“I know,” Aerin said, embarrassed. “Teka’s been feeding them only bread and milk these last two days, since she says she refuses to have the rooms smelling like a butcher’s shop, and fortunately there’s that back stair nobody uses—the way I used to sneak off and see Talat. But I never knew why they came to me in the first place, and so I don’t know how long they plan to stay, or—or how to get rid of them.” She gulped, and found herself staring into two steady yellow eyes; the folstza king’s tail twitched. “Nor, indeed, do I wish to be rid of them, although I know they aren’t particularly welcome here. I would be lonesome without them.” She remembered how they had huddled around her the night after she had left Luthe, and stopped speaking abruptly; the yellow eyes blinked slowly, and Tor became very busy refilling their goblets. She picked hers up and looked into it, and saw not Luthe, but the long years in her father’s house of not being particularly welcome; and she thought that perhaps she would enjoy filling the castle with not particularly welcome visitors that were too many and too alarming to be ignored.
“They shall stay here just as long as they wish,” Tor said. “Damar owes you any price you feel like asking, and,” he said dryly, “I don’t think it will hurt anyone to find you and your army just a little fear-inspiring.” Aerin grinned.
He told then of what had come to them during her absence; much of it she knew or guessed already. Nyrlol had rebelled for once and for all soon after she had ridden into Luthe’s mountains; and immediately the local sols and villages near him had either gone over to him or been razed. The division of his army Arlbeth had left to help Nyrlol patrol the Border had been caught in a Northern trap; less than half of their number survived to rejoin their king. Arlbeth had ridden out there in haste, leaving Tor in the City to prepare for what they now knew was to come; and it had come. It had come already, for when Arlbeth met Nyrlol in battle, the man’s face had been stiff with fear, but with the fear of what rode behind him, not what he faced; and when Arlbeth killed him, the fear, in his last moments of life, slid away, and a look of exhausted peace closed his eyes forever.
“Arlbeth wasn’t surprised, though,” Tor said. “We had known we were fighting a lost war since Maur first awoke.”
“I didn’t know,” said Aerin.
“Arlbeth saw no reason that you should,” said Tor. “We—we both knew you were dying.” He swallowed, and tapped his fingers on the tabletop. “I thought you would not likely live to see us fail, so why further shadow what time remained to you?
“When you left I felt hope for the first time. That note you left me—it wasn’t the words, it was just the feeling of the scrap of paper in my hands. I took it out often, just to touch it, and always I felt that hope again.” He smiled faintly. “I infected both Arlbeth and Teka with hope.” He paused, sighed, and went on. “I even chewed a leaf of surka, and asked to dream of you; and I saw you by the shore of a great silver lake, with a tall blond man beside you, and you were smiling out across the water, and you looked well and strong.” He looked up at her. “Any price is worth paying to have you here again, and cured of that which would have killed you long since. Any price .... Neither Arlbeth nor Teka was sure, as I was. I knew you would come back.”
“I hope at least the Crown was a surprise,” said Aerin.
Tor laughed. “The Crown was a surprise,”
The lifting of Maur’s evil influence was as important a relief to the beleaguered City as the unexpected final victory in the war; but there was still much healing to be done, and little time for merrymaking. Arlbeth was buried with quiet state. Tor and Aerin stood together at the funeral, as they had been almost always together since Aerin had ridden across the battlefield to give Tor the Crown; as the two of them had never publicly been together before. But the people, now, seemed to accept it, and they simply gave Aerin the same quiet undemonstrative respect that the first sola had received since the battle; it was as if they did not even differentiate between the two.
