The Hero and the Crown (27 page)

now—if she went home—it would be as a runaway dog might go home, tail

between legs, its highest hope only for forgiveness.

Her eyes closed, and she slept the numbed sleep of failure; but soon after

midnight even this was disturbed. The earth seemed to shiver under her, and she

heard low rumblings like rocks falling far away; but perhaps she was only

dreaming. Later she knew she dreamed, for she saw faces she had never met in

her waking life.

A sad-faced girl sat by a pool. The white walls around her were so high there

seemed to be clouds resting on their heads; low steps behind her led to an open

door, and a room beyond it. There were no doors in the other walls, and the flat

earth around the pool was covered with squares of white stone. The girl’s long

black hair fell forward as she stared into the calm water, and her look of sadness

deepened.

Then Aerin, in her dream, saw another walled garden, but the water here

played in a fountain, and the walls were blue mosaic; and in the garden stood a

tall young woman with yellow hair, taller by a hand’s breadth than Aerin herself,

and at her side a green-eyed folstza stood. And then she saw three men standing

on the side of a mountain, on a little ridge of rock, facing a crack or a hole in the

face of the mountain. A burly man with thinning black hair was staring at the

crack with a set stubborn expression, and his fair-haired companion was saying,

“Don’t be a fool. Tommy. Listen to me.” The third man was young and brown-

skinned and slightly built, and he looked amused, but he said, “Leo, you should

know better by now than to argue with him.”

Their voices seemed to bring Aerin half awake, for her dreams became more

confused, and she saw faces without being sure if she recognized them or not,

and she felt the rocky bed beneath her again, and it seemed as if the ground

pressed up unevenly, against a shoulder, a hip—then a lurch, and a stone she was

sure had not been there before dug painfully into the small of her back. Still she

could not awaken—and then, with a gasp, she opened her eyes and sat up; and it

was morning, and her fire was out; not only out, but scattered, as if someone with

fireproof hands had picked it up and tossed bits of it in all directions; or as if the

earth had heaved up under it.

Their voices seemed to bring Aerin half awake, for her dreams became more

confused, and she saw faces without being sure if she recognized them or not,

and she felt the rocky bed beneath her again, and it seemed as if the ground

pressed up unevenly, against a shoulder, a hip—then a lurch, and a stone she was

sure had not been there before dug painfully into the small of her back. Still she

could not awaken—and then, with a gasp, she opened her eyes and sat up; and it

was morning, and her fire was out; not only out, but scattered, as if someone with

fireproof hands had picked it up and tossed bits of it in all directions; or as if the

earth had heaved up under it.

She blinked, but it stayed gone. She was in the middle of the plateau she had

crossed to come to the black tower, although the ground sloped gently but

definitely from where she sat into the distance, toward the encircling mountains,

and she had not gone uphill to reach Agsded’s crag. It was a fine blue day, the sky

high and cloudless, and she could see the width of the plateau in all directions;

the Damarian Hills were a little farther away than the unnamed Northern

mountains on the opposite side. In sudden fear she jolted to her feet, turned and

looked over her shoulder—but the black mountain was still a ruin; she did not

have to face all those stairs again, nor the meeting with a mage who bore her own

face.

She had gone but a few steps in no particular direction when a long low black

object slammed into her and knocked her flat. She had only just begun frantically

to grope for Gonturan when she recognized him: it was the black king cat, and he,

it would appear, was delighted to see her. His forepaws were tucked over her

shoulders and he was rubbing her face with his own bristles-and-velvet face, and

purring loudly enough, she thought, to bring what remained of the tower down

on top of them.

He permitted her, eventually, to sit up, although he remained twined around

her. She gingerly felt the places she had fallen on, and looked at him severely. “I

had bruises enough before,” she said aloud, and was rewarded by Talat’s ear-

shattering whinny, and Talat himself appeared around the edge of the tower. He

trotted up and nosed her eagerly, and she stroked his chest and tumbled the cat

off her lap that she might stand up, and Talat heaved a sigh of relief after he had

done so. The last time he had rediscovered her after battle it had not been a

merry meeting. He whiffled down her shirt and she pulled his ears, and the black

cat twined among her legs and Talat’s forelegs both, and Aerin said, “Something

has come of my absence: you two have made friends.” Whereupon the cat left off

at once and stalked away. Aerin laughed.

She and Talat followed him and came shortly to where the rest of the great cats

were, and the wild dogs were there as well, and while the two camps still held

mostly to their own, Aerin had a strong sense that there was a reliable peace, if

not exactly friendship, between them.

The folstza and yerig were curled up among mounds of rubble nearly under the

shadow of the last standing walls; yet Aerin knew she had gone completely

around the remains of the black mountain the day before, and had seen no sign

of her friends. She ascended the slope toward them, and the dog queen came up

to her, with the barest wave of her long tail. Aerin tentatively held out her hand

and the dog queen tentatively took it between her jaws. Aerin stood quite still,

and one narrow blue eye looked up at her, and she looked back. The tail waved

again, and then she dropped Aerin’s hand and trotted off, and some invisible

command she gave to her folk, for they all followed her; and they rounded the

edge of the mountain of rubble, going away from her, and disappeared.

Aerin felt a little forsaken. Had they only waited to—to see who won? Would

they have known if Agsded had killed her, and run off then to spread the evil

news to others of their kind, perhaps to all who lived wild in their forests and

mountains? She had not known why the animals first came to her, but, knowing a

little too much about the wrong kind of solitude, she had been glad of their

company; and had been simply happy to find them here again after she fell asleep

last night alone and comfortless, without thinking beyond the fact that they were

her friends and she had missed them. But the cats showed no sign of leaving; and

always there was Talat.

