Read The Hero and the Crown Online
Authors: Robin McKinley
and things like old axe handles and sticks of wood that might make new axe
handles, and she had never gotten around to sweeping the floor. Her hands were
shaking so badly that she dropped the candle again when she tried to pick it up,
and missed when she went to stamp out the thread of smoke that rose from the
floor where the candle had fallen.
She checked her notes to be sure she could read what she had written about
the proportions of this particular attempt; then blew out the candle and went off
in a daze to darn stockings.
Teka asked her twice, sharply, what was the matter with her, as she tried to
help her dress for the court dinner. Aerin’s darns were worse than usual—which
was saying a good deal, and Teka had said even more when she saw them, but as
much out of worry for her sol’s extraordinary vagueness as from straightforward
exasperation at yet another simply homely task done ill. Usually, big court dinners
made Aerin clumsy and rather desperately here-and-now. Teka finally tied
ribbons around both of Aerin’s ankles to hide the miserable lumps of mending
and was even more appalled when Aerin did not object. Ankle ribbons were all
the fashion among the higher-born young ladies this year; when this first became
apparent Teka had had a difficult time convincing Aerin not to lengthen all her
skirts eight inches, that they might drag on the floor and render all questions of
ankle adornment academic; and Teka was fairly sure the only reason she’d won
the argument was that Aerin couldn’t face the thought of all the sewing such a
project would entail.
Teka hung a tassel at the front of one ankle, to fall gracefully over the high arch
of Aerin’s long foot (not that it would stay there; Galanna and the others had
developed a coy little hitch and skip to their walk, to make their tassels fall
forward as they should), and pinned a small silver brooch bearing the royal crest
on the other, and Aerin didn’t even fidget. She was dreamily staring into space;
she was even wearing a slight smile. Could she have fallen in love? Teka
wondered. Who? Thorped’s son—what was his name? Surely not. He was half a
head shorter than she and wispy.
Teka sighed and stood up. “Aerin—are you sure you’re not ill?” she said.
Aerin came back to herself with a visible jerk and said, “Dear Teka, I’m fine.
Truly I am.” Then she looked down with a scowl and wiggled her ankles. “Ugh,”
“They hide your—dare I call them—darns,” Teka said severely.
“There’s that,” said Aerin, and smiled again, and Teka thought, What ails the
girl? I will look for Tor tonight; his face will tell me something.
TOR THOUGHT that night she looked radiant and wished, wistfully, that it had
something to do with him, while he was only too certain it did not. When, daring
greatly, he told her as they spun through the figures of the dance that she was
beautiful, she laughed at him. Truly she has grown up, he thought; even six
months ago she would have blushed scarlet and turned to wood in my arms. “It’s
the ribbons round my ankles,” she said. “My darning surpassed itself in atrocity
today, and Teka said it was this or going barefoot.”
“I am not looking at your feet,” said Tor, looking into her green eyes; and she
said without flinching: “Then you should be, dearest cousin, for you have never
seen me thus bedecked previously, nor likely are ever to see me so again.”
“I am not looking at your feet,” said Tor, looking into her green eyes; and she
said without flinching: “Then you should be, dearest cousin, for you have never
seen me thus bedecked previously, nor likely are ever to see me so again.”
But then so was he. Neither of them would ever forget it for a moment.
Aerin floated through the evening. Since she was first sol, she never had the
embarrassment (or the relief) of being able to sit out. She wasn’t particularly
aware that—most unusually—she had stepped on no one’s feet that night; and
she was accustomed to the polite protests, at the end of each set when partners
were exchanged, of what a pleasure it was to dance with her, and her thoughts
were so far away that she failed to catch the unusual ring of truth in her dancing
partners’ voices. She didn’t even mind dancing three figures with Thorped’s son
(what was his name again?), for while his height did not distress her, his
chinlessness, on another occasion, would have.
She did notice when she danced with Perlith that there was an unwonted
depth of malignance in his light remarks, and wondered in passing what was
biting him. Does the color of my gown make his skin look sallow? But Perlith too
had noticed Thorped’s son’s admiration of the king’s only daughter, and it
irritated him almost as much as it irritated Galanna. Perlith knew quite well that
when Galanna had stopped playing hard to get back in the days when he was
punctiliously courting her it was because she had decided to make a virtue of
necessity after it became apparent that a second sola was the best she was going
to get. But a second sola was an important personage, and Perlith wanted
everyone to envy him his victory to the considerable extent that his blue blood
and irresistible charm—and of course Galanna’s perfect beauty-deserved. How
dare this common runt admire the wrong woman?
Being Perlith, he had, of course, timed his courtship to coincide with the
moment that Galanna admitted defeat on the score of future queenship; but he’d
never been able to bring himself to flirt with Aerin. He had as much right to the
king’s daughter as anyone—what a pity she had to have orange hair and
enormous feet—and while he would never have married her, king’s daughter or
no, with that commoner for a mother, it might have been amusing to make her
fall in love with him. In his conscious mind he preferred to think that he hadn’t
made her fall in love with him by choice; in a bleaker moment it had occurred to
him that Aerin probably wouldn’t like being flirted with, and that his notorious
charm of manner (when he cared to use it) might have had no effect on her
whatsoever. He had banished the thought immediately, and his well-trained self-
esteem had buried it forever.
