The Hero and the Crown (14 page)

praising your recently demonstrated dragon-slaying skills,” he said, and turned

and picked up the spears Tor still held, “these are yours,” Aerin held out her arms,

the scabbard strap hitched up hastily to dangle from one shoulder. “These are

from my days as a dragon-hunter,” Arlbeth said. Aerin looked up sharply. “Yes; I

hunted dragons when I was barely older than you are now, and I have a few scars

to prove it.” He smiled reminiscently. “But heirs to the throne are quickly

discouraged from doing anything so dangerous and unadmirable as dragon-

hunting, so I only used these a few times before I had to lay them aside for good.

It’s sheer stubbornness that I’ve kept them so long.” Aerin smiled down at her

armful.

“I can tell you at least that they are tough and strong and fly straight from the

hand.

“I can also tell you that there’s another report of a dragon come in—yesterday

morning it was. I told the man I’d have his answer by this morning; he’s coming to

the morning court. Will you go back with him?”

Aerin and her father looked at each other. For the first time she had official

position in his court; she had not merely been permitted her place, as she had

grudgingly been permitted her undeniable place at his side as his daughter, but

she had won it. She carried the king’s sword, and thus was, however irregularly, a

member of his armies and his loyal sworn servant as well as his daughter. She had

a place of her own—both taken and granted. Aerin clutched the spears to her

breast, painfully banging her knee with the sword scabbard in the process. She

nodded.

“Good. If you had remained hidden, I would have sent Gebeth again—and think

of the honor you would have lost.”

Aerin, who seemed to have lost her voice instead, nodded again.

“Another lesson for you, my dear. Royalty isn’t allowed to hide—at least not

once it has declared itself.”

A little of her power of speech came back to her, and she croaked, “I have

hidden all my life.”

Something like a smile glimmered in Arlbeth’s eyes. “Do I not know this? I have

thought more and more often of what I must do if you did not stand forth of your

own accord. But you have—if not quite in the manner I might have wished—and I

shall take every advantage of it.”

The second dragon-slaying went better than had the first. Perhaps it was her

father’s spears, which flew truer to their marks than she thought her aim and arm

deserved; perhaps it was Talat’s eagerness, and the quickness with which he

caught on to what he was to do. There was also only one dragon.

This second village was farther from the City than the first had been, so she

stayed the night. She washed dragon blood from her clothing and skin—it left

little red rashy spots where it had touched her—in the communal bathhouse,

from which everyone had been debarred that the sol might have her privacy, and

sleeping in the headman’s house while he and his wife slept in the second

headman’s house. She wondered if the second headman then slept in the third’s,

and if this meant eventually that someone slept in the stable or in a back garden,

but she thought that to ask would only embarrass them further. They had been

embarrassed enough when she had protested driving the headman out of his own

home. “We do you the honor fitting your father’s daughter and the slayer of our

demon,” he said.

She did not like the use of the word demon; she remembered Tor saying that

the increase of the North’s mischief would increase the incidence of small but

nasty problems like dragons. She also wondered if the headman did not wish

himself or his pregnant wife to spend a night under the same roof as the witch

woman’s daughter, or if they would get a priest in—the village was too small to

have its own priest—to bless the house after she left. But she did not ask, and she

slept atone in the headman’s house.

Her sword fell from her hand, and she hissed her indrawn breath, for she

discovered that she was too proud to scream. But not screaming took nearly ail

her strength, and she looked, appalled, into the dragon’s small red eye as she

knelt weakly beside it. Awkwardly she picked up her sword with her other hand,

and awkwardly swung it; but the dragon was dying already, the small eye glazing

over, its last fury spent in closing its jaws on her arm. It had no strength to avoid

even a slow and clumsy blow, and as the sword edge struck its neck it gave a last

gasp, and its jaws loosened, and it died, and the blood poured out of Aerin’s arm

and mixed on the ground with the darker, thicker blood of the dragon.

Fortunately that village was large enough to have a healer, ‘and he bound her

arm, and offered her a sleeping draught which she did not swallow, for she could

smell a little real magic on him and was afraid of what he might mix in his

draughts. At least the poultice on her arm did her good and no harm, even if she

got no sleep that night for the sharp ache of the wound.

At home, pride of place and Arlbeth’s encouragement brought her to attend

more of the courts and councils that administered the country that Arlbeth ruled.

“Don’t let the title mislead you,” Arlbeth told her. “The king is simply the visible

one. I’m so visible, in fact, that most of the important work has to be done by

other people.”

“Nonsense,” said Tor.

Arlbeth chuckled. “Your loyalty does you honor, but you’re in the process of

becoming too visible to be effective yourself, so what do you know about it?”

The most important thing that Aerin learned was that a king needed people he

could trust, and who trusted him. And so she learned all over again that she

lacked the most important aspect of her heritage, for she could not trust her

father’s people, because they would not trust her. It was not a lesson she learned

gratefully. But she had come out of hiding, and just as she could not scream when

the dragon bit her, so she could not go back to her former life.

And the reports of dragons did increase, and thus she was oftener not at home,

and so her excuse for eluding royal appearances was often the excellent one of

absence, or of exhaustion upon too recent return. And she grew swifter and

defter in dispatching the small dangerous vermin, and lost no more than a lock of

hair that escaped her kenet-treated helmet to the viciousness of the creatures

she faced. And the small villages came to love her, and they called her Aerin Fire-

hair, and were kind to her, and not only respectful; and even she, wary as she was

of all kindness, stopped believing that the headmen asked priests to drive out the

aura of the witch-woman’s daughter after she left them.

