There were still the old myths of the great dragons, huge scaled beasts many times larger than horses; and it was sometimes even said that the great dragons flew, flew in the air, with wingspreads so vast as to blacken the sun. The little dragons had vestigial wings, but no one had ever seen or heard of a dragon that could lift its thick squat body off the ground with them. They beat their wings in anger and in courtship, as they raised their crests; but that was all. The old dragons were no more nor less of a tale than that of flying dragons.
But this book took the old dragons seriously. It said that while the only dragons humankind had seen in many years were little ones, there were still one or two of the great ones hiding in the Hills; and that one day the one or two would fly out of their secret places and wreak havoc on man, for man would have forgotten how to deal with them. The great dragons lived long; they could afford to wait for that forgetfulness. From the author’s defensive tone, the great dragons even in his day were a legend, a tale to tell on festival days, well lubricated with mead and wine. But she was fascinated, as he had been.
“It is with the utmost care I have gathered my information; and I think I may say with truth that the ancient Great Ones and our day’s small, scurrilous beasts are the same in type. Thus anyone wishing to learn the skill to defeat a Great One can do no better than to harry as many small ones as he may find from their noisome dens, and see how they do give battle.”
He went on to describe his information-gathering techniques, which seemed to consist of tirelessly footnoting the old stories for dragonish means and methods; although, thought Aerin, that could as well be from the oral tale-tellers adapting the ancient dragons to the ways of the present ones as from the truth of the author’s theory. But she read on.
Dragons had short stubby legs on broad bodies; they were not swift runners over distance, but they were exceedingly nimble, and could balance easily on any one foot the better to rip with any of the other three, as well as with the barbed tail. The neck was long and whippy, so that the dragon might spray its fire at any point of the circle; and they often scraped their wings against the ground to throw up dust and further confound their enemies, or their prey.
“It is customary today to hunt the dragon with arrow and thrown spear; but if one of the Great Ones comes again, this will avail his attacker little. As their size has diminished, so has their armament; a well-thrown spear may pierce a small dragon anywhere it strikes. The Great Ones had only two vulnerable spots that might be depended upon: at the base of the jaw, where the narrow head joins the long neck; and behind the elbow, from whence the wings spring. Dragons are, as I have said, nimble; it is most unlikely that a Great One would be so foolish as to lower its head or its wings to make an easy mark. A great hero only may slay a Great One; one who by skill and courage may draw close enough to force the fatal blow.
“It is fortunate for all who walk the earth that the Great Ones bred but rarely; and that mankind has borne Plough heroes to vanquish the most of them. But it is this writer’s most fervid belief that at least one more hero must stand forth from his people to face the last of the Great Ones.
“Of this last—I have said one or two; perhaps there are three or four; I know not. But of one I will make specific remark: Gorthold, who slew Crendenor and Razimtheth, went also against Maur, the Black Dragon, and it he did not slay. Gorthold, who was himself wounded unto death, said with his last strength that the dragon would die of its wounds as he would die of his; but this was never known for a certainty. The only certainty is that Maur disappeared; and has been seen by no man—or none that has brought back the tale to tell—from that day to this.”
In the back of the book Aerin found an even older manuscript: just a few pages, nearly illegible with age, sewn painstakingly into the binding. Those final ancient pages were a recipe, for an ointment called kenet. An ointment that was proof against dragonfire—it said.
It had a number of very peculiar ingredients; herbs, she thought, by the sound of them. She knew just enough of the Old Tongue to recognize a few syllables; there was one that translated as “red-root.” She frowned; there was a thing called redroot that showed up in boring pastoral poems, but she’d always thought it belonged to that classic category known as imaginary, like nymphs and elephants. Teka might know about redroot; she brewed a uniquely ghastly tea or tisane for every ailment, and when Aerin asked what was in the awful stuff, Teka invariably rattled off a list of things that Aerin had never heard of. She had been inclined to assume that Teka was simply putting her off with nonsense, but maybe not.