Everyone still felt more than a little grey, and perhaps in the aftermath of the Northerners a witch woman’s daughter whom they had, after all, grown used to seeing for over twenty years past seemed a small thing to worry about; and she was, after all, their Arlbeth’s daughter too, and Arlbeth they sincerely mourned, and they read in her face that she mourned too. She stood at Tor’s side while Arlbeth’s final bonfire burned up wildly as the incense and spices were thrown on it, and the tears streamed down her face; and her tears did more good for her in her people’s eyes than the Crown did, for few of them really understood about the Crown. But she wept not only for Arlbeth, but for Tor and for herself, and for their fatal ignorance; the wound that had killed the king had not been so serious a one, had he had any strength left. Maur’s weight on the king of the country it oppressed had been the heaviest, and the king had been old.
When Tor was proclaimed king in the long Damarian ceremony of sovereignty officially bestowed, it was the first time in many generations that a Damarian king wore a crown, the Hero’s Crown, for it had been tradition that the kings went bare-headed in memory of that Crown that was the heart of Damar’s strength and unity, and had been lost. After the ceremony the Crown was placed carefully back in the treasure hall.
When Aerin and Tor had gone to look for it three days after they hurled Maur’s skull out of the City, they had found it lying on the low vast pedestal where the head had lain. They had looked at it, and at each other, and had left it there. It was a small, flat, dull-grey object, and there was no reason to leave it on a low platform, little more than knee high, and wide enough for several horses to stand on; but they did. And when the treasure keeper, a courtier with a very high opinion of his own artistic integrity, tried to open the subject of a more suitable keeping-place, Aerin protested before the words were all out of his mouth, although they had been directed at Tor.
Tor simply forbade that the Crown be moved, and that was the end of it; and the treasure keeper, offended, bowed low to each of them in turn, and left. He might not have wished to be quite so polite to the witchwoman’s daughter, for the courtiers were inclined to take a more stringent view of such things than the rest of Damar. But any lack of courtesy that survived the highborn Damarians’ knowledge that Aerin-sol had fought fiercely in the last battle against the Northerners (although of course since she’d shown up only on the last day she’d had more energy left to spend), and the inalterable fact that their new king was planning to marry her, tended to back down in the face of the baleful glare of her four-legged henchmen. Not that they ever did anything but glare. But the treasure keeper’s visit had been watched with interest by nine quite large hairy beasts disposed about Aerin’s feet and various corners of the audience chamber.
Chapter 25
TOR HAD WANTED to marry her as part of the celebration of his kingship, and have her acknowledged queen as he was acknowledged king, but Aerin insisted they wait.
“One might almost think you didn’t want to be queen,” Tor said glumly.
“One might almost be right,” replied Aerin. “But it’s more that I don’t want anybody to have the opportunity to say that I slipped in the back door. That I was assuming everyone would be so preoccupied with you that no one would notice I was being declared official queen by the way.”
“Mm,” said Tor.
“It was Arlbeth who told me that once royalty commits itself it can’t go back into hiding,” Aerin said.
Tor nodded his head slowly. “Very well. But I think you’re doing your people an injustice.”
“Ha,” said Aerin.
But Tor was right, although not for the reasons he would have preferred; it had little to do with her fighting in the last battle, and almost nothing to do with the Crown. By the time the three months’ betrothal that Aerin demanded was up and the marriage was performed, thirteen weeks after what had come mysteriously to be called Maur’s battle, most Damarians (all but a few hidebound courtiers) seemed to have more or less forgotten that they had ever held the last king’s daughter in so lively an antipathy; and affectionately they called her Fire-hair, and Dragon-Killer. They even seemed to enjoy the prospect of Aerin as their new queen; certainly the wedding was a livelier meeting than Tor’s crowning had been, and the crowd cheered when Tor declared Aerin his queen, which startled them both. But many things that had happened before the day Maur’s head had been dragged into the City had faded from people’s memory, and at the wedding they said comfortably to one another that it was true that the first sol’s mother had been a commoner from some outlandish village in the North, and that Aerin-sol had always been an odd sort of child; but she had grown into her rank quite satisfactorily, and she had certainly helped turn the Northern tide with that funny foreign sword of hers and those wild animals that were so fond of her (there are worse spells than those that make wild animals tame).