She had discovered how to make the dragonfire ointment.
It was, she knew, sheer obstinacy that had kept her at it-over two years of making fractional changes in her mixtures, learning how to find and prepare all the ingredients for the mixtures, for she could not continue raiding Hornmar’s and Teka’s supplies; finding small apothecary shops in the City that might sell the odder ones, and riding out on the reluctant Kisha for the herbs that grew nearby.
At first she had wondered if anyone would try to stop her, and her first visits to shopkeepers, and beyond the City gates, gave her stomachaches of dread. But the shopkeepers attended her respectfully and even helpfully, and slowly the visits stopped seeming so awful. There was no sense in trying to disguise herself; she was the only person in the City with orange hair, and any Damarian who had never in fact seen her would know instantly who she was. She had tried the effect of a scarf over the give-away hair, but as soon as she looked in a mirror she realized this wouldn’t work: the scarf was obviously there to hide her hair, and she still had orange eyebrows. There was stuff Galanna used to blacken her brown lashes, but Aerin had no idea how to get hold of it, and thought that while Teka seemed willing to let her and her peculiar errands alone at present, she would probably throw a fit and spoil everything if she caught her royal charge creeping around with her hair hidden and her brows blackened. And as she wasn’t stopped, her confidence grew, and she swept into the shops she frequented with her head high as a first sol should, and made her purchases, and swept out again. She felt tremendously grand, but the shopmen and women found her charmingly unpretentious, being accustomed to the Perliths and Galannas who never looked anyone in the eye and were never satisfied (it was widely held that the woman who supplied Galanna with her brow-darkener more than earned the fancy price she charged), and who always had lackeys to handle the money and the purchases themselves while they fingered their jewels and looked into the distance. Arlbeth would have been pleased to hear the small new thread of gossip that began to circulate in the City about the witchwoman’s daughter, and how the daughter (like the mother, a few folk now recalled) had a smile for everyone; and this view of the king’s daughter almost eased the fear of her that had begun with the rumor that she was enspelling the first sola. A few of her new supporters decided that Tor, as first sola and king to be, understandably wanted a quiet family life; and the king’s daughter, of all those court ladies, looked the likeliest to give it to him.
There were even those, especially among the older folk, who shook their heads and said that they shouldn’t keep the young first sol mewed up in that castle the way they did; it’d be better if she were let out to mingle with her people. If Aerin could have heard, she would have laughed.
And the things she bought were such harmless things, even if some of them were odd, and even though, as the months passed, she did buy quite a quantity of them. Nothing there that could cause any ... mischief. Hornmar had mentioned, very quietly, to one or two of his particular friends the first sol’s miraculous cure of old Talat; and somehow that tale got around too, and as the witchwoman’s easy smile was remembered, so did some folk also begin to remember her way with animals.
It was a few months before her nineteenth birthday that she put a bit of yellowish grease on a fresh bit of dry wood, held it with iron pincers, and thrust it into the small candle flame at the corner of her work table—and nothing happened. She had been performing this particular set of motions—measuring, noting down, mixing, applying and watching the wood burn-—for so long that her movements were deft and exact with long practice even while her brain tended to go off on its own and contemplate her next meeting of swords with Tor, or the nagging Teka was sure to begin within the next day or two for her to darn her stockings since they all had holes in them and lately she had perforce always to wear boots when she attended the court in the great hall so that the holes wouldn’t show. She was thinking that the green stockings probably had the smallest and most mendable holes, and she had to have dinner in the hall tonight. Since she’d turned eighteen she’d been expected to take part in the dancing occasionally, and there was sure to be dancing tonight since the dinner was in honor of Thorped and his son, who were here from the south; one of Thorped’s daughters was one of Galanna’s ladies. It was difficult dancing in boots and she needed all the help she could get. At this point she realized that her arm was getting tired—and that the bit of yellow-slick wood was peacefully ignoring the fire that burned around it, and that the iron tongs were getting hot in her hand.