An ointment against dragonfire. If it worked—one person, alone, could tackle a dragon safely; not a Great One, of course, but the Black Dragon probably did die of its wounds ... but the little ones that were such a nuisance. At present the system was that you attacked with arrows and things from a distance, with enough of you to make a ring around it, or them, so if they bolted at someone he could run like mad while the other side of the ring was filling them full of arrows. They couldn’t run far, and usually a family all bolted in the same direction. It was when they didn’t that horses died.
Aerin had been sitting under the convenient tree by Talat’s pond most afternoons for several weeks when she found the recipe for dragon salve. It made her thoughtful, and she was accustomed to pacing while she thought. The surka was slowly losing its grip on her, and while she couldn’t exactly pace, she could amble slowly without her cane. She ambled around Talat’s pool.
Talat followed her. When she stopped, or grabbed a tree limb for balance, he moved a step or two away and dropped his nose to the ground and lipped at whatever he found there. When she moved on, he picked up his head and drifted after her. On the third afternoon since finding the recipe she was still pacing, not only because she was a slow thinker, but because her four-legged shadow with the dragging hind foot intrigued her. It was on the third day that when she put her hand out to steady herself against the air, a horse’s neck insinuated itself under her outstretched fingers. She let her hand lie delicately on his crest, her eyes straight ahead, ignoring him; but when she took another step forward, so did he.
Two days later she brought a currycomb and some brushes to Talat’s meadow; they belonged to Kisha, her pony, but Kisha wouldn’t miss them. Kisha was the ideal young sol’s mount: fine-boned and delicate and prettier than a kitten. She was also as vain as Galanna, and loved nothing better than a royal procession, when the horses of the first circle would be all decked out in gilt and tassels. The sols’ horses further would have ribbons braided into their manes and tails, and Kisha had a particularly long silky tail. (She would doubtless be cross at missing the mounted salute at Galanna and Perlith’s wedding.) She never shied at waving banners and flapping velvet saddle skirts; but if Aerin tried to ride her out in the countryside, she shied sulkily at every leaf, and kept trying to turn and bolt for home. They thoroughly detested each other. Galanna rode her full sister, Rooka. Aerin was convinced that Rooka and Kisha gossiped together in the stable at night about their respective mistresses.
Kisha had dozens of brushes. Aerin rolled up a few in a bit of leather and hid them in an elbow of her reading tree by the pond.
Talat was still too much on his dignity to admit how thoroughly he enjoyed being groomed; but his ears had a tendency to lop over, his eyes to glaze and half shut, and his lips to twitch, when Aerin rubbed the brushes over him. White hairs flew in a blizzard, for Talat had gone white in the years since he was lamed.
“Hornmar,” she said, several days later, trying to sound indifferent, “do you suppose Talat’s leg really hurts him any more?”
Hornmar was polishing Kethtaz, Arlbeth’s young bay stallion, with a bit of soft cloth. There wasn’t a dust mote on the horse’s hide anywhere. Aerin looked at him with dislike: he was fit and shining and merry and useful, and she loved Talat. Hornmar looked at Arlbeth’s daughter thoughtfully. All of the sofor knew by now of the private friendship between her and the crippled stallion. He
was glad for Talat and for Aerin both, for he knew more than she would have wished about what her life was like. He was also, deep down, a tiny bit envious; Kethtaz was a magnificent horse, but Talat had been a better. And Talat now turned away from his old friend with flattened ears.
“I imagine not much any more. But he’s gotten into the habit of favoring that leg, and the muscles are soft, and stiff too, from the scarring,” he said in a neutral voice. He buffed a few more inches of Kethtaz’s flank. “Talat is looking good, this season.” He glanced at Aerin and saw the blood rising in her face, and turned away again.
“Yes, he’s getting fat,” she said.
Kethtaz sighed and flicked his tail; Hornmar had tied it up so it wouldn’t slap him in the face. He worked his way round the stallion’s quarters and started the other side; Aerin was still leaning against the stable wall, watching. “Talat might come back a little more,” Hornmar said at last, cautiously. “He’d never be up, say, to a man’s weight again, though.”