She pulled his saddle off, and was glad to see that he had no starting sores

underneath; and then she eagerly opened the saddlebags and chewed a little of

the end of the tough dried meat she had brought with her. Her stomach was

grateful but it rumbled for more. She looked around her again, leaning into the

solid reality of Talat’s shoulder. The bare lands met her eye just as they had

before. Her gaze dropped to the tumbled remains of her fire. Beyond just what

she had laid her hands on last night there was no wood in sight nearer than the

green verge of the boundary Hills of Damar. “Well,” she said aloud to whoever

was listening. “At least we can see where to go, to get back now.”

THEY STARTED BACK toward the mountains before the sun had risen much

higher. Aerin had buried the ashes of the fire, out of habit, for there was certainly

nothing around that might burn; and she reverently wrapped the surka wreath

and its stone, and the Crown, and stowed them in one of Talat’s saddlebags.

There was nothing else left to do.

Her entourage strung out behind her, cats on one flank, dogs on the other.

Only once did she look back, when they were already well across the plain and the

sun was beginning to drop toward evening. The way did slope down from the dark

mountain, and she was sure that this one thing had changed, even if there had

been a disappearing forest between. But if this was the worst of what remained,

she thought, they were getting off very lightly.

The ruins of the black tower were small in the distance, and they seemed to

leer at her, but it was a small nasty, useless leer, like a tyrant on the scaffold as

the rope is placed around his neck. This plain would not be a healthy or attractive

place for many years to come, but it would not be a dangerous one either. She

went on with a lighter heart.

She was eager to reach the edge of her beloved Damarian Hills by nightfall, that

she might camp in their shadow and drink from their clean waters, and so kept on

into the beginning twilight. She wanted to sing when she caught the first breath

of the evening breeze from the kindly trees; but her voice had never adapted

itself to carrying a tune, so she didn’t. Her army all seemed to be glad to be under

familiar leaves again, and the dogs wagged their tails and made cheerful playful

snaps at one another, and the cats knocked each other with clawless feet, and

rolled on the ground. Talat pranced. And so they came merrily to a turn in the

path they followed, paying attention to nothing but their own pleasure; and then

Aerin caught a sudden whiff of smoke as from a small fire, and then the smell of

cooking. She sat down hard, but Talat’s ears flicked back at her. What do you

mean stop here? and went on. And there was a small campfire, tucked in the

curve of the trail where there was a little clearing and a stream curving around

the other side of it.

“Good day to you,” said Luthe.

Talat whickered a greeting, and Aerin slid off him and he went forward alone to

nose Luthe’s hands and browse in his hair. “I thought you never left your hall and

your lake,” said Aerin.

“Rarely,” said Luthe. “In fact, increasingly exceedingly rarely. But I can be

prodded by extraordinary circumstances.”

Aerin smiled faintly. “You have had plenty to choose from here recently.”

“Yes.”

“May I ask which particular circumstance was sufficiently extraordinary in this

case?”

“Aerin—” Luthe paused, and then his voice took on its bantering tone again. “I

thought you might like to be dragged back to the present, that you might arrive in

time to give Tor his Crown and end the siege; and of course now instead of a few

hundred years hence there is no jungle to be compelled to claw your way

through. I’ve no doubt you could have done it, but it would have put you in a foul

temper, and you would have been in a fouler one by the time you came back to

the Lake of Dreams—assuming you would have had the sense to make your way

there, not in your case something one can count on. You would have needed my

assistance to regain your own time—if lighting a little fire made you see double,

charging about in time without assistance would have blinded you for good—and

the longer you’re out of it, the harder it would have been to get you back in. So I

came to meet you.”

“Yes,” said Luthe. “A very long time.”

“And a very long time falling.”

“And a very long time falling.”

Aerin said nothing more while she pulled Talat’s saddle off and dropped it by

the fire, and rubbed his back dry, and checked his feet for small stones. “I suppose

I should forgive you, then, for making me other than mortal,” she said.

“You might. I would appreciate it if you did.” He sighed. “It would be nice to

claim that I knew this was going to happen all along, knew that your only chance

of success in regaining your Crown was to do as I did. But I didn’t. Sheer blind

luck, I’m afraid.”

He handed her a cup of malak, steaming hot, which she drank greedily; then

stew on a thin metal plate, but she ate it so fast it had no time to burn her fingers,

and then she had seconds and thirds. When she was finished at last, Luthe gave

what remained to the king cat and queen dog, in carefully measured halves, on

separate plates. Aerin heard his footsteps behind her as he returned from setting

those two plates out, and she said, “Thank you.”

The footsteps paused just behind her, and she felt him bend over her, and then

his hands rested on her shoulders. She put her own hands up, and drew his down,

till he was kneeling behind her, and he bowed his head to press his cheek to her

face. She turned in his arms, and put her own arms around his neck and raised her

face and kissed him.

They remained near the fire far into the night, feeding it with twigs so that it

would keep burning; the animals were all long since asleep, and even Talat was

relaxed enough to lie down and doze. Luthe sprawled on his back with his head in

Aerin’s lap, and she stroked his hair through her fingers, watching the thick curls

wind around her fingers, stretch to their fullest length, and spring back again. “Is

it so amusing?” said Luthe.

“Yes,” said Aerin, “although I should like it just as well if it were straight and

green, or if you were bald as an egg and painted your head silver.”