Read The Hero and the Crown Online
Authors: Robin McKinley
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