He could admit that she looked better than usual tonight; he’d never seen her
in the fashionable ribbons before, and she had nice trim ankles, in spite of the
feet. This realization did not soften his attitude; he glared at his dancing partner,
and Aerin could feel the glare, though she knew that if she looked into his face his
expression would be one of lazy pleasure, with only a deep glint in his heavy-
lidded eyes to tell her what he was thinking. At a pause in the dance he plucked
several golden specks out of the air that were suddenly there for him when he
reached for them. He closed his fingers around them, smiled, and opened his
hand again, and a posy of yellow and white ring-a-ling flowers—the flowers Aerin
had carried at his wedding—sprang up between his thumb and first finger.
“For the loveliest lady here tonight,” he said, with a bow, to Aerin.
Aerin turned white and backed up a step, her hands behind her. She bumped
into the next couple as they waited for the music for the next figure to begin and
they turned, mildly irritated, to see what was happening; and suddenly the entire
hall was watching. The musicians in the gallery laid down their instruments when
they should have played their first notes; it didn’t occur to them to do anything
else. Perlith, especially when he was feeling thwarted, was formidably Gifted.
Perlith stood, smiling gently at her, his arm gracefully raised and his hand
curled around his posy; the glint in his eye was very bright.
And then the flowers leaped from his fingers and grew wings, and became
yellow and white birds which sang “Aerin, Aerin” as sweetly as golden harps, and
as they disappeared into the darkness of the ceiling the musicians began playing
again, and Tor’s arms were around her, and Perlith was left to make his way out
of the circle of dancers. Aerin stepped on Tor’s feet several times as he helped her
off the dancing-floor, for the magic was strong in her nostrils, and though what
Tor had done had been done at a distance, it still clung to him too. He held her up
by main force till she said, a little shakily, “Let go, cousin, you’re tearing the
waistband right out of my skirt.”
He released her at once, and she put a hand out—to a chair, not to his
outstretched arm. He let the arm drop. “My pardon, please. I am clumsy tonight.”
“You are never clumsy,” she said with bitterness, and Tor was silent, for he was
wishing that she would lean on him instead of on the chair, and did not notice
that most of the bitterness was for Perlith, who had hoped to embarrass her
before the entire court, and a little for herself, and none at all for him. She told
him he might leave her that she was quite all right. Two years ago he would have
said, “Nonsense, you are still pale, and I will not leave you”; but it wasn’t two
years ago, and he said merely, “As you wish,” and left her to find his deserted
partner and make his excuses.
Perlith came to Aerin as she sat in the chair she had been leaning on, sipping
from a glass of water a woman of the hafor had brought her. “I beg most humbly
for forgiveness,” he said, closing his eyes till only the merest glitter showed
beneath his long lashes. “I forgot that you—ah—do not care for such—ah—
tokens.”
Aerin looked at him levelly. “I know perfectly well what you were about this
evening. I accept your apology for precisely what it is worth.”
Perlith blinked at this unexpected intransigence and was, very briefly, at a loss
for a reply. “If you accept my apology for what it is worth,” he said smoothly,
“then I know I need have no fear that you will bear me a grudge for my hapless
indiscretion.”
Aerin laughed, which surprised her as much as it surprised him. “No indeed,
cousin; I shall bear you no grudge for this evening’s entertainment. Our many
years of familiar relationship render us far beyond grudges.” She curtsied hastily
and left the hall, for fear that he would think of something else to say to her;
Perlith never lost verbal skirmishes, and she wanted to keep as long as she could
the extraordinary sensation of having scored points against him.
Later, in the darkness of her bedroom, she reconsidered the entire evening,
and smiled; but it was half a grimace and she found she could not sleep. It had
been too long a day, and she was too tired; her head always spun from an evening
spent on display in the great hall, and tonight as soon as she deflected her
thoughts from Perlith and Tor and yellow birds they immediately turned to the
topic of the dragon fire ointment.
She considered creeping back to her laboratory, but someone would see a light
where only axe handles should be. She had never mentioned that she had taken
over the old shed, but she doubted anyone would care so long as lights didn’t
start showing at peculiar hours—and how would she explain what she was doing?
The castle was the highest point in the City, though the walls around its
courtyard prevented anyone standing at ground level within them from seeing
the City spread out on the lower slopes. But from the third—and fourth-story
windows and balconies overlooking the front of the castle the higher roofs of the
City could be seen, grey stone and black stone and dull red stone, in slabs and thin
shingle-chips; and chimneys rising above all. From fifth—and sixth-story windows
one could see the king’s way, the paved road which fell straight from the castle
gates to the City gates, almost to its end in a flat-stamped earth clearing cornered
by monoliths, a short way beyond the City wails.
But from any point in the castle or the City one might look up and see the Hills
that cradled them; even the break in the jagged outline caused by the City gates
was narrow enough not to be easily recognizable as such. The pass between Vasth
and Kar, two peaks of the taller Hills that surrounded the low rolling forested land
that lay before the City and circled round to meet the Hills behind the castle, was
not visible at all. Aerin loved the Hills; they were green in spring and summer, rust
and brown and yellow in the fall, and white in the winter with the snow they
sheltered the City from; and they never told her that she was a nuisance and a
disappointment and a half blood.
She paced around the balcony and looked at the stars, and the gleam of the
moonlight on the glassy smooth courtyard. Somehow the evening she’d just
endured had quenched much of her joy in her discovery of the morning. That a bit
of yellow grease could protect a finger from a candle flame said nothing about its
preventive properties in dealings with dragons; she’d heard the hunters home
from the hunt say that dragon fire was bitter stuff, and burned like no hearth fire.
On her third trip around the balcony she found Tor lurking in the shadow of
one of the battlemented peaks. “You walk very quietly,” he said.
“Bare feet,” she said succinctly.
“If Teka should catch you so and the night air so chill, she would scold.”