Later they spoke in snatches as they tended their horses and helped elsewhere as they could. Aerin, numb with shock and sorrow, did not think of her father’s last words to her, and did not think there might be special healing in her hands, or in the hands of him who wore the Hero’s Crown; for that was something else that Luthe had forgotten to teach her. And so she went merely where there was a cry for an extra pair of hands. But somehow she and Tor managed to stay near each other, and the presence of the other was to each a comfort.
Aerin thought of a black tower falling as she tucked blankets, of the Hero’s Crown no longer on the head of one who worked to do Damar evil as she pinned bandages; and as she crouched for a moment near the great campfire that threw wild shadows on the walls of her City, she thought of words spoken by another fire: How could anyone be so stupid as to bring back the Black Dragon’s head as a trophy and hang it on a wall for folk to gape at?
Abruptly she turned to Tor and said; “Where is Maur’s head?”
Tor stared at her; he was dazed with grief and exhaustion even as she was, and he could not think who Maur was.
“Before I left, I asked that Maur’s head be put somewhere that I need not look at it. Do you know where it was taken?” There was urgency in her question, suddenly, although she herself did not know why; but the urgency penetrated the fog in Tor’s mind.
“In—in the treasure hall, I believe,” Tor said uncertainly. “I’m not sure.”
Aerin reeled to her feet, and a plush-furred black head was at once beneath her hand, propping her up. “I must go there.”
“Now?” Tor said unhappily, looking around. “Then I’ll go too .... We’ll have to walk; there isn’t a fresh horse in all the City.”
It was a brutally long walk, almost all uphill, for the king’s castle stood at the City’s peak, a lower Hat-topped shoulder within the encircling mountains. Several of Aerin’s army came with them, and the tallest ones silently supported Tor, and he wonderingly stroked the heads and backs he found beneath his fingers. “A long story you have to tell me,” Tor said; it was not a question.
Aerin smiled as much of a smile as her weariness allowed. “A very long story.” She was much too tired to weep any more, but she sighed, and perhaps Tor heard something in that sigh, for he edged a yerig out of the way and put an arm around her, and they toiled up together, leaning on each other.
The castle was deserted. Tomorrow many of the sick and wounded would be brought here; for this night they would stay by the fire at the foot of the king’s way, for even the hale and whole had no strength left, and there had been no one in the City during the last days’ fighting; all had been below, doing what they could.
Tor found candles, and by some wonder he still carried his flint. The castle was eerie in its silence and solitude and darkness; and Aerin’s tiredness drew little dancing designs at the corners of her sight and pulled the shadows closer in around the candlelight. She found she had to follow Tor blindly; she had spent almost her whole life in these halls, and yet in but a few months she had forgotten her way through them; and then horribly she remembered climbing centuries of stairs in a darkness very like this, and she shivered violently, and her breath hissed through her teeth. Tor glanced at her and held out his free hand, and she took it gratefully for she had been all alone on those other stairs.
“Here we are, I believe,” Tor said. She dropped his hand so that he could attend to the lock, one of the small magics she had never been able to learn. He muttered a moment, touched the door in five places, and the door slid open.
A blast of grief, of the deaths of children, of crippling diseases that took beauty at once but withheld death; of unconsummated love; of love lost or twisted and grown to hate; of noble deeds that proved useless, that broke the hearts of their doers; of betrayal without reason, of guilt without penance, of all the human miseries that have ever occurred; all this struck them, like the breath of a slaughterhouse, or the blow of a murderer. Tor fell to his knees and covered his face with his hands, and the beasts cringed back, moaning. Aerin put out her hand, leaned against the doorframe; just this she had feared, had half expected; yet the reality was much worse than what her tired mind had been able to prepare her for.
Greetings, said Maur’s head. I did not think to have the pleasure of seeing you again.
It is you, responded Aerin. She opened her mouth to gasp, and despair rushed in, bitter as aloes. Tears filled her eyes, but she pushed herself away from the threshold and bent slowly and carefully to pick up the candle Tor had set down before he opened the door. She shook her head to clear her vision, held the candle aloft, and stepped inside the high vaulted room, despite the silent keening of the air. I know despair, she said. There is nothing more that you can show me.
Oh?
The keening changed tone and madness edged it, drifted across her skin, fluttered in her hair like bats’ wings; she ducked, and the candle guttered and almost went out. Maur laughed. She remembered that silent hollow laugh.
Angry, she said: Nothing!
“Aerin,” a voice said hoarsely behind her: Tor. “Light my way—I cannot—see you.” The words dragged out of him as he dragged himself to his feet. “This—is why—we’ve been—so—tired—all along.”
“Yes.” The sibilant hissed in the silence like adders’ tongues, but Aerin’s anger made a small clear space around her, and her beasts crept to her feet and breathed it gratefully, and Tor staggered to her like a man crossing a narrow bridge to freedom, and put an arm around her again, but this time it was for his own comfort.
“Tor,” she said calmly, “we must get rid of Maur’s head. Get it out of the City.”
Tor shook his head slowly; not in refusal but confusion. “How? It is too huge; we cannot lift it. We must wait ....”
Wait, snickered Maur’s head.
“No.” Aerin looked around wildly. The reek of despair stilt tingled in her nostrils and in her brain, and her anger was ebbing. She had to think. How?
“We can roll it,” she said at last. “It’s roundish. We can roll it downstairs, and then downhill—out of the City gates.” She thrust the candle at him. “Hold this.”
She walked purposefully up to the low platform where Maur’s skull lay; the shadows in the eye sockets glinted. Her beasts came after her, clinging to her shadow; and Tor came behind them, just clear-headed enough to hold the light high, and to watch Aerin.
She set her shoulder in one of the ridged hollows at the base of the skull and heaved. Nothing happened but that Maur laughed louder; its laughter crashed in her head like thunder, and her vision was stained red. Then Tor found a niche for the candle and came to help her; they heaved, and heaved again, and barely the massive skull rocked on its base. Then her beasts came, and clawed at the thing, and chipped their teeth on it; their lady’s anger and their own fear gave them a wild frenzy, and the skull shuddered where it lay, but they could stir it no further, and Aerin cried at last, “Peace!” and laid her hands on her loyal friends. They calmed under her touch, but they panted where they sat, even the cats, the curved white fangs glinting in the dim light. The candle was burning low.
“It’s no use,” said Tor heavily. He was still leaning against the skull, pressed up against it as if he loved the touch of it; Aerin grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him away, and he staggered. He blinked at her, and a little more of Tor crept back into his eyes, and he almost smiled, and with his sleeve he rubbed his face where it had lain against the skull.