She had briefly thought with terror that the villagers had sent the messenger to the king that morning so long ago might send another messenger to find out what had become of either sol or dragon; but then she realized that they would do no such thing. If the sol had killed the dragon (unlikely), she would doubtless come and tell them about it. If she didn’t, the dragon could be presumed to have killed her, and they would stay as far away as possible.
At last she grew restless. “Perhaps we should go home,” she said to Talat. She wondered how it had gone with Arlbeth and Tor and the army; it could all be over now, or Damar could be at war, or—almost anything. She didn’t know how long she’d been in the dragon’s valley, and she began to want urgently to know what was happening outside. But she did not yet have the courage to venture out of Maur’s black grave-out where she would have to face people again.
Meanwhile she walked a little farther and a little farther each day: and one day she finally left the steam bank, and hobbled around the high rock that separated the stream from the black valley where Maur lay. As the sound of the stream receded she kept her eyes on her feet; one booted and one wrapped in heavy tattered and grimy rags; and one of them stepping farther than the other. She watched their uneven progress till she passed the rock wall by, and a little gust of burnt-smelling breeze pressed her cheek, and the sound of her footsteps became the slide-crunch, slide-crunch of walking on ash and cinders. She looked up.
Carrion beasts had not gotten far with the dead dragon. Its eyes were gone, but the heavy hide of the creature was too much for ordinary teeth and claws. Maur looked smaller to her, though; withered and shrunken, the thick skin more crumpled. Slowly she limped nearer, and the small breeze whipped around and stroked her other cheek. There was no smell of rotting flesh in the small valley, although the sun beat down overhead and made her cheek, despite the kenet on it, throb with the heat. The valley reeked, but of smoke and ash; small black flakes still hung in the air, and when the breeze struck her full in the face the cinders caught in her throat and she coughed. She coughed, and bent over her walking stick, and gasped, and coughed again; and then Talat, who had not wanted to follow her into the dragon’s valley but didn’t want to let her out of his sight either, blew down the back of her bare neck and touched his nose to her shoulder. She turned toward him and threw her right arm over his withers and pressed the side of her face into his neck, breathing through the fine hairs of his mane till the coughing eased and she could stand by herself again.
The dragon’s snaky neck lay stretched out along the ground, the long black snout looking like a ridge of black rock. Ash lay more heavily around the dragon than in the rest of the small valley, in spite of the breeze; but around the dragon the breeze lifted a cloud that eddied and lifted and swelled and diminished so that it was hard to tell—as it had been when she and Talat had first ridden to confront the monster—where Maur ended and the earth began. As she watched, another small brisk vagrant breeze swept down the body of the dragon, scouring its length from shoulder hump to the heavy tail; a great black wave of ash reared up in the breeze’s wake and crested, and misted out to drift over the rest of the valley. Aerin hid her face in Talat’s mane again.
When she looked up she stared at Maur, waiting to think something, feel something at the sight of the thing that she had killed, that had so nearly killed her; but her mind was blank, and she had no hatred or bitterness nor any sense of victory left in her heart; it had all been burned away by the pain. Maur was only a great ugly black lump. As she stared, another small breeze kicked up a windspout, a small ashy cyclone, just beyond the end of the dragon’s nose. Something glittered there on the ground. Something red.
She blinked. The wind-spout died away, and the ash fell into new ribs and whorls; but Aerin thought she could still see a small hummock in the ash, a small hummock that dimly gleamed red. She limped toward it, and Talat, his ears half back to show his disapproval, followed.
She stood on one foot and dug with her stick; and she struck the small red thing, which with the impulsion of the blow sprang free of the black cinders, made a small fiery arc through the air, and fell to the earth again, and the ash spun upward in the air draught it made and fell in ripples around it, like a stone thrown into a pond.
Aerin had some trouble kneeling down, but Talat, who had adjusted to his lady’s new slow ways, came and stood beside her and let her clutch her way one-handed down a foreleg. She picked the red thing up; it was hard and glittering and a deep translucent red, like a jewel. “Well,” she whispered. I can’t take the head away as a trophy this time; so I will take this. Whatever it is.”
She tucked it into the front of her tunic, where her bound arm made a cradle for it, and pulled herself back up Talat’s foreleg again. He had gotten so good at being an invalid’s assistant that she could lean her stick against him and he would not move till she took it back in her hand, that she need not have to pick it up from the ground.
A few days after she found the red dragon stone she looked around for something high enough to let her climb up onto Talat’s back, and low enough that she could climb up onto it in the first place. This took some doing. She finally persuaded him—he was willing to be persuaded once he could figure out what strange thing she next wanted of him—to stand in the stream while she edged out, balanced precariously on her buttocks and one hand, down a long heavy overhanging branch from a tree growing near the shallow bank; and lowered herself as slowly as possible onto his bare back. He gave a little whicker of pleasure to have her there again, and took steps as smooth as silk when he carried her; and she sat up a little straighter than she could stand on her own feet, and felt a tiny bit more like a king’s daughter than she had for a long time. She rode him up and down the bank of the stream that day, just for the pleasure of a motion that didn’t hurt her right ankle; and the next day she saddled him and tried it again, and the day after that she saddled him and tied the remains of her belongings clumsily behind the saddle, and they left the stream and Maur’s valley forever. The red stone knocked gently against her ribs as her body swung back and forth in rhythm to Talat’s long gentle stride.
Chapter 14
IT TOOK THEM three days of Talat’s careful walking to come to the crossroads where they had parted with their guide to go on and face the dragon; three days complicated by the fact that Aerin didn’t dare dismount till she found something near a campsite that would let her remount in the morning.
She was deadly tired each evening; her ankle throbbed from hanging vertical so long; and she realized how much weaker she was even than she had thought. It was hard to make herself eat; she was never hungry, and eating hurt, and she ate dutifully because eating was something one did; but she got more pleasure out of watching Talat graze. He had eaten everything edible along the banks of their stream, including some of the bark off the trees, and he tore with great enthusiasm into the fresh grass they now camped beside.
Not infrequently during the day she would come to herself again and look around and realize that she had drifted away. Sometimes it would take her a minute or two just to recognize the trees around her, common Damarian trees whose shapes and leaf patterns had been familiar to her since childhood. Occasionally she woke up and found herself collapsed forward on Talat’s neck. But he would not let her fall off, and she didn’t. He carried her steadily, his ears pricked and cautious; and he seemed to feel no hesitation about their direction.