“Marry me,” said Tor. “Then you’ll be queen.” Aerin looked up, startled at the suddenness of it. “I mean, I’ll marry you as queen, none of this Honored Wife nonsense. Please I—I need you.” He looked at her and bit his lip. “You can’t mean that you didn’t know that I would ask. I’ve known for years. Arlbeth knew, too. He hoped for it.
“It’s the easy way out, I know,” he said, hope and hurt both in his eyes. “I would have asked you even if you hadn’t brought the Crown back—believe me. If you’d never killed a dragon, if you broke all the dishes in the castle. If you were the daughter of a farmer. I’ve loved you—I’ve loved you, to know it, since your eighteenth birthday, but I think I’ve loved you all my life. I will marry no one if you’ll not have me.”
Aerin swallowed hard. “Yes, of course,” she said, and found she couldn’t say anything else. It had not been only her doom and her duty that had brought her back to the City, and to Tor, for she loved Damar, and she loved its new king, and a part of her that belonged to nothing and no one else belonged to him. She had misunderstood what her fate truly was a few days ago, as she rode to the City to deliver up the Crown into the king’s hands; it was not that she left what she loved to go where she must, but that her destiny, like her love, like her heritage, was double. And so the choice at last was an easy one, for Tor could not wait, and the other part of her—the not quite mortal part, the part that owed no loyalty to her father’s land—might sleep peacefully for many long years. She smiled.
“Yes-of-course what?” said Tor in anguish.
“Yes-of-course-I’ll-marry-you,” said Aerin, and when he caught her up in his arms to kiss her she didn’t even notice the shrill pain of burst blisters.
It was a long story she told him after that, for all that there was much of it that she left out; yet she thought that Tor probably guessed some of the more bitter things, for he asked her many questions, yet none that she might not have been able to answer, like what face Agsded had worn, or what her second parting from Luthe had been.
They ate at length and in great quantity, and their privacy was disturbed only by the occasional soft-footed hafor bearing fresh plates of food; yet somehow by the end of the meal the shadows on the floor, especially those near Aerin’s chair, had grown unusually thick, and some of those shadows had ears and tails.
Tor looked thoughtfully at the yerig queen, who looked thoughtfully back at him. “Something must be done for—or with—your army, Aerin.”
“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 leav
e 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).
Besides, while Tor had remained obstinately single, all the other sols of his generation had gotten themselves married off; and Aerin was, whatever her faults, a first sol.
And when Aerin understood at last what had happened, she laughed. So Maur did me a good turn after all, she thought. That’s the finest victory of all.
It was called Maur’s battle perhaps because it had been fought on what was now known as Maur’s plain. While much else had been forgotten, or at least become a little blurry, of the events before the seasons the City had borne with Maur’s head held in the king’s castle like an enormous jewel, everyone well remembered that at the end of the battle the stretch of earth at the foot of the king’s way was a destroyed forest, and that bodies of people and beasts, and of half-beasts and half-people, lay everywhere, with broken bits of war gear mixed with the broken landscape. And they remembered Maur’s skull rushing down on them—flaming, they said, like a living dragon, its jaws open to spew fire—and spinning past them in the darkness.
And in the morning, when they awoke, instead of low rolling hills despoiled by war, they found a plain, flat as a table, stretching from the burnt-out fire where the survivors had slept huddled together to the feet of Vasth and Kar and the pass where Aerin had paused and seen what awaited her and gathered herself and her army together. It was a desert plain, and it remained a desert; nothing grew there, nor would grow, but a little low scrub. Desert creatures came to live there, and a new sort of hunting dog was bred to run by sight, and the City dwellers came to love the wild sweet song of the britti, the desert lark. They took to holding horse races on the plain after the first few years of staring at it nervously had worn off, and the uncanniness was lost in familiarity; and then various games of skill were pursued there, mock battles and sword-play, and it became a much better practice ground than the old cramped space behind the castle and the royal stables at the peak of the City. It was a handy spot for the drilling of cavalry, and Tor paid much attention to the rebuilding of his cavalry, for he, like his wife, if perhaps no one else in the City, remembered very clearly what had happened in the months preceding Maur’s battle. The Laprun trials therefore grew in size and importance, which was all to the good; what was less good was the growing popularity of the churakak, the duel of honor, fought by those a little too proud of their ability to fight.
