Chapter 21
THEY STARTED BACK toward the mountains before the sun had risen much higher. Aerin had buried the ashes of the fire, out of habit, for there was certainly nothing around that might burn; and she reverently wrapped the surka wreath and its stone, and the Crown, and stowed them in one of Talat’s saddlebags. There was nothing else left to do.
Her entourage strung out behind her, cats on one flank, dogs on the other. Only once did she look back, when they were already well across the plain and the sun was beginning to drop toward evening. The way did slope down from the dark mountain, and she was sure that this one thing had changed, even if there had been a disappearing forest between. But if this was the worst of what remained, she thought, they were getting off very lightly.
The ruins of the black tower were small in the distance, and they seemed to leer at her, but it was a small nasty, useless leer, like a tyrant on the scaffold as the rope is placed around his neck. This plain would not be a healthy or attractive place for many years to come, but it would not be a dangerous one either. She went on with a lighter heart.
She was eager to reach the edge of her beloved Damarian Hills by nightfall, that she might camp in their shadow and drink from their clean waters, and so kept on into the beginning twilight. She wanted to sing when she caught the first breath of the evening breeze from the kindly trees; but her voice had never adapted itself to carrying a tune, so she didn’t. Her army all seemed to be glad to be under familiar leaves again, and the dogs wagged their tails and made cheerful playful snaps at one another, and the cats knocked each other with clawless feet, and rolled on the ground. Talat pranced. And so they came merrily to a turn in the path they followed, paying attention to nothing but their own pleasure; and then Aerin caught a sudden whiff of smoke as from a small fire, and then the smell of cooking. She sat down hard, but Talat’s ears flicked back at her. What do you mean stop here? and went on. And there was a small campfire, tucked in the curve of the trail where there was a little clearing and a stream curving around the other side of it.
“Good day to you,” said Luthe.
Talat whickered a greeting, and Aerin slid off him and he went forward alone to nose Luthe’s hands and browse in his hair. “I thought you never left your hall and your lake,” said Aerin.
“Rarely,” said Luthe. “In fact, increasingly exceedingly rarely. But I can be prodded by extraordinary circumstances.”
Aerin smiled faintly. “You have had plenty to choose from here recently.”
“Yes.”
“May I ask which particular circumstance was sufficiently extraordinary in this case?”
“Aerin—” Luthe paused, and then his voice took on its bantering tone again. “I thought you might like to be dragged back to the present, that you might arrive in time to give Tor his Crown and end the siege; and of course now instead of a few hundred years hence there is no jungle to be compelled to claw your way through. I’ve no doubt you could have done it, but it would have put you in a foul temper, and you would have been in a fouler one by the time you came back to the Lake of Dreams—assuming you would have had the sense to make your way there, not in your case something one can count on. You would have needed my assistance to regain your own time—if lighting a little fire made you see double, charging about in time without assistance would have blinded you for good—and the longer you’re out of it, the harder it would have been to get you back in. So I came to meet you.”
Aerin stared at the fire, for she couldn’t think at all when she looked at Luthe. “I really was a long time climbing, then,” she said.
“Yes,” said Luthe. “A very long time.”
“And a very long time falling.”
“And a very long time falling.”
Aerin said nothing more while she pulled Talat’s saddle off and dropped it by the fire, and rubbed his back dry, and checked his feet for small stones. “I suppose I should forgive you, then, for making me other than mortal,” she said.
“You might. I would appreciate it if you did.” He sighed. “It would be nice to claim that I knew this was going to happen all along, knew that your only chance of success in regaining your Crown was to do as I did. But I didn’t. Sheer blind luck, I’m afraid.”
He handed her a cup of malak, steaming hot, which she drank greedily; then stew on a thin metal plate, but she ate it so fast it had no time to burn her fingers, and then she had seconds and thirds. When she was finished at last, Luthe gave what remained to the king cat and queen dog, in carefully measured halves, on separate plates. Aerin heard his footsteps behind her as he returned from setting those two plates out, and she said, “Thank you.”
The footsteps paused just behind her, and she felt him bend over her, and then his hands rested on her shoulders. She put her own hands up, and drew his down, till he was kneeling behind her, and he bowed his head to press his cheek to her face. She turned in his arms, and put her own arms around his neck and raised her face and kissed him.
They remained near the fire far into the night, feeding it with twigs so that it would keep burning; the animals were all long since asleep, and even Talat was relaxed enough to lie down and doze. Luthe sprawled on his back with his head in Aerin’s lap, and she stroked his hair through her fingers, watching the thick curls wind around her fingers, stretch to their fullest length, and spring back again. “Is it so amusing?” said Luthe.
“Yes,” said Aerin, “although I should like it just as well if it were straight and green, or if you were bald as an egg and painted your head silver.”
She had not told him much of her meeting with her uncle, nor had she asked him any questions about him; but she could not say how much he guessed—or knew, in the same way he knew of her fire-starting—and she listened eagerly when he began to talk of Agsded, and of their school days together. The chill of hating someone with her own face eased as she listened, and eased still more at the sight of Luthe smiling up into her face as he talked; and at last she told him, haltingly, a little of what had passed between them.
Luthe looked wry, and was silent for a time, and they heard the soft contented moan of a dog stretching in its sleep. “Agsded was not entirely wrong about me,” he said at last. “I was stubborn, and no, frankly, I was not one of Goriolo’s most brilliant and promising pupils. But I survived on that stubbornness and stayed with my master long enough to learn more than most of the ones who had greater gifts to begin with and then went off and got themselves killed or became sheep farmers because a mage’s life is such a grim and thankless one.
“I was also always at my worst when Agsded was around, for he was one of those glittering people whose every gesture looks like a miracle, whose every word sounds like a new philosophy. You’ve a bit of that yourself, valiantly as you seek to hide it.
“But I don’t know that he and I are so unequal in the end; for as I made mistakes in ignorance, or obstinacy, he made mistakes in pride ... .”
“You haven’t asked me how I—how he lost and I won,” said Aerin, after another pause.
“I have no intention of asking. You may tell me or not as you wish, now or later.”