Breakfast was got through without any further uncomfortable moments, but as Aerin rose to slink away—she still wasn’t recovered quite enough for the receiving-hall, and had been spending her days mending her gear and riding Talat—Arlbeth said, “Wait just a moment. I have some things for you, but I gave up bringing them to breakfast several days ago.”
Tor got up and disappeared from the room, and Arlbeth deliberately poured himself another cup of malak. Tor returned swiftly, although the moments were long for Aerin, and he was carrying two spears and her small plain sword, which he must have gone to her room to fetch from its peg on the wall by her bed. Tor formally offered them to the king, kneeling, his body bowed so that the outstretched arms that held the weapons were as high as his head; and Aerin shivered, for the first sola should give such honor to nobody. Arlbeth seemed to agree, for he said, “Enough, Tor, we already know how you feel about it,” and Tor straightened up with a trace of a smile on his face.
Arlbeth stood up and turned to Aerin, who stood up too, wide-eyed. “First, I give you your sword,” and he held it out to her with his hands one just below the hilt and one two-thirds down the scabbarded blade, and she cupped her hands around his. He dropped the sword into her hands, and then cupped his fingers around her closed fingers. “Thus you receive your first sword from your king,” he said, and let go; and Aerin dropped her arms slowly to her sides, the sword pressing against her thighs. She carried the sword of the king now; and so the king could call upon it and her whenever he had need—to do, or not to do, at his bidding. The color came and went in her face, and she swallowed.
“And now,” Arlbeth said cheerfully, “as you have received your sword officially by my hand I can officially reprimand you with it.” He reached for the hilt as Aerin stood dumbly holding it by the scabbard, and pulled the blade clear. He whipped it through the air, and it looked small in his hands; then he brought the blade to a halt just before Aerin’s nose. “Thus,”, he said, and slapped her cheek hard with the flat of it, “and thus,” and he slapped her other cheek with the opposite flat, and Aerin blinked, for the blows brought tears to her eyes. Arlbeth stood looking at her till her vision cleared, and said gravely, “I am taking this very seriously, my dear, and if I catch you riding off again without speaking to me first, I may treat you as a traitor.”
Aerin nodded.
“But since you are officially a sword-bearer and since we take pride in officially 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 witchwoman’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.
The fifth dragon was the first one that marked her. She was careless, and it was her own fault. It was the smallest dragon she had yet faced, and the quickest, and perhaps the brightest; for when she had pinned it to the ground with one of her good . spears and came up to it to chop off its head, it did not flame at her, as dragons usually did. It had flamed at her before, with depressingly little result, from the dragon’s point of view. When she approached it, it spun around despite the spear that held it, and buried its teeth in her arm.
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 To
r.
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.
The ballad told of Aerin Fire-hair, whose hair blazed brighter than dragonfire, and thus she stew them without hurt to herself, for the dragons were ashamed when they saw her, and could not resist her. Perlith had a sweet light tenor voice, and the ballad was not so very badly composed, and the tune was an old and venerable one that many generations had enjoyed. But Perlith mocked her with it by the most delicate inflections, the gentlest ironies, and her knuckles were white around her wine goblet as she listened.
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
Chapter 12
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.
And so she stood heavy-eyed in the castle courtyard as the cavalry officers and courtiers mounted their horses and awaited the king and the first sola. The army waited in the wide clearing hewn out of the forest beyond the gates of the City; Aerin imagined that she could hear the stamp of hoofs, the jingle of bits, see the long shadows of the trees lying across the horses’ flanks and the men’s faces.
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 witchwoman’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 li
ke 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 cupped her chin in his hands, and looked at her for a long moment; then he turned to Kethtaz, and Aerin grasped the stirrup and turned it for Arlbeth’s foot.
At that moment there was a small commotion at the courtyard gate, and a man on a tired horse stepped onto the glassy stone. The horse stopped, swaying on wide-spaced legs, for it was too weary to walk trustingly on the smooth surface; and the man dismounted and dropped the reins, and ran to where the king stood. Arlbeth turned, his hand still on Aerin’s shoulder, as the man came up to them.
“Majesty,” he said.
Arlbeth inclined his head as if he were in his great hall and this man only the first of a long morning’s supplicants. “Majesty,” the man said again, as if he could not remember his message, or dared not give it. The man’s gaze flicked to Aerin’s face as she stood, her hand still holding the stirrup for mounting, and she was startled to see the gleam of hope in the man’s eyes as he looked at her.
“The Black Dragon has come,” he said at last. “Maur, who has not been seen for generations, the last of the great dragons, great as a mountain. Maur has awakened.”
Sweat ran down the man’s face, and his horse gave a gasping shuddering breath that meant its wind was broken, so hard had it been ridden. “I beg you for ... help. My village even now may be no more. Other villages will soon follow.” The man’s voice rose in panic. “In a year—in a season Damar may all be black with the dragon’s breath.”
“This is mischief from across the Border,” Tor said, and Arlbeth nodded. There was silence for a long, sad, grim moment, and when Arlbeth spoke again, his voice was heavy. “As Tor says, the Black Dragon’s awakening is mischief sent us, and sent us crucially at just this moment when we dare not heed it.” The messenger’s shoulders slumped, and he put his hands over his face.
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