s

legs and began to purr and, to Aerin’s delight, a slow flush crept up Teka’s throat

and face.

“I’m glad not everyone in my father’s house is terrified by my friends,” said

Aerin.

Aerin began the long excruciating process of getting out of bed; she felt that

she would never move easily again. “I’ll help you, my lady,” said Teka, as Aerin

touched her feet to the floor and hissed involuntarily. Teka was thinner than she

had been when Aerin saw her last, and as Teka put out a hand to help her, Aerin

saw a long bandage wrapped around her forearm under her sleeve. She jerked

her eyes away and looked up at Teka’s face again. “Must you call me lady?” she

said crossly. “You never did before.”

Teka looked at her oddly. “I know that perfectly well,” she said. “If you’re up.

I’ll look to your bath.”

The hot water helped the deeper aches but just about killed the blisters, and

Aerin herself with them. She padded the back of the bath with two or three

towels so that she could at least lie softly; and after three cups of very strong

malak she dared climb out of the bath. Teka laid her down on a cushioned bench

and rubbed a little more of the soreness out with the help of some astringent

solution (that smelted, of course, very strongly of herbs) that was even worse

than the hot water on blisters; Aerin shrieked.

“Quiet,” said Teka remorselessly. She finished by smoothing on a silky pale

ointment that almost made up for the astringent, as Aerin told her. “Your

adventures have made you no more polite, Aerin-sol,” Teka said with asperity.

“You could not possibly have hoped for so much,” Aerin responded as she

eased into the undershift Teka had laid out for her.

“No,” Teka admitted, and turned down the corners of her mouth, which meant

she was suppressing a smile.

Aerin turned to pick up the tunic. “Why am I getting all dressed up to eat

breakfast?” she inquired. The tunic was new to her, blue and heavy, with a lot of

gold thread worked into it.

“It’s mid-afternoon,” Teka said repressively. “The honor of your company for an

early dinner has been requested by Tor-sola.”

Aerin grunted, and put the tunic on—and grunted again. “He woke up, then.”

“So it would appear. There is nothing that can be done with your hair.”

Aerin grinned and shook her head so that the fine not-quite-shoulder-length

tips swung across her cheeks. “Nothing at all. It doesn’t seem to want to grow.”

Tor looked haggard but convalescent, as Aerin felt she probably looked as well.

She’d worn Gonturan as a way of acknowledging the formality of the occasion,

but the sword belt only reminded her more intensely of certain of her blisters,

and she was glad to hang it on the tall back of her chair. Tor came to her at once

and put his arms around her, and they stood, leaning against each other, for a

long time.

He put her away from him only an arm’s length then and looked down at her.

“I—” He broke off, and dropped his arms, and paced around the room once. He

turned back like a man nerving himself for a valorous deed, and said, “I’m to be

made king tomorrow. They seem to think I already am, you know, but there’s a

ceremony ...” His voice trailed off.

“Yes, I know,” Aerin said gently. “Of course you’re king. It’s what my—what

Arlbeth wanted. We both know that. And,” she said with only a little more

difficulty, “it’s what the people want as well.”

Tor stared at her fiercely. “You should be queen. We both know it. You brought

the Crown back; you’ve won the right to wear it so. They can’t doubt you now.

Arlbeth would agree. You won the war for them.” Aerin shook her head. “The

gods give me patience. You did. Stop being stubborn.”

“Tor—calm down. Yes, I know I helped get the Northerners off our doorstep. It

doesn’t really matter. Come to that, I’d rather you were king.” Tor shook his head.

Aerin smiled sadly. “It’s true.”

“It shouldn’t be.”

Aerin shrugged. “I thought you invited me here to feed me. I’m much too

hungry to want to stand around and argue.”

Aerin swallowed hard. “Yes, of course,” she said, and found she couldn’t say

anything else. It had not been only her doom and her duty that had brought her

back to the City, and to Tor, for she loved Damar, and she loved its new king, and

a part of her that belonged to nothing and no one else belonged to him. She had

misunderstood what her fate truly was a few days ago, as she rode to the City to

deliver up the Crown into the king’s hands; it was not that she left what she loved

to go where she must, but that her destiny, like her love, like her heritage, was

double. And so the choice at last was an easy one, for Tor could not wait, and the

other part of her—the not quite mortal part, the part that owed no loyalty to her

father’s land—might sleep peacefully for many long years. She smiled.

“Yes-of-course what?” said Tor in anguish.

