It was another long afternoon before she dragged herself within reach of her saddlebags, for she had often to climb back into the water and soothe her burns and her throbbing ankle. She lay with one hand on their smooth leather, and then thought: A fire. If I could boil something to a pulp till I could swallow it .... She fumbled one of the flaps open; there was still bread, and she put it in her hand and held her hand in the water till she felt it begin to disintegrate, and then lapped it up slowly.
She did build a fire; she found a way to wedge her tinder between stones so that she could strike it with her good hand; and fortunately there was plenty of fuel by the shores of the stream. Trees still grew here, for they were a little protected from the dragon’s valley by the long stone shoulder that had hidden Maur from Aerin’s campsite. She found the remains of her campfire, and it looked old and weathered; and she thought to notice that the stream was running clear again, and she wondered again how long she had lain in the stream. She found a flat rock for a lid, and began the long process of boiling dried meat in her tin till it was soft enough for her to eat. She didn’t dare make the fire very large, for she could not go far to fetch wood for it; nor could she bear the heat of it.
She slept, or fainted again, often, drifting back and forth across the boundary of selfhood; it was no longer only oblivion that those periods of blank ness brought her, but the beginning of healing. She pried the boot off her right foot, gingerly felt the ankle, wrapped it in strips made from spare clothing, tying knots with one hand and her teeth; and hoped she was doing something useful. The wrappings reminded her, if they did no other good, to keep the foot quiet, and the ache of it ebbed away to a dull mutter.
She had looked only once at her left arm, and had felt so sick at the sight that she did not look again. But not looking reminded her the same way as bandaging her foot reminded her; and the pain of the burns had subsided but little, and she had often to crawl back to the stream and soak herself in it. And how long before I get sick from the cold? she thought, shivering; for now that her body was trying to fight back it recognized that lying in cold water for long periods of time is not generally a good thing to do, and the unhurt bits of it shivered. She sneezed, and sneezed again. Great, she thought dully, and her eyes fell again on the saddlebags. It was hard to think because of the pain.
Kenet, she thought. Kenet. It can’t hurt to try.
Hope rose up and blocked her aching throat. She crept to the saddlebags and unrolled the long wallet that held the kenet; and twitched her left arm forward and let it lie in the thick yellow ointment. She closed her eyes, trying not to hope so desperately; she feared the pain might drive her mad soon, and she could not spare the strength to withstand too great a disappointment. But as she grappled with herself the pain in her arm dwindled and ebbed and finally died away to a vague queasy discomfort. I’m imagining this, she thought, holding perfectly still so as not to disrupt the beautiful unexpected dream of peace. She opened her eyes. Her arm was still black and horrible-looking. She lay down, very, very slowly, til her left cheek was cradled as well in the dragonfire ointment; and slowly her face, too, hurt less and less till it did not hurt at all. She fell into sleep, real sleep, the first real sleep she had had since the evening she had read Tor’s note.
She dreamed that she woke up, lying with her left arm curled around her head, and her left cheek pressed to the ground. She rose up on both elbows and noticed without finding it remarkable that both arms were whole and strong. She sat up, hands falling easily and languorously into her lap. She rubbed her palms together and thought uncomfortably that she had had a most unpleasant dream about a very large dragon .... As she bent her head forward her hair fell forward too, and she noticed two things: first, that her hair was short, barely chin length. This disturbed her, for she knew that she would never cut her hair; Teka was adamant about this, and Aerin was secretly a little proud of the fact that her hair was even longer than Galanna’s, falling unbound almost to her ankles, the weight of it stretching the curls into long ripples. It was also nearly straight now; and when she was younger and her hair shorter, it had been mercilessly curly. But, worst of all, it was the wrong color. It was still red, but it was the darker color of flaring embers, not the paler shade of the leaping flames. Panic seized her; she was not herself; she had died; or, worse, she, Aerin still existed, but the dream of the dragon had not been a dream at all, but real, and the real Aerin still lay somewhere with a burned face and a blackened arm and a broken ankle, and this healthy painless body she presently inhabited belonged to someone else; she would not be permitted to stay.
“I will help you if I can,” said a voice; but she was dreaming, and could not be sure if the words were spoken aloud. She looked up from where she sat huddled on the ground; a tall blond man stood near her. He knelt beside her; his eyes were blue, and kind, and anxious. “Aerin-sol,” he said. “Remember me; you have need of me, and I will help you if I can.” A flicker came and went in the blue eyes. “And you shall again aid Damar, for I will tell you how.”
“No,” she said, for she remembered Maur, and knew Maur was real, whether or not she was dreaming now; “no, I cannot. I cannot. Let me stay here,” she begged. “Don’t send me back.”
A line formed between the blue eyes; he reached one hand toward her, but hesitated and did not touch her. “I cannot help it. I can barely keep you here for the space of a dream; you are being pulled back even now.”
It was true. The smell of kenet was in her nostrils again, and the sound of running water in her ears. “But how will I find you?” she asked desperately; and then she was awake. Slowly she opened her eyes; but she lay where she was for a long time.
Eventually she began walking again, leaning heavily on a thick branch she had found and laboriously trimmed to the proper length. She had to walk very slowly, not only for the sake of her ankle, but that her left arm not be shaken too gravely; and she still had trouble breathing. Even when she breathed in tiny shallow gasps it hurt, and when she forgot and sucked in too much air she coughed; and when she coughed, she coughed blood. But her face and arm were healing.
She had also discovered that the hair on the left side of her head was gone, burnt by the same blast of dragonfire that had scarred her cheek. So she took her hunting knife, the same ill-used blade that had been forced to chop her a cane, and sawed off the rest of her hair till none of it was longer than hand’s width. Her neck felt rubbery with the sudden weightlessness, and the wind seemed to whistle in her ears and down her collar more than it used to. She might have wept a little for her hair, but she felt too old and grim and worn.
She avoided wondering what her face looked like under her chopped-off hair. She thought fixedly of other things when she rubbed kenet into her cheek, and when she dressed and rebound her arm. She did not think at all about being willing to face other people again, except to cringe mentally away from the idea. She was not vain as Galanna was vain, but she who had always disliked being noticed was automatically conspicuous as the only pale-skinned redhead in a country of cinnamon-skinned brunettes; she could not bear that her wounds now should make her grotesque as well. It took strength to deal with people, strength to acknowledge herself as first sol, strength to be the public figure she could not help being; and she had no strength to spare. She tried to tell herself that her hurts were honorably won; even that she should be proud of them, that she had successfully done something heroic; but it did no good. Her instinct was to hide.