After the first few tries she sighed and began to keep careful notes of how each sample was made. It was not an exercise natural to her, and after she’d filled several sheets of parchment with her tiny exact figures—parchment was expensive stuff, even for kings’ daughters—she began to lose heart. She thought: If this mess really worked, everyone would know of it; they would all use it for dragon-hunting, and-would have been using it all along, and dragons would no longer be a risk—and that book would be studied and not left to gather dust. It is foolish to think I might have discovered something everyone before me had overlooked. She bowed her head over her burnt twig, and several hot tears slipped down her face onto her page of calculations.
Chapter 7
ON HER EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY there was a banquet for the first sol, despite all she could do to prevent it. Galanna shot her glances like poisoned arrows and clung curiously near Tor’s side for someone else’s wife of so few seasons. Perlith made witty remarks at Aerin’s expense in his soft light tenor that always sounded kind, whatever he might be saying. The king her father toasted her, and the faces around the tables in the great hall glittered with smiles; but Aerin looked at them sadly and saw only the baring of teeth.
Tor watched her: she was wearing a golden tunic over a long red skirt; the tunic had embroidered flowers wound round its hem, and petals of many colors stitched drifting down the full sleeves; she wore the same two rings she had at Galanna’s wedding. Her flame-colored hair was twisted around her head, and a golden circlet was set upon it, and over her forehead three golden birds held green stones in their beaks. He saw her wince away from the courtiers’ smiles, and he shook Galanna’s hand from his arm impatiently, and then Galanna no longer even pretended to smile.
Aerin did not notice this, for she never looked at Galanna if she could help it, and if Galanna were near Tor she didn’t look at Tor either. But Arlbeth noticed. He knew what it was that he saw, for better or for worse, and it was not often that he did not know what was best done about the things he saw; but in this case he did not know. What he read in Tor’s face tore at his heart, for it would be his heart’s fondest wish that these two might wed, and yet he knew his people had never loved the daughter of his second wife, and he feared their mistrust, and he had reason to fear it. Aerin felt her father’s arm around her shoulders, and turned to smile up at him.
After the banquet she went to sit in her window seat, staring into the dark courtyard; the torches around its perimeter left great pools of shadow near the castle walls. Her bedroom was dark as well, and Teka had not yet come to be sure she had hung her good clothes up as she should instead of leaving them on the floor where she would step on them. There was a light knock on the door. She turned and said, “Come in,” with surprise; if she had thought about it, she would have been silent and let the visitor leave without finding her. She wished to be alone after the hall full of food and talk and bright smiles.
It was Tor. She could see him outlined in the light from the hall, and she had been sitting in the dark long enough to see clearly. But he blinked and looked around, for her figure was only a part of the heavy curtains that hung around the deep window alcove. She stirred, and he saw the flicker of her red skirt.
“Why do you sit in the dark?”
“There was too much light in the hall tonight.”
Tor was silent. After a moment she sighed, and reached for a candle and flint. It seemed to Tor that the shadows it cast upon her face made her briefly old: a woman with grandchildren, for all her brilliant hair. Then she set the candle on a small table and smiled at him, and she was eighteen again.
She saw that he carried something in his arms: a long narrow something, wrapped in dark cloth. “I have brought you your birthday present—privately, as I thought you might prefer.” And so that I need not do any explaining, he thought.
She knew at once what it was: a sword. She watched with rising excitement as he unrolled the wrappings, and from them, gleaming, came her sword, her very own sword. She reached for it eagerly, and slid it out of its scabbard. It was plain but for some work on the hilt to make the grip sure; but she felt it light and true and perfect in her hand, and her hand trembled with the pride of it.
“Thank you,” she said, her eyes still fixed on the sword, so she did not see the look of hope and pity on Tor’s face as he watched her.
“At dawn you shall try it out,” said Tor, and the tone of his voice shook her out of her reverie, and she raised her eyes to his. “I will meet you at our usual place,” he said, and tried to speak as if this were a lesson like any other lesson; and if he failed, Aerin still did not guess why he failed.
“This is ever so much better than another dressing gown,” she said lightly, and was pleased to see him smile.
“It was a very beautiful dressing gown.”
“If it had been less beautiful, I would not have disliked it so much. You were as bad as Teka, trying to keep me in bed, or trailing about my rooms in a dressing gown forever.”
“And a lot of good it did us, despite the fact that you could not stand on your feet without either fainting or falling over.”
“It was concentrating on my lessons with you that finally sweated the last of the surka out of me,” Aerin said, waving her birthday present gently under his nose.
“I almost believe you,” he replied sadly.
So they were standing, looking at each other, with the naked blade upheld between them, when Teka come through the open door behind them. “Gholotat protect us,” said Teka, and closed the door behind her.
“Is my birthday present not beautiful?” said Aerin, and turned the blade back and forth quickly so that it winked at her old nurse as she stood by the door. Teka looked at her face and then at Tor’s, and then back at Aerin’s, and said nothing.
“I will bid you good night,” said Tor, and because Teka was there he dared reach out his hands to Aerin, and put them on her shoulders, as she slid her sword into its scabbard, and kiss Her cheek as a cousin might; which he would not have dared had they been alone. He bowed to Teka, and left them.
Perhaps it was having a real sword of one’s own. Perhaps it was being eighteen—or that eighteen years’ practice of being stubborn was finally paying off. If she still stumbled over the corners of rugs or bumped into doorways while she was thinking about other things, she no longer bothered looking around anxiously to find out if anyone had seen her: either they had or they hadn’t, and she had other things on her mind; she reveled in those other things. They meant that she did not blush automatically when she caught sight of Perlith, knowing that he would have thought of something to say to her since the last time she had failed to avoid him, and that his little half smile beneath half-lidded eyes would make whatever he said worse. She walked through the halls of the castle and the streets of the City the most direct way instead of the way she would meet the fewest people; and she avoided the surka in the royal garden, but only that it might not make her sick again. She did not cringe from the thought of its presence, or from the shame that she had to avoid it in the first place; nor did she any longer feel that breathing the garden air was synonymous with breathing Galanna’s malice.
She had discovered how to make the dragonfire ointment.