She jumped, and knocked over the candlestick and dropped the hot tongs, and the greasy bit of wood skittered over the dusty, woodchip-littered floor, picking up shreds and shavings till it looked like a new sort of pomander. She had set up shop in a deserted stone shed near Talat’s pasture that had once held kindling and things like old axe handles and sticks of wood that might make new axe handles, and she had never gotten around to sweeping the floor. Her hands were shaking so badly that she dropped the candle again when she tried to pick it up, and missed when she went to stamp out the thread of smoke that rose from the floor where the candle had fallen.
She sat down on a pile of axe handles and took a few deep breaths, and thought fixedly about green stockings. Then she stood up, lit the candle again, and set it quietly back in its holder. She’d learned in the long months past not to waste her time and the apothecaries’ wares by making more than a tiny trial bit of each mixture, and the marble bowl where the final mashing and mixing went on before the experiment with the candle flame was no bigger than an eggcup. There was just enough in the bottom of the cup now to grease one fingertip. She chose the left index finger, which had been the one to get burnt with the result of her very first fire-ointment attempt, what seemed centuries ago. She held the fingertip steadily in the flame, and watched it; the pointed blue-and-yellow oval of the fire parted smoothly around her finger and rejoined above it to prick the shadows of the stone ceiling. She felt nothing. She withdrew the finger and stared at it with awe—touched it with another finger. Skin-heat, no more; and while it had remained stickily apparent on the surface of the wood, the ointment was not greasy on her finger. Kenet. It existed.
She checked her notes to be sure she could read what she had written about the proportions of this particular attempt; then blew out the candle and went off in a daze to darn stockings.
Teka asked her twice, sharply, what was the matter with her, as she tried to help her dress for the court dinner. Aerin’s darns were worse than usual—which was saying a good deal, and Teka had said even more when she saw them, but as much out of worry for her sol’s extraordinary vagueness as from straightforward exasperation at yet another simply homely task done ill. Usually, big court dinners made Aerin clumsy and rather desperately here-and-now. Teka finally tied ribbons around both of Aerin’s ankles to hide the miserable lumps of mending and was even more appalled when Aerin did not object. Ankle ribbons were all the fashion among the higher-born young ladies this year; when this first became apparent Teka had had a difficult time convincing Aerin not to lengthen all her skirts eight inches, that they might drag on the floor and render all questions of ankle adornment academic; and Teka was fairly sure the only reason she’d won the argument was that Aerin couldn’t face the thought of all the sewing such a project would entail.
Teka hung a tassel at the front of one ankle, to fall gracefully over the high arch of Aerin’s long foot (not that it would stay there; Galanna and the others had developed a coy little hitch and skip to their walk, to make their tassels fall forward as they should), and pinned a small silver brooch bearing the royal crest on the other, and Aerin didn’t even fidget. She was dreamily staring into space; she was even wearing a slight smile. Could she have fallen in love? Teka wondered. Who? Thorped’s son—what was his name? Surely not. He was half a head shorter than she and wispy.
Teka sighed and stood up. “Aerin—are you sure you’re not ill?” she said.
Aerin came
back to herself with a visible jerk and said, “Dear Teka, I’m fine. Truly I am.” Then she looked down with a scowl and wiggled her ankles. “Ugh,”
“They hide your—dare I call them—darns,” Teka said severely.
“There’s that,” said Aerin, and smiled again, and Teka thought, What ails the girl? I will look for Tor tonight; his face will tell me something.
Chapter 8
TOR THOUGHT that night she looked radiant and wished, wistfully, that it had something to do with him, while he was only too certain it did not. When, daring greatly, he told her as they spun through the figures of the dance that she was beautiful, she laughed at him. Truly she has grown up, he thought; even six months ago she would have blushed scarlet and turned to wood in my arms. “It’s the ribbons round my ankles,” she said. “My darning surpassed itself in atrocity today, and Teka said it was this or going barefoot.”
