The Hero And The Crown d-2

by Robin McKinley

  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.”

  As she spoke, a yerig trotted around the edge of the tower and into view again, and two or three others followed. She tried to suppress the little bubble of happiness that popped up in her throat when she saw them coming back to her; but then the yerig queen came into sight as well, and swung her head around at once to catch Aerin’s eye, and Aerin couldn’t help smiling. The queen held something in her mouth, and the young brown dog beside her also was carrying something. The queen dropped back a little, and her companion reached Aerin first; he had a fine fierce ruff and copper-colored eyes, and far less dignity than his leader, for he wagged his tail enthusiastically and flattened his ears as he came near. He dropped what he held on the ground at her feet: it was a charred circlet of surka leaves. So black and withered it was she would not have recognized it but for the red glint it showed: the dragon stone, still woven securely in its place. She stooped to pick it up as the one-eyed queen dropped what she held: it was the Hero’s Crown.

  Chapter 21

  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.”

  Aerin stared at the fire, for she couldn’t think at all when she looked at Luthe. “I really was a long time climbing, then,” she said.

  “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.”

  She had not told him much of her meeting with her uncle, nor had she asked him any questions about him; but she could not say how much he guessed—or knew, in the same way he knew of her fire-starting—and she listened eagerly when he began to talk of Agsded, and of their school days together. The chill of hating someone with her own face eased as she listened, and eased still more at the sight of Luthe smiling up into her face as he talked; and at last she told him, haltingly, a little of what had passed between them.

  Luthe looked wry, and was silent for a time, and they heard the soft contented moan of a dog stretching in its sleep. “Agsded was not entirely wrong about me,” he said at last. “I was stubborn, and no, frankly, I was not one of Goriolo’s most brilliant and promising pupils. But I survived on that stubbornness and stayed with my master long enough to learn more than most of the ones who had greater gifts to begin with and then went off and got themselves killed or became sheep farmers because a mage’s life is such a grim and thankless one.

  “I was also always at my worst when Agsded was around, for he was one of those glittering people whose every gesture looks like a miracle, whose every word sounds like a new philosophy. You’ve a bit of that yourself, valiantly as you seek to hide it.

  “But I don’t know that he and I are so unequal in the end; for as I made mistakes in ignorance, or obstinacy, he made mistakes in pride ... .”

  “You haven’t asked me how I—how he lost and I won,” said Aerin, after another pause.

  “I have no intention of asking. You may tell me or not as you wish, now or later.”

  “There is something at least I wish to ask you.”

  “Ask away.”

  “It requires you move; I need to reach my saddlebags.”

  Luthe groaned. “Is it worth it?”

  Aerin didn’t mean to laugh, but she did anyway, and Luthe smiled languorously, but he did sit up and free her. “This,” she said, and handed him the charred wreath and its red stone.

  “The gods wept,” said Luthe, and no longer looked sleepy. “I should have thought you might have this. I am the earth’