The first year’s harvest after the battle was a scanty one, but Arlbeth had grain set aside for just such an occurrence, and as there were fewer Damarians to be fed than when he had built his warehouses, the winter was no harder than a winter after a good harvest, although everyone was thoroughly sick of porridge by the time spring came.
But spring did come, and people stirred themselves, and many of them felt quite like their old selves, and went out to dig in the ground or refurbish their shops or look to their stock and their holdings with good heart. Those who had remained in the City over the winter, to nurse their wounds and regain their strength, went home to their villages and began the long process of rebuilding, and most of the rebuilding went on cheerfully. Tor and Aerin sent aid where they could, and some of the new villages were handsomer (and better drained) than the old ones had been.
It was during the first winter that Aerin, wandering vaguely one day in the center-court garden of the castle, felt that there was something at the gate she had entered by. She frowned at it till she remembered what it was: the great oil green surka vine was gone. She stared round at all the gates to be sure she had not mistaken it, but it was not there; and she went in search of Tor, and asked what had happened to it.
Tor shook his head. “There isn’t any surka any more—anywhere. One day—a fortnight, maybe, before Maur’s battle, they all went. I saw this one; the smoke came from nowhere, but when it cleared, the surka was a charred skeleton. It was such a weird sort of thing, and everyone was preoccupied with weird sorts of things that always turned out to be unpleasant, that the remains were rooted out and buried.
“Arlbeth said it was a sign too clear to be ignored, even if we didn’t know what it meant, and so we carried no standard during the final days of the siege of the City.” He frowned. “The surka seems to be something I want to remind people of; we’re probably better off without it. No more Merths.” He smiled at her.
“And no more Aerins,” said Aerin feelingly.
Some who had lost too much stayed on in the City when spring came; Katah had lost her husband, and she and her six children asked to stay on in the king’s castle, where she had grown up. Tor and Aerin were glad to say yes, for the castle was a little too empty; not only Perlith was gone, but Thurny and Gebeth and Orin, and many others. And Aerin found the rel
iable and practical Katah invaluable in sorting out which petitions and complaints to bend her royal judgment on, and which to ignore. “I have found my calling,” said poor Katah, who missed her husband: “I was meant to be a royal secretary.”
“You were meant to be the power behind the throne,” said Aerin. “I shall cover you with a velvet drape and you can whisper to me what to tell the people as they come.” Katah laughed, as she was supposed to.
Katah was not the only one that the passing of time did not heal. Galanna’s hair had gone grey during that first winter, and was white by the time the second spring after the battle came. She was quieter, and slower, and while she looked with no love upon Damar’s new queen, she caused, and wished to cause, no more trouble.
As Katah was a hard and honest worker, Aerin could contrive to steal a little time to chase dragons—whose numbers had greatly fallen off since the Northerners’ defeat—and to teach a suddenly considerable number of interested young men and women what she knew about dragon-hunting. Among other things, she found out what she had known all along, that she had a superior horse. No horse liked wearing kenet, and most of them were much nastier about it than Talat had ever been; and then there was the fact that Aerin had no idea what to tell her students to do with their reins while they were trying to pin a dragon with their spears. Somehow or other Aerin’s dragon-hunting lessons began to spill into horsemanship lessons, and she taught her pupils first about riding without stirrups, and later without reins. By trial and error she trained a few young horses to go as Talat had gone for her—to prove to herself as much as to anyone else that it could be done with other horses—and she learned to have an eye for the horses who could learn what she wished to teach them, and those who could not. Soon the queen of Damar was rumored to be an uncanny judge of horseflesh, and her opinion on this colt or that mare was frequently sought.
Hornmar had taken a bad wound in his side, and he was older than the king he had served, and Arlbeth’s death weakened him almost as much as his own hurt. He had to retire from his post as the head of the sofor; but he lived in the castle still, and at his request he was permitted to have the care of his old friend Talat. Aerin was forced to be grateful for this, for she had too much work, now, to be able to attend to Talat as frequently as she had been accustomed to do, and was yet jealous of who tended him in her place. She would not have wished to leave him to any ordinary groom, however skilled and worthy.
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