“I am not looking at your feet,” said Tor, looking into her green eyes; and she said without flinching: “Then you should be, dearest cousin, for you have never seen me thus bedecked previously, nor likely are ever to see me so again.”
Thorped’s wispy son could barely take his eyes off her. He remarked to his father that Aerin-sol was so splendidly large. Thorped, who liked a woman of the size to throw over a shoulder and run lightly off with—not that the opportunity had ever presented itself, but it was an appealing standard of measurement—said ah, hmm. Galanna, who didn’t like wispy men, was still furious that anyone should waste time looking at Aerin, and snuggled relentlessly with Perlith. She was about resigned to being married to him; Tor was truly hopeless. If only Perlith would play up a bit more; a little mock despair over her being the center of attention at every gathering (well, nearly); a little jealousy when beautiful young men wrote her poems, as she was able occasionally to persuade them to do. But he had the infuriating attitude that his carefully chosen offer for her hand had conferred upon her a favor. By the gods! She was a good match, after all.
But then so was he. Neither of them would ever forget it for a moment.
Aerin floated through the evening. Since she was first sol, she never had the embarrassment (or the relief) of being able to sit out. She wasn’t particularly aware that—most unusually—she had stepped on no one’s feet that night; and she was accustomed to the polite protests, at the end of each set when partners were exchanged, of what a pleasure it was to dance with her, and her thoughts were so far away that she failed to catch the unusual ring of truth in her dancing partners’ voices. She didn’t even mind dancing three figures with Thorped’s son (what was his name again?), for while his height did not distress her, his chinlessness, on another occasion, would have.
She did notice when she danced with Perlith that there was an unwonted depth of malignance in his light remarks, and wondered in passing what was biting him. Does the color of my gown make his skin look sallow? But Perlith too had noticed Thorped’s son’s admiration of the king’s only daughter, and it irritated him almost as much as it irritated Galanna. Perlith knew quite well that when Galanna had stopped playing hard to get back in the days when he was punctiliously courting her it was because she had decided to make a virtue of necessity after it became apparent that a second sola was the best she was going to get. But a second sola was an important personage, and Perlith wanted everyone to envy him his victory to the considerable extent that his blue blood and irresistible charm—and of course Galanna’s perfect beauty-deserved. How dare this common runt admire the wrong woman?
Being Perlith, he had, of course, timed his courtship to coincide with the moment that Galanna admitted defeat on the score of future queenship; but he’d never been able to bring himself to flirt with Aerin. He had as much right to the king’s daughter as anyone—what a pity she had to have orange hair and enormous feet—and while he would never have married her, king’s daughter or no, with that commoner for a mother, it might have been amusing to make her fall in love with him. In his conscious mind he preferred to think that he hadn’t made her fall in love with him by choice; in a bleaker moment it had occurred to him that Aerin probably wouldn’t like being flirted with, and that his notorious charm of manner (when he cared to use it) might have had no effect on her whatsoever. He had banished the thought immediately, and his well-trained self-esteem had buried it forever.
He could admit that she looked better than usual tonight; he’d never seen her in the fashionable ribbons before, and she had nice trim ankles, in spite of the feet. This realization did not soften his attitude; he glared at his dancing partner, and Aerin could feel the glare, though she knew that if she looked into his face his expression would be one of lazy pleasure, with only a deep glint in his heavy-lidded eyes to tell her what he was thinking. At a pause in the dance he plucked several golden specks out of the air that were suddenly there for him when he reached for them. He closed his fingers around them, smiled, and opened his hand again, and a posy of yellow and white ringaling flowers—the flowers Aerin had carried at his wedding—sprang up between his thumb and first finger.
“For the loveliest lady here tonight,” he said, with a bow, to Aerin.