But killing dragons did her no good with her father’s court; the soft-skinned

ministers who worked in words and traveled by litter and could not hold a sword

still mistrusted her, and privately felt that there was something rather shameful

about a sol killing dragons at all, even a half-blood sol. Their increasing fear of the

North only increased their mistrust of her, whose mother had come from the

North; and her dragon-slaying, especially when the only wound she bore from a

task that often killed horses and crippled men was a simple flesh wound, began to

make them fear her; and the story of the first sola’s infatuation, which had begun

to fade as nothing more came of it, was brought up again, and those who wished

to said that the king’s daughter played a waiting game. They knew the story of the

kenet, knew that anyone might learn the making of the stuff who wished to learn

it; but why was it Aerin-sol who had found it out?

No one but Arlbeth and Tor asked her to teach them.

Perlith one night, after a great deal of wine had been drunk, amused the

company by singing a new ballad that, he said, he had recently heard from a

minstrel singing in one of the smaller dingier marketplaces in the City. She had

been a rather small and dingy minstrel as well, he added, smiling, and she had

been traveling through some of the smaller dingier villages of the Hills of late,

which is where the ballad came from.

When Perlith finished, Galanna gave one of her bright little laughs. “How

charming,” she said. “To think—we are living with a legend. Do you suppose that

anyone will make up songs about any of the rest of us, at least while we are alive

to enjoy them?”

“Let us hope that at least any songs made in our honor do not expose us so

terribly,” Perlith said silkily, “as this one explains why our Aerin kills her dragons

so easily.”

Aerin knew she must sit still but she could not, and she left the hall, and heard

Galanna’s laugh again, drifting down the corridor after her.

It was a week after Perlith sang his song that the news of Nyrlol came in. Aerin

had been out killing another dragon the day the messenger arrived, and had not

returned to the City till the afternoon of the next day. She had had not only a pair

of adult dragons this time, but a litter of four kits; and the fourth one had been

nearly impossible to catch, for it was small enough still to hide easily, and enough

brighter than its siblings to do so. But the kits were old enough that they might

forage for themselves, and so she did not dare leave the last one unslain. She

would not have found it at all but for its dragon pride that made it send out a

small thread of flame at her. It was grim thankless work to kill something so small;

the kit wasn’t even old enough to scorch human skin with its tiny pale fires. But

Aerin concentrated on the fact that it would grow up into a nasty creature

capable of eating children, and dug it out of its hole, and killed it.

The town the dragons had been preying upon was large enough to put on a

feast with jugglers and minstrels in her honor, and so she had spent the evening,

and the next morning had slept late. She could feel the nervous excitement in the

City as she rode through it that day, and it made Talat fidgety.

“What has happened?” she asked Hornmar.

He shook his head. “Trouble—Nyrlol is making trouble.”

“Nyrlol,” Aerin said. She knew of Nyrlol, and of Nyrlol’s temperament, from her

council meetings.

Six days later Aerin faced her father in the great hall with the sword she had

received at his hands hanging at her side, to ask him to let her ride with him; and

watched his face as he came back a long long way to be kind to her; and

discovered, what the place she had earned in his court was worth. Aerin Dragon-

Killer. King’s daughter.

Part Two

TEKA BROUGHT HER THE MESSAGE from Tor three days later. He had tried to

see her several times, but she had refused to talk to him, and Teka could not sway

her; and from the glitter in her eye Teka did not dare suggest to Tor that he

simply announce himself. His note read: “We ride out tomorrow at dawn. Will you

see us off?”

She wanted to burn the note, or rip it to bits, or eat it, or burst into tears. She

spent the night sitting in her window alcove, wrapped in a fur rug; she dozed

occasionally, but mostly she watched the stars moving across the sky. She did not

want to stand in the cold grey dawn and watch the army ride away, but she would

do it, for she knew it had hurt her father to deny her what she asked—because

she was too young; too inexperienced; because he could not afford even the

smallest uncertainty in his company’s faith when they went to face Nyrlol, and

because her presence would cause that uncertainty. Because she was the

daughter of a woman who came from the North, they could at least part with

love. It was like Tor to make the gesture; her father, for all his kindness, was too

proud—or too much a king; and she was too proud, or too bitter, or too young.

Hornmar emerged round the looming bulk of the castle, leading Kethtaz, who

tiptoed delicately, ears hard forward and tail high. Hornmar saw her and

wordlessly brought Kethtaz to her, and gave his bridle into her hand. The first

sola’s equerry waited impassively, holding Dgeth. Hornmar turned away to mount

his own horse, for he was riding with the army; but meanwhile he was giving the

king’s daughter the honor of holding the king’s stirrup. This was not a small thing:

holding the king’s stirrup conferred luck upon the holder, and often in times past

the queen had demanded the honor herself. But often too the king ordered one

who was considered lucky—a victorious general, or a first son, or even a first

sola—to hold his stirrup for him, especially when the king rode to war, or to a

tricky diplomatic campaign that might suddenly turn to war.

No one said anything, but Aerin could feel a mental chill pass across the

courtyard as some of the mounted men wondered if the witch woman’s daughter

began their mission with a bad omen, and she wondered if Hornmar had done her

a favor. If the army rode out expecting the worst, they were likely to find it.

Aerin held Kethtaz’s reins grimly, but Kethtaz did not like grimness, and

prodded her with his nose till she smiled involuntarily and petted him. She looked

up when she heard the king’s footsteps, and when she met her father’s eyes she

was glad she had yielded to Tor’s request. Arlbeth kissed her forehead, and