“Oh,” said Aerin, still indifferent. Kethtaz had a black dapple on one shoulder; she rubbed it with a finger, and he turned his head around and poked her with his nose. She petted him for a moment, and then she quietly slipped away.
The next day she rode her crippled stallion. She brushed him first, and when she was done, she dropped the grooming things together in a pile. She ran a finger along one wide cheek; Talat, nothing loath for a little more attention, rested his nose against her stomach so she could stroke’ the other cheek with the other hand. After a moment she worked down his left side, and placed her hands on his withers and loins, and leaned on them. He was smaller than most of the royal war-horses, but still too tall for her to put much of her weight into her hands. He flicked his ears at her. “Well,” she said. She rested one hand on his shoulder and he followed her to a rock she had picked out for the purpose some days before. She stepped up on it, and he stood quietly as she slowly eased one leg over his back.
She was sitting on him. Nothing happened. Well, she said to herself crossly, what was supposed to happen? He was broken to saddle while I was still learning to walk. The first time.
Talat cocked his ears back toward her, his head bowed as if he felt the bit in his mouth again. She nudged him with her legs, and he walked away from the mounting stone: thunk-thunk-1hunk-drag. He was bigger than she expected, and her legs ached spanning a war-stallion’s broad back. For all that Talat had done nothing but stand in a field for over two years, the shoulders under her hands were hard with muscle.
She rode him every day after that. At first it was once around his field, starting and stopping at the mounting stone; then it was two and three times: thunk-thunk-thunk-drag, thunk-thunk-thunk-drag. He walked when she squeezed with her legs, and went right or left when she bumped him with the outside knee; and after a few tries he realized she meant him to stop when she dug her hipbones into his back. She ran her hands over the bad leg every day after she dismounted: there was no heat, no swelling, no tenderness. One day she banged the long ugly scar with her closed fist, said, “Very well, it really doesn’t hurt, I hope,” got back on him again and wrapped her legs around him till, his ears flicking surprise at her, he broke into a shuffling trot. He limped six steps and she let him stop. Tears pricked at her eyes, and she fed him mik-bars silently, and left early that day.
Nonetheless she returned the next afternoon, though she looked glum, and tried to pick up her book after she’d done grooming him. But he went so expectantly to the mounting stone and stood watching her that she sighed, and climbed on him again, and sent him forward with her legs. But he broke at once into the shuffling trot, and at the end of the six steps he did not stumble to a halt, but strode out a little more boldly; a quarter of the way around the field, halfway—Aerin sat into him and he obediently subsided into a walk, but his ears spoke to her: You see? It was that day that a small but terrible hope first bloomed in Aerin’s heart.
Chapter 5
AERIN WAS GOING to have to take part in Galanna’s wedding after all. The surka was indisputably wearing off—”It’s lasted this long, why couldn’t it have hung on just a little longer?” Aerin said irritably to Tor.
“It tried, I’m sure,” said Tor. “It just wasn’t expecting Galanna.”
Galanna had contrived to have the great event put off an extra half-year because, she said coyly, she wanted everything to be perfect, and in the time remaining it was not possible to drag a sufficient number of things up to meet that standard. Meanwhile Aerin had resignedly begun to take her old place in her father’s court; her presence was not a very necessary one, but her continued absence was noted, and the surka hadn’t killed her after all. “I wonder if I could at least convince her that I’m too woozy to carry a rod and a veil or throw flowers and sing. I could maybe get away with just standing with my father and looking pale and invalid. Probably. She can’t possibly want me around any more than I want to be around.”
“She should have thought more exactingly of the timing involved when she goaded you into eating the surka in the first place.”
Aerin laughed.