Aerin turned white and backed up a step, her hands behind her. She bumped into the next couple as they waited for the music for the next figure to begin, and they turned, mildly irritated, to see what was happening; and suddenly the entire hall was watching. The musicians in the gallery laid down their instruments when they should have played their first notes; it didn’t occur to them to do anything else. Perlith, especially when he was feeling thwarted, was formidably Gifted.
A little space cleared around Perlith and Aerin, and the focal point of the vast hall was a little bouquet of yellow and white flowers. Tor muttered something, and dropped his partner’s hand, much to that lady’s annoyance (she would feel resentful of the orange-haired sol for weeks after); but he was on the far side of the hall from Aerin and Perlith, and it was as though the company were frozen where they stood, for he had difficulty threading his way through them, and no one tried to make room. Aerin knew if she touched the magic flowers they would turn to frogs, or burst in an explosion that anyone who might not have noticed the frogs couldn’t help but notice; or, worst of all, make her sick on the floor at Perlith’s feet. Perlith knew it too. Magic had made her queasy since early adolescence, when her Gift should have been asserting itself and wasn’t; and since her illness her reaction to anything to do with other royal Gifts was much more violent. She stood helpless and could think of no words to say; even if she asked him to return the flowers to dust motes, the whiff of magic about his hands and face would remain, and she dared not dance with him again immediately.
Perlith stood, smiling gently at her, his arm gracefully raised and his hand curled around his posy; the glint in his eye was very bright.
And then the flowers leaped from his fingers and grew wings, and became yellow and white birds which sang “Aerin, Aerin” as sweetly as golden harps, and as they disappeared into the darkness of the ceiling the musicians began playing again, and Tor’s arms were around her, and Perlith was left to make his way out of the circle of dancers. Aerin stepped on Tor’s feet several times as he helped her off the dancing-floor, for the magic was strong in her nostrils, and though what Tor had done had been done at a distance, it still clung to him too. He held her up by main force till she said, a little shakily, “Let go, cousin, you’re tearing the waistband right out of my skirt.”
He released her at once, and she put a hand out—to a chair, not to his outstretched arm. He let the arm drop. “My pardon, please. I am clumsy tonight.”
“You are never clumsy,” she said with bitterness, and Tor was silent, for he was wishing that she would lean on him instead of on the chair, and did not notice that most of the bitterness was for Perlith, who had hoped to embarrass her before the entire court, and a little for herself, and none at all for him. She told him he might leave her, that she was quite all right. Two years ago he would have said, “Non
sense, you are still pale, and I will not leave you”; but it wasn’t two years ago, and he said merely, “As you wish,” and left her to find his deserted partner and make his excuses.
Perlith came to Aerin as she sat in the chair she had been leaning on, sipping from a glass of water a woman of the hafor had brought her. “I beg most humbly for forgiveness,” he said, closing his eyes till only the merest glitter showed beneath his long lashes. “I forgot that you—ah—do not care for such—ah—tokens.”
Aerin looked at him levelly. “I know perfectly well what you were about this evening. I accept your apology for precisely what it is worth.”
Perlith blinked at this unexpected intransigence and was, very briefly, at a loss for a reply. “If you accept my apology for what it is worth,” he said smoothly, “then I know I need have no fear that you will bear me a grudge for my hapless indiscretion.”
Aerin laughed, which surprised her as much as it surprised him. “No indeed, cousin; I shall bear you no grudge for this evening’s entertainment. Our many years of familiar relationship render us far beyond grudges.” She curtsied hastily and left the hall, for fear that he would think of something else to say to her; Perlith never lost verbal skirmishes, and she wanted to keep as long as she could the extraordinary sensation of having scored points against him.
Later, in the darkness of her bedroom, she reconsidered the entire evening, and smiled; but it was half a grimace, and she found she could not sleep. It had been too long a day, and she was too tired; her head always spun from an evening spent on display in the great hall, and tonight as soon as she deflected her thoughts from Perlith and Tor and yellow birds they immediately turned to the topic of the dragon fire ointment.
The Hero And The Crown d-2 Page 7