“Yes-of-course-I’ll-marry-you,” said Aerin, and when he caught her up in his

arms to kiss her she didn’t even notice the shrill pain of burst blisters.

It was a long story she told him after that, for all that there was much of it that

she left out; yet she thought that Tor probably guessed some of the more bitter

things, for he asked her many questions, yet none that she might not have been

able to answer, like what face Agsded had worn, or what her second parting from

Luthe had been.

They ate at length and in great quantity, and their privacy was disturbed only

by the occasional soft-footed hafor bearing fresh plates of food; yet somehow by

the end of the meal the shadows on the floor, especially those near Aerin’s chair,

had grown unusually thick, and some of those shadows had ears and tails.

Tor looked thoughtfully at the yerig queen, who looked thoughtfully back at

him. “Something must be done for—or with—your army, Aerin.”

“I know,” Aerin said, embarrassed. “Teka’s been feeding them only bread and

milk these last two days, since she says she refuses to have the rooms smelling

like a butcher’s shop, and fortunately there’s that back stair nobody uses—the

way I used to sneak off and see Talat. But I never knew why they came to me in

the first place, and so I don’t know how long they plan to stay, or—or how to get

rid of them.” She gulped, and found herself staring into two steady yellow eyes;

the folstza king’s tail twitched. “Nor, indeed, do I wish to be rid of them, although

I know they aren’t particularly welcome here. I would be lonesome without

them.” She remembered how they had huddled around her the night after she

had left Luthe, and stopped speaking abruptly; the yellow eyes blinked slowly,

and Tor became very busy refilling their goblets. She picked hers up and looked

into it, and saw not Luthe, but the long years in her father’s house of not being

particularly welcome; and she thought that perhaps she would enjoy filling the

castle with not particularly welcome visitors that were too many and too alarming

to be ignored.

“They shall stay here just as long as they wish,” Tor said. “Damar owes you any

price you feel like asking, and,” he said dryly, “I don’t think it will hurt anyone to

find you and your army just a little fear-inspiring.” Aerin grinned.

He told then of what had come to them during her absence; much of it she

knew or guessed already. Nyrlol had rebelled for once and for all soon after she

had ridden into Luthe’s mountains; and immediately the local sols and villages

near him had either gone over to him or been razed. The division of his army

Arlbeth had left to help Nyrlol patrol the Border had been caught in a Northern

trap; less than half of their number survived to rejoin their king. Arlbeth had

ridden out there in haste, leaving Tor in the City to prepare for what they now

knew was to come; and it had come. It had come already, for when Arlbeth met

Nyrlol in battle, the man’s face had been stiff with fear, but with the fear of what

rode behind him, not what he faced; and when Arlbeth killed him, the fear, in his

last moments of life, slid away, and a look of exhausted peace closed his eyes

forever.

“I didn’t know,” said Aerin.

“Arlbeth saw no reason that you should,” said Tor. “We—we both knew you

were dying.” He swallowed, and tapped his fingers on the tabletop. “I thought you

would not likely live to see us fail, so why further shadow what time remained to

you?

“When you left I felt hope for the first time. That note you left me—it wasn’t

the words, it was just the feeling of the scrap of paper in my hands. I took it out

often, just to touch it, and always I felt that hope again.” He smiled faintly. “I

infected both Arlbeth and Teka with hope.” He paused, sighed, and went on. “I

even chewed a leaf of surka, and asked to dream of you; and I saw you by the

shore of a great silver lake, with a tall blond man beside you, and you were

smiling out across the water, and you looked well and strong.” He looked up at

her. “Any price is worth paying to have you here again, and cured of that which

would have killed you long since. Any price... Neither Arlbeth nor Teka was sure,

as I was. I knew you would come back.”

“I hope at least the Crown was a surprise,” said Aerin.

Tor laughed. “The Crown was a surprise,”

The lifting of Maur’s evil influence was as important a relief to the beleaguered

City as the unexpected final victory in the war; but there was still much healing to

be done and little time for merrymaking. Arlbeth was buried with quiet state. Tor

and Aerin stood together at the funeral, as they had been almost always together

since Aerin had ridden across the battlefield to give Tor the Crown; as the two of

them had never publicly been together before. But the people, now, seemed to

accept it, and they simply gave Aerin the same quiet undemonstrative respect

that the first sola had received since the battle; it was as if they did not even

differentiate between the two.

Everyone still felt more than a little grey, and perhaps in the aftermath of the

Northerners a witch woman’s daughter whom they had, after all, grown used to

seeing for over twenty years past seemed a small thing to worry about; and she