Aerin said slowly, “I’ve heard of it, of course, but I’m not entirely sure what the Crown is, or is supposed to do.”
There was a silence. “Neither am I,” said Tor. “It’s been lost ... a long time. I used to think it was only a legend, but old Councilor Zanc mentioned it a few weeks ago—that’s when Arlbeth told me that when he was a boy they were looking under trees for it. Zanc’s father’s father used to tell the story of how it was lost. Zanc thinks the increase of the Border raids is somehow due to its absence; that Northern ... mischief ... did not trouble us when the Hero’s Crown lay in the City. And Thorped apparently agrees with him, although he’s not quite so outspoken about it.”
He shrugged, and then settled her more securely in the curve of his arm. “The Hero’s Crown holds much of what Damar is; or at least much of what her king needs to hold his people together and free of mischief. Aerinha was supposed to have done the forging of it. Here we get into the legend, so maybe you know this bit. Damar’s strength, or whatever it is about this land that makes it Damar and us Damarians, was thought to be better held, more strongly held, in a Crown, which could be handed from sovereign to sovereign, since some rulers are inevitably better or wiser in themselves than others. Of course this system runs the risk of the Crown’s being lost, and the strength with it, which is what eventually happened. Zanc’s story is that it was stolen by a black mage, and that he rode east, not north, or the Northerners would have fallen on us long since. Arlbeth thinks ...” His voice trailed away.
“Yes?”
“Arlbeth thinks it has come into the hands of the Northerners at last.” He paused a moment before he said slowly, “Arlbeth at least believes in its existence. So must I, therefore.”
Aerin asked no more. It was the heaviest time of the night; dawn was nearer than midnight, but the sky seemed to hold them in a closing hand. Then suddenly through the weight of the sky and of her new knowledge, she remembered her dragon ointment, and somehow neither the missing Crown nor Perlith’s malice, the reason she had come up to stare at the sky in the middle of the night, mattered quite so much; for, after all, she could do nothing about either Perlith or the Crown, and the recipe for kenet was hers. If she got no sleep, she’d botch making a big trial mixture tomorrow. “I must go to bed,” she said, and straightened up.
“I too,” said Tor. “It will be very embarrassing to the dignity of the royal house if the first sola falls off his horse tomorrow. Lady, that’s a very handsome dressing gown.”
“It is, isn’t it? It was given me by a friend with excellent taste.” She smiled up at him, and without thinking he bent his head and kissed her. But she only hugged him absently in return, because she was already worrying whether or not she had enough of one particular herb, for it would spoil the whole morning if she had to fetch more and she’d be mad with impatience and would botch the job after all. “A quiet sleep to you,” she said. “And to you,” said Tor from the shadows.
Chapter 9
SHE HAD ALMOST enough of the herb she had been worrying about. After dithering awhile and muttering to herself she decided to go ahead and make as much ointment as she had ingredients for, and fetch more tomorrow. It was a messy business, and her mind would keep jumping away from the necessary meticulousness; and she knocked over a pile of axe handles and was too impatient to pile them up again and so spent several hours tripping over them and stubbing her toes and using language she had picked up while listening to the sofor, and the thotor, who were even more colorful. Once she was hopping around on one foot and yelling epithets when her other foot was knocked out from under her as well by a treacherous rear assault from a fresh brigade of rolling lumber, and she fell and bit her tongue. This chastened her sufficiently that she finished her task without further incident.
She stared at the greasy unpleasant-looking mess in the shallow trough before her and thought, Well, so what do I do now? Build a fire and jump in? The only fireplaces big enough are all in heavily used rooms of the castle. Maybe a bonfire isn’t such a bad idea after all; but it will have to be far enough away that no one will come looking for the source of the smoke.
Meanwhile she did have enough of the kenet to fireproof both hands, and she made a small fire in the middle of the shed floor (out of broken axe handles) and held both hands, trembling slightly, in its heart—and nothing happened. The next day she went to fetch more herbs.
She decided at once that she would have to leave the City to try her bonfire; and she decided just as quickly that she had to take Talat. Kisha would be worse than a nuisance under such circumstances; at very least she would find the bonfire excuse enough to break either her halter rope or her neck in a declared panic attempt to bolt back toward the City.
Teka, however, did not like this plan at all. Teka was willing to accept that Aerin was a good rider, and might be permitted to leave the City alone for a few hours on her pony; but that she should want to go alone, overnight, with that vicious stallion—such an idea she was not willing to entertain. First she declared that Talat was too lame to go on such a journey; and when Aerin, annoyed, tried to convince her otherwise, Teka changed her ground and said that he was dangerous and Aerin couldn’t be certain of her ability to control him. Aerin was ready to weep with rage, and after several weeks of this (she having meanwhile made vast quantities of her kenet and almost set her hair on fire trying to test its effectiveness on various small bits of her anatomy), Teka had to realize that there was more to this than whim.
“You may go if your father says you may,” she said at last, heavily. “Talat is still his horse, and he has a right to decide what his future should be. I—I think he will be proud of what you’ve done with him.”
Aerin knew how much it cost Teka to say so, and her anger ebbed away and she felt ashamed of herself.
“The journey itself—I do not like it. It is not proper”—and here a smile touched the corners of Teka’s sad mouth—”but you will always be unusual, as your mother was, and she traveled alone as she chose, nor did your father ever try to hinder her. You are a woman grown, and past needing a nursemaid to judge your plans. If your father says you may go—well, then.”
Aerin went off and began to worry about how best to approach her father. She had known she would have to ask his permission at some point, but she had wanted to get Teka on her side first, and had misjudged how alarming the horse-shy Teka would find a war-stallion like Talat, even an elderly, rehabilitated, and good-natured war-stallion. Aerin’s own attitude toward Talat hadn’t been rational for years.
She brooded for days after Teka had withdrawn from the field of combat; but she brooded not only about how to tackle her father, but also about what, precisely, she was setting out to do. Test the fire-repellent properties of her discovery. Toward killing dragons. Did she realty want to kill dragons? Yes. Why? Pause. To be doing something. To be doing something better than anyone else was doing it.
She caught her father one day at breakfast, between ministers with tactical problems and councilors with strategic ones. His face lit up when he saw her, and she made an embarrassed mental note to seek him out more often; he was not a man who had ever been able to enter into a child’s games, but she might have noticed before this how wistfully he looked at her. But for perhaps the first time she was recognizing that wistfulness for what it was, the awkwardness of a father’s love for a daughter he doesn’t know how to talk to, not shame for what Aerin was, or could or could not do.
She smiled at him, and he gave her a cup of malak, and pushed the bun tray and the saha jam toward her. “Father,” she said through crumbs, “do you know I have been riding Talat?”