At fifteen Aerin should already have shown signs of her royal blood’s Gift; usually the Gift began to make its presence known—most often in poltergeist fits—years younger. Galanna had contrived to disguise her loathing for her littlest cousin for several years after her temper tantrums upon Aerin’s birth had not been a complete success; but lately had occurred to an older Galanna that if Aerin really was a throw-back, a sport, as she began to appear truly to be, Galanna had excellent reason to scorn and dislike her: her existence was a disgrace to the royal honor.
They made a pair, facing off, standing alone in the royal garden, glaring at each other. Galanna had come to her full growth and beauty by that time: her blue-black hair hung past her hips in heavy waves, and was artfully held in place by a golden webwork of fine thread strung with pearls; her cheeks were flushed becomingly with rage till they were as red as her lips, and her huge black eyes were opened their widest. Her long eyelashes had almost grown back since the night Aerin had drugged her supper wine and crept into her bedroom later and cut them off. Everyone had known at once who had done it, and Aerin, who in general held lying in contempt, had not bothered to deny it. She had said before the gathered court—for Galanna, as usual, had insisted on a public prosecution—that Galanna should have been grateful she hadn’t shaved her head for her; she’d been snoring like a pig and wouldn’t have wakened if she’d been thrown out her bedroom window. Whereupon Galanna had gone off in a fit of strong hysterics and had to be carried from the hall (she’d been wearing a half-veil that covered her face to her lips, that no one might see her ravaged features), and Aerin had been banished to her private rooms for a fortnight.
Aerin was as tall as Galanna already, for Galanna was small and round and compact, and Aerin was gangly and awkward; and Aerin’s pale skin came out in splotches when she was angry, and her fiercely curly hair—which when wet from the bath was actually longer than Galanna’s—curled all the more fiercely in the heat of her temper, and for all the pins that attempted to keep it under control. They were alone in the garden; and whatever happened Galanna had no fear that Aerin would ever tale-bear (which was another excellent reason for Galanna to despise her), so when Aerin spun around, pulled half a branch off the surka, and stuffed most of it into her mouth, Galanna only smiled. Her full lips curved most charmingly when she smiled, and it brought her high cheekbones into delicate prominence.
Aerin gagged, gasped, turned a series of peculiar colors which ended with grey, and fell heavily to the ground. Cabana noticed that she was still breathing, and therefore waited a few minutes while Aerin twitched and shook, and then went composedly to find help. Her story was that she had gone for a walk in the garden and found Aerin there. This, so far as it went, was true; but she had been planning to find Aerin alone in the garden for some time, that she might say certain things to her. She had thought of those certain things while she had been keeping to her rooms while her eyelashes grew out again.
Aerin was sick for weeks. Her mouthful had given her mad hallucinations of men with translucent blue skin and six-legged riding beasts, and of a pale face terribly like her own with a dull grey band wound about its temples, bending down at her through clouds of smoke, and of a cave with five walls that glittered as though it were walled with rubies. The worst of these then began to wear off, and she could again see the walls of her own room around her, and Teka’s face bending over her, half angry and half frightened; but she still had dizzy spells and stomachaches, and these lasted a very long time. She knew this was not how it should be for a king’s daughter, just as Galanna had said; and a depression she would not admit further slowed her recovery.
“You idiot!” Tor yelled at her. “You bonehead, you mud-brain, you oozog, you stzik! How could you do such a thing?” He tried to remind her of the stories of the surka; he said did she remember by chance that the stuff was dangerous even to those of the royal house? True, it did not kill them; true, a leaf of it bestowed superhuman strength and the far-seeing eyes of a bird of prey to one of royal blood, or, if the Gift were strong enough, true visions; although this last was very rare. But when the effect wore off, in several hours or several days, the aftereffects were at best mortal exhaustion and blurred sight—sometimes permanent. Had she forgotten the tale of King Merth the Second, who kept himself on the battlefield for a fortnight, never resting, by the virtue of the surka, pausing only to chew its leaves at need? He won the battle, but he died even as he proclaimed his victory. He looked, when they buried him, like an old, old man, though he was only a year past twenty.
“You must have eaten half the tree, from the size of the scar of the branch you took off. Enough for two or three Merths. Are you really trying to kill yourself?” Here his voice almost broke, and he had to get up and stamp around the room, and kick over a handy chair, which he then picked up again so that Teka wouldn’t notice and ban him from the sickroom. He sat on the edge of Aerin’s bed and brooded. “It must have been Galanna. It always is Galanna. What did she do this time?”
Aerin stirred. “Of course it’s Galanna. I’ve been desperate to think of an excuse to get out of attending her wedding. It’s only a little over a season away, you know. This was the best that occurred to me.”
Tor laughed—grudgingly, but it was a laugh. “Almost I forgive you.” He reached out and grabbed one of her hands. She refrained from telling him that his bouncing on the edge of her bed was making her feel sick, and that every time he moved she had to refocus her eyes on him and that made her feel more sick, and she squeezed his hand. “I guess she dared you to eat a leaf. I guess she told you you weren’t royal and wouldn’t dare touch it.” He looked at her sternly. She looked back, her face blank. He knew her too well, and he knew she knew, but she wouldn’t say anything; he knew that too, and he sighed.
Her father visited her occasionally, but he always sent warning ahead, and as soon as she could creak out of bed without immediately falling down in a heap, she began receiving him in her sitting-room, bolt upright in a straight chair and hands crossed in her lap. To his queries she answered that she was feeling quite well now, thank you. She had learned that no one could tell how badly her vision wandered in and out of focus, so long as she kept still where the dizziness couldn’t distract her; and she kept her eyes fixed on the shifting flesh-colored shadows where she knew her father’s face was. He never stayed long, and since she closed her eyes when he came near to stoop over her and kiss her cheek or forehead (other people’s movements were almost as dizzying as her own) she never saw the anxious look on his face, and he didn’t shout at her, like Teka or Tor.
When she was enough better to totter out of bed for a longer stretch than into a chair in her sitting-room, or rather when she hated her bed so thoroughly that Teka could no longer keep her in it, she had to make her way around the castle by feeling along the walls, for neither her eyes nor her feet were trustworthy. Creeping about like one of her father’s retired veterans escaped from the grace-and-favor apartments in the rear of the castle did nothing for her morale, and she avoided everyone but Teka, and to some extent Tor, even more single-mindedly than usual; and she stayed out of the court’s way altogether.
Especially she avoided the garden at the center of the castle. The surka stood by the main gate, wrapped around one of the tall white pillars. Its presence was symbolic only; anyone might pass the gate without danger of touching its leaves, and there were several other ways into the garden. But she felt that the surka exhaled hallucinations into the very air around it, waiting gleefully for her to breathe them in, and that it clattered its leaves at her if she came too near. She heard it mocking her if she even dared step out on one of the balconies that overlooked the garden from three or four stories up. Her protracted illness more nearly proved Galanna’s contention about her heritage than her own, whatever Tor said, but she saw no reason to remind herself of it any oftener than she had to.