“Are you sure?” she whispered.
“One is never sure of anything,” he snapped; but she had learned that his anger was not directed at her, but at his own fears, and she waited. He closed his eyes again, thinking. She’s being patient with me. Gods, what has happened to me? I’ve been a master mage since old Goriolo put the mark on me, and he could almost remember when the moon was first hung in the sky. And this child with her red hair looks at me once with those smoky feverish eyes and I panic and dunk her in the lake. What is the matter with me?
He opened his eyes again and looked down at her. Her eyes were still smoky, green and hazel, still gleaming with the occasional amber flame, but they were no longer feverish, and their calm shook him now almost as badly as their dying glitter had done. “I followed you, you know, when you went under. I—I had to make a rather bad bargain to bring you back again. It was not a bargain I was expecting to have to make.” He paused. “I’m pretty sure.”
The eyes wavered and dropped. She looked at her one hand tucked over Luthe’s arm, and brought the other up to join it; and gently, as if she might like his comfort no better than she had liked his gift, he put his other arm around her; and she leaned slowly forward and rested her head against his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She laughed the whisper of a laugh. “I was not ready to die yet; very well, I shall live longer than I wished.”
She stirred, and moved away from him, and her arms dropped; but when he took one of her hands she did not try to withdraw it. The wind rustled lightly in the leaves. “You promised me food,” she said lightly.
“I did. Come along, then.”
The way back to Luthe’s hall was narrow, and as they walked side by side, for Luthe would not relinquish her hand, they had to walk very near each other. Aerin was glad when she saw the grey stone of the hall rear up before her, and at the edge of the small courtyard she broke away from the man beside her, and ran up the low steps and into the huge high room; and by the time he rejoined her she was busily engaged in pretending to warm her hands at the hearth. But she had no need of the fire’s warmth, for her blood was strangely stirred, and the flush on her face was from more than the fire’s red light.
Over supper she said, “I have not heard anyone else call it kelar. Just the Gift, or the royal blood.”
He was grateful that she chose to break the silence and answered quickly: “Yes, that’s true enough, although your family made themselves royalty on the strength of it, not the other way round. It came from the North originally.” He smiled at her stricken look. “Yes, it did; you and the demon-kind share an ancestor, and you have both lived to bear kelar through many generations. You need that common ancestor; without the unphysical strength the kelar grants you, you could not fight the demonkind, and Damar would not exist.”
She laughed her whispered laugh again, and said, “One in the eye for those who like to throw up to me my status as a half-blood.”
“Indeed,” said Luthe, and the flicker of temper she had grown accustomed to seeing whenever they discussed her father’s court flashed across his face. “Their ignorance is so great they are terrified by a hint of the truth; a hint such as you are in yourself.”
“You overrate me,” Aerin said. “I may be all you say of me now, but I have been nothing—nothing but an inconvenient nuisance; inconvenient particularly because I had the ill grace to get born to the king, where I could not be ignored as I deserved.”
“Ignored,” said Luthe. “You should be queen after your father. The sober responsible Tor is no better than a usurper.”
“No,” she replied, stung. “Tor is sober and responsible and he will make a far better king than I would a queen. Which is just as well, since he’s for it and I’m not.”
“Why not?” said Luthe. “It is you who is Arlbeth’s child.”
“By his second marriage,” said Aerin. “If Queen Tatoria had borne a child, of course it would have ruled after Arlbeth—or it would certainly have ruled if it were a son. But she didn’t. She died. Kings aren’t supposed to remarry anyway, but they may under extreme duress, like childless widower-hood; but they can’t marry unknown foreigners of questionable blood. I’m sure it was a great relief to all concerned when the unknown foreigner’s pregnancy resulted in a girl—they usually manage not to let even firstborn girls of impeccable breeding inherit, so shunting me aside was as easy as swearing by the Seven Perfect Gods.
“Galanna prefers to think I’m a bastard, but I’ve seen the record book, and I am down as legitimate—but not as a legitimate heir. The priests chose to call my father’s second marriage morganatic—my mother wasn’t even permitted to be Honored Wife. Just in case she had a boy.”
Aerin’s sense of the passage of time had been uncertain since she met Maur; and as her health returned in Luthe’s mountain valley, she yet had difficulty in believing that days and weeks had any meaning. When it occurred to her that one season had passed and another was passing, and that these were things she should take note of, she backed away from that knowledge again, for it was then that what Luthe had told her about the price she had paid to regain her life rose up and mocked her. Immortality was far more terrible a price than any she might have imagined.
As the air grew colder and the grass in the meadow turned brown and dull violet and as the flowers stopped blooming she pretended to notice these things only as isolated phenomena. Luthe watched her, and knew much of what she thinking, but had no comfort for her; all he could offer was his knowledge, of magic, of history, of Damar; of the worlds he had traveled, and the wonders he brought back. He taught her eagerly, and eagerly she learned, each of them distracting the other from something each could not yet face. Snow fell, and Talat and the cattle and sheep spent their days in the low open barn at the edge of their meadow; and sometimes a few deer joined them at their hay and oats; but the deer came mostly for the company—and the oats—because winter never fell harshly where Luthe was, nor did ice ever rime even the shores of the Lake of Dreams.
Sometimes what she learned frightened her, or perhaps it was that she could learn such things from a mage that frightened her; and one day, almost involuntarily she asked: “Why do you tell me ... so much?”
Luthe considered her. “I tell you ... some you need to know, and some you have earned the right to know, and some it won’t hurt you to know—” He stopped.
“And some?” He raised his hands and his eyebrows; smiled faintly. The pale winter sun gleamed on his yellow hair and glinted in his blue eyes. There were no lines in his face, and his narrow shoulders were straight and square; but still he looked old to her, old as the mountains, older than the great grey hall he inhabited, that looked as though it had stood there since the sun first found the silver lake. “Some things I tell you only because I wish to tell them to you.”
Aerin’s lessons grew longer and longer, for her brain’s capacity seemed to increase as the strength of her body did; and she began to love the learning for its own sake, and not merely for the fact that there was kelar in her blood, and that the house of the king of Damar need not be ashamed to claim her; and then she could not learn enough.
“I shall have to give you the mage mark soon,” Luthe said, smiling, one grey afternoon as the snow fell softly outside.
Aerin stood up and paced restlessly, twice the length of the hall to the open door and back to the hearth and the table where Luthe sat. It was a wonderful hall for pacing, for it took several minutes, even for the fidgetiest, to get from one end of it to the other and back again. The door stood open all year long, for the cold somehow stayed outside, and the only draughts were warm ones from the fire. Aerin stared at the glinting white courtyard for a moment before returning to Luthe and the table before the fire.
“I came here first for healing and second for knowledge—but by the gods and their hells I do not know if I can bear either. And yet I have no choice. And yet I do not know even what I wished to know.”