Hornmar himself appeared at her elbow to take Talat off to the stables when they arrived in the royal courtyard. Her escort seemed to her to dismount awkwardly, with a great banging of stirrups and creak of girths. She pulled down the bundles from behind Talat’s saddle and squared her shoulders. She couldn’t help looking wistfully after the untroubled Talat, who readily followed Hornmar in the direction he was sure meant oats; but she jerked her attention back to herself and found Gebeth staring at her, frozen-faced, so she led the way into the castle.
Even Arlbeth looked startled when they all appeared before him. He was in one of the antechambers of the main receiving hall, and sat surrounded by papers, scrolls, sealing wax, and emissaries. He looked tired. Not a word had passed between Aerin and her unwilling escort since they had left the village, but Aerin felt that she was being herded and had not tried to .escape. Gebeth would have reported to the king immediately upon his return, and so she must; it was perhaps just as well that she had so many sheepdogs to her one self-conscious sheep, because she might have been tempted to put off the reckoning had she ridden back alone.
“Sir,” she said. Arlbeth looked at Aerin, then at Gebeth and Gebeth’s frozen face, then back at Aerin.
“Have you something to report?” he said, and the kindness in his voice was for both his daughter and his loyal, if scandalized, servant.
Gebeth remained bristling with silence, so Aerin said: “I rode out alone this morning, and went to the village of Ktha, to ... engage their dragon. Or—um—dragons.”
What was the proper form for a dragon-killing report? She might have paid a little more attention to such things if she’d thought a little further ahead. She’d never particularly considered the after of killing dragons; the fact that she’d done it was supposed to be enough. But now she felt like a child caught out in misbehavior. Which at least in Gebeth’s eyes she was. She unwrapped the bundle she carried under her arm, and laid the battered dragon heads on the floor before her father’s table. Arlbeth stood up and came round the edge of the table, and stood staring down at them with a look on his face not unlike Gebeth’s when he first recognized what was lying in the dust at his horse’s feet.
“We arrived at the village ... after,” said Gebeth, who chose not to look at Aerin’s ugly tokens of victory again, “and I offered our escort for Aerin-sol’s return.”
At “offered our escort” a flicker of a smile crossed Arlbeth’s face, but he said very seriously, “I would speak to Aerin-sol alone.” Everyone disappeared like mice into the walls, except they closed the doors behind them. Gebeth, his dignity still outraged, would say nothing, but no one else who had been in the room when Aerin told the king she had just slain two dragons could wait to start spreading the tale.
Arlbeth said, “Well?” in so colorless a tone that Aerin was afraid that, despite the smile, he must be terribly angry with her. She did not know where to begin her story, and as she looked back over the last years and reminded herself that he had set no barriers to her work with Talat, had trusted her judgment, she was ashamed of her secret; but the first words that came to her were: “I thought if I told you first, you would not let me go.”
Arlbeth was silent for a long time. “This is probably so,” he said at last. “And can you tell me why I should not have prevented you?”
Aerin exhaled a long breath. “Have you read Astythet’s History?”
Arlbeth frowned a moment in recollection. “I ... believe I did, when I was a boy. I do not remember it well.” He fixed her with a king’s glare, which is much fiercer than an ordinary mortal’s. “I seem to remember that the author devotes a good deal of time and space to dragon lore, much of it more legendary than practical.”
“Yes,” said Aerin. “I read it, a while ago, when I was ... ill. There’s a recipe of sorts for an ointment called kenet, proof against dragonfire, in the back of it—”
Arlbeth’s frown returned and settled. “A bit of superstitious nonsense.”
“No,” Aerin said firmly. “It is not nonsense; it is merely unspecific.” She permitted herself a grimace at her choice of understatement. “I’ve spent much of the last three years experimenting with that half a recipe. A few months ago I finally found out ... what works.” Arlbeth’s frown had lightened, but it was still visible. “Look.” Aerin unslung the heavy cloth roll she’d hung over her shoulder and pulled out the soft pouch of her ointment. She smeared it on one hand, then the other, noticing as she did so that both hands were trembling. Quickly, that he might not stop her, she went to the fireplace and seized a burning branch from it, held it at arm’s length in one greasy yellow hand, and thrust her other hand directly into the flame that billowed out around it.
Arlbeth’s frown had disappeared. “You’ve made your point; now put the fire back into the hearth, for that is not a comfortable thing to watch.” He went back behind his table and sat down; the weary lines showed again in his face.
Aerin came to the other side of his table, wiping her ashy hands on her leather leggings. “Sit,” said her father, looking up at her; and leaving charcoal fingerprints on a scroll she tried delicately to move, she cleared the nearest chair and sat down. Her father eyed her, and then looked at the ragged gashes in her tunic. “Was it easy, then, killing dragons when they could not burn you?”
She spread her dirty fingers on her knees and stared at them. “No,” she said quietly. “I did not think beyond the fire. It was not easy.”
Arlbeth sighed. “You have learned something, then.”
“I have learned something.” She looked up at her father with sudden hope.
Arlbeth snorted, or chuckled. “Don’t look at me like that. You have the beseeching look of a puppy that thinks it may yet get out of a deserved thrashing. Think you that you deserve your thrashing?”
Aerin said nothing.
“That’s not meant solely as a rhetorical question. What sort of thrashing are you eligible for? You’re a bit old to be sent to your room without any supper, and I believe I rather gave you your autonomy from Teka’s dictates when I let you and Talat ride out alone.” He paused. “I suppose you needed to get far enough away from the City to build a fire big enough to test your discovery thoroughly.” Aerin still said nothing. “I can’t forbid you Talat, for he’s your horse now, and I love him too well to deny him his master.”
He paused again. “You seem to be rather a military problem, but as you have no rank I cannot strip you of it, and as you do not bear a sword from the king’s hands he can’t take it away from you and hit you with the flat of it.” His eyes lingered for a moment on Aerin’s eighteenth-birthday present hanging by her side, but he did not mention it.
This time the pause was a long one. “Will you teach the making of the fire ointment if I ask it? “
Aerin raised her head. He could command her to explain it, and knew that she knew he could so command her. “I would gladly teach any who ... gladly would learn it,” and as she recognized that he did not command her, he recognized that she said gladly would learn from me, the witchwoman’s daughter; for he knew, for all that it had never been spoken in his ears, what his second wife had been called.
“I would learn.” He reached for the sack of ointment that Aerin had left lying on his table, took a little of the yellow grease on his fingertips, and rubbed thumb and forefinger together. He sniffed. “I suppose this explains the tales of the first sol’s suddenly frequent visits to the apothecaries.”
Aerin gulped and nodded. “I would—would be honored to show you the making of the kenet, sir.”
Arlbeth stood up and came over to hug his daughter, and left his arm around her shoulders, mindless of the sleek fur of his sleeve and the condition of her leather tunic. “Look, you silly young fool. I understand why you have behaved as you have done, and I sympathize, and I am also tremendously proud of you. But kindly don’t go around risking your life to prove any more points, will you? Come talk to me about it first at least.