Read The Hero and the Crown Online
Authors: Robin McKinley
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.