At last she grew restless, as she had in the dragon’s valley, and she began to creep about the castle, and visit Talat in the stables. He had his old stall back, and Arlbeth’s young Kethtaz had actually been moved one stall down to give his predecessor pride of place. Talat was very conscious of eminence regained. She investigated his croup carefully with her fingers; the weals from the dragonfire had disappeared, although she could still see them, for the hair had grown back lying in the opposite direction from the hair around them.
Her own hair was growing in vigorously if unevenly, and Teka one day combed it out from a center spot at the top of her skull and cut in a neat arch around her face, for it was no longer curly. Aerin looked at herself in the mirror and laughed. “I look like a boy.”
“No,” said Teka, sweeping up the trimmings. “You look like a girl with a boy’s haircut.”
Aerin stared at herself. She had avoided mirrors as she had avoided everyone but Tor and Teka and her father, and the healers they sent, who could not be got rid of; and now that she finally dared herself to look in a mirror she was surprised at what she saw. The shiny scars across her left cheek—and a few flecks, like freckles, on the other side of her face, where the hot dragon blood had splashed her—were visible but not disfiguring. Her scalp was still tender on the left, and she had to use her hairbrush tentatively; but her hair was coming back as thick as before, although it was several shades darker and almost straight. But her face was drawn and pale, except for two spots of red high on her cheekbones; and there were lines on her face that had not been there before, and her eyes looked as old as Arlbeth’s, “I look a lot more like my mother now, don’t I?” she said.
Teka paused with the cloth she’d used to gather the hair clippings dangling from her hand. “Yes,” she said.
The first morning she came to breakfast with her father again. Tor was there too, and was not able to stop himself from jumping out of his chair and hugging her. He was so glad to see her walking, and with her hair grown out and combed smoothly around her face, that he almost managed not to think about how little there was of her to hug, how frail she felt; how each breath she took seemed to shake her, like a wind through a sapling. She smiled up at him, and he saw the red spots on her cheekbones, but he looked only at her smile.
She asked about Nyrlol, and Arlbeth said that he had been humble—no, craven—in a way Arlbeth had disliked even more than Nyrlol’s usual overbearing bluster; it was as if the threat of secession had never happened. Nyrlol had seemed nervous, looking behind himself too frequently, starting at sounds no one else heard. He apologized, and claimed that he was not sleeping well; that there was too much raiding on his borders and he seemed able to do too little about it. Arlbeth, with the army at his back, had made the correct noises, and after a visit of the shortest possible length consistent with courtesy, headed for home, leaving a division of his army behind to help watch the Border near Nyrlol’s land for him. Nyrlol had seemed honestly grateful, and that made Arlbeth even more uneasy; but there was nothing more he could do.
“I have no doubt that we were lured away from the City just then for a purpose,” said Arlbeth, “and the best I could do then was return as quickly as the horses could run. I had almost forgotten Maur.”
“I hadn’t,” murmured Tor, and his eyes flicked up to Aerin’s face and away again, and she knew that he had guessed she would ride back with the messenger and face the Black Dragon alone.
Arlbeth frowned into his cup. “But if the only purpose was to set the Black Dragon upon us, why then does the feeling of a dark fate still cling around us? For it does.”
“Yes,” said Tor.
There was a silence, and Arlbeth said at last: “We can only hope that Aerin-sol has so disturbed their plans”—and by their his auditors knew he meant the Northerners—”that we will have time enough to prepare, and strength enough in reserve.”
Neither Arlbeth nor Tor ever told her what they had thought when they first saw her, bent and burnt and coughing blood onto Talat’s white neck; and Aerin did not ask. All else that was said on the subject occurred that same morning: “I owe you a punishment for carrying the king’s sword without the king’s wishes, Aerin-sol,” her father said gravely.
She had been thinking much of this herself lately, and she nodded. “I await your command.”
Tor made a noise, and Arlbeth waved him to silence. “The punishment is that you remain prisoned in the City and not carry your sword for two seasons, half a year, and not less. Maur has taken care of that for me.”
She bowed her head; and then a woman of the hafor brought fresh malak and hot rolls, and they busied themselves with passing and pouring, and that was the end of it. She put milk in her malak now, to cool it before she drank it, so that she would not have to wait so obviously for it to grow tepid by itself—a long process at the king’s castle, where it was served in huge heavy earthenware cups with wide thick bases and narrow tapered rims. She didn’t like the flavor so well—malak was supposed to bite, and the milk gentled it—but there were worse compromises she had to make.
Arlbeth asked her when they might hold the banquet in her honor, and she blinked stupidly at him, thinking. My birthday isn’t till—?
“Maur,” he said gently. “We wish to honor you for your slaying of Maur.”
Tor and Arlbeth both knew she wanted nothing of the sort, but she said grimly, “I thank you. Name the day.”
The hush that fell on the great half that evening when she entered it was worse even than what she had imagined. It should have been little different than it ever had been, for her father’s court had never been easy in the presence of his daughter; but it was different nonetheless. Her head buzzed with the silence, and her dim vision dimmed further, till the people around her were no more than vague hulks draped in the bright colors of their court clothing. She wore a long brown dress, high in the collar, and with sleeves that fell past her wrists; and while there was much embroidery on it, the threads were black and darker brown, and she went bareheaded, and wore only one ring, on her right hand. She looked around, and the hulks turned slowly away from her, and she took her place at her father’s side. The talk started up again, but she did not hear the words of it; she heard the broken flickering fear beneath it, and calmly she thought: It is I that they are afraid of.
Maur’s ugly black skull had been hung high on one wall of the great hall, whose ceilings were three stories tall. It had been placed there by some other direction, for she had had nothing to do with it, nor would have wanted it there had she been asked. Even in the great hall it was huge; she looked at it, and it she could see clearly, and it leered at her. I am the shape of their fear, it said, for you dared to slay me. I am the shape of their fear, the thing said.
But I am lame and crippled from our meeting, she replied; I am human like them, for I was sorely wounded.
The thing laughed; the laugh came as a ripple of heavy silence that muffled the uncertain conversation in the hall; but only Aerin heard. Ah, but you lived, and you slew me; that is enough, and more than enough, for I was as big as a mountain and might have swallowed all of Damar at last. The villagers who saw me before you came—the man who guided you to me—all say that when I reared up, my head touched the stars; that nothing human could have stood against me. They say it who saw me, with awe and gratitude for their deliverance; but that is not how the story travels.
She heard the rhythm of the voices around her; the broken rhythm of syllables under the words they said aloud. Witch, they said. Witchwoman’s daughter.