Tor said ruefully, “I almost wish I’d had the forethought to eat a tree myself.” Perlith had asked Tor to stand behind him at the ceremony. The first companion was supposed to hold a sola’s badge of rank during his wedding; but in this particular case there were some interesting politics going on. Perlith was required by tradition to ask the king and the first sola to stand by him for the ceremony, and the king and the first sola by tradition were required to accept the invitation. The first companion’s place was, as attendants go, the most important, but it was also the most attentive; the slang for the first companion’s position was rude, and referred to the companion’s location near his sola’s backside. Asking Tor to stand first companion was a token of Perlith’s unrivaled esteem for his first sola, as the first companion’s place should go to Perlith’s dearest friend. It would also be Perlith’s only chance ever to have the first sola waiting on him.
“You should drop the badge with a clatter just as the chant gets to the bit about family loyalty and the unending bliss of being a member of a family. Ugh,” said Aerin.
“Don’t tempt me,” Tor said.
Fortunately Galanna did not have her future husband’s sense of humor, and she was glad to excuse Aerin from participation on the grounds of the continuing unreliability of the first sol’s health. Galanna was incapable of plotting much of anything over a year in advance, and the surka incident had had nothing to do with the predictable approach of her wedding day. It had had to do with the loss of her eyelashes just when she knew Perlith had decided to offer for her—which offer had then had to be put off till they were long enough again for her to look up at him through them. (She had actually been weak enough to wonder if Aerin was Gifted after all, her timing in this case being no less than diabolical.) But it had occurred to her lately that it would be a boon to find a way to keep Aerin out of the ceremony itself, without giving visible public offense (and since the surka hadn’t killed her off, which, to give Galanna what little credit she deserves, she had not been attempting). Galanna understood as well as Perlith did why Tor had been asked, and would stand as first companion; but Tor was reliable, for all his disgusting sympathy for his youngest cousin. He believed in his first sola’s place as Aerin had no reason to believe in her place as first sol; and Aerin, if dragooned into performing some ceremonial role, would by fair means or foul mess things up. Nothing was going to spoil Galanna’s wedding day. She and Aerin understood each other very well when Aerin, formal and smiling, offered her apologies and regrets, and Galanna, formal and smiling, accepted them.
Galanna and Perlith’s wedding was the first great state event since the celebration of Tor’s coming to manhood, and thus his taking his full place at his uncle’s right hand, less than two years after his own father died. Aerin had been a part of that ceremony, and she had been determined to perform her role with both dignity and accuracy, that Tor wou
ld not be embarrassed in front of all the people who had told him not to ask her to be in it. The result was that she remembered very little of the day-long rites. She did remember frantically running her responses through her mind (which she had so firmly committed to memory that she remembered them all her life). When the priests finished naming the three hundred and ten sovereigns before Arlbeth (not that all of them had ruled quite the same country, but the sonorous recitation of all the then-who-came-afters had an impressive ring to it), she had to rename the last seven of them, seven being the perfect number because of the Seven Perfect Gods, and name their Honored Wives or queens (there hadn’t been a ruling queen in a very long time) and any full brothers or sisters. The finish was: And then who came after was Tor, son of Thomar, own brother to Arlbeth; Tor came next. And she had to not squeak, and she had to not squeak three times, for they went through it all once at dawn, once at midday, and once at sunset. She also had to hold his swordbelt, and by the evening she had blisters across both palms from gripping it too hard. But she had done everything right.
Tor had been busier since then, often away from the City, showing himself to the Hillfolk who came rarely or never to the City, that they might one and all know the face and voice of the man who would be their king someday; and it had also been soon after Tor’s coming of age that Aerin had eaten the surka. While it lay heavily on her she had not wished to see much of him even when he was at home, though he had come often to sit by her when she was too sick to protest and even, without her knowledge, put off one or two trips that he might stay near her. But as she got enough better to be surly about not being well, and as his absences of necessity increased, a barrier began to grow up between them, and they were no longer quite the friends they had once been. She missed him, for she had been accustomed to talking to him nearly every day, but she never said she missed him, and she told herself that it was as well, since the surka had proved Galanna three-quarters right about her, that the first sola not contaminate himself with her company too often. When she did see him, she was painstakingly bright and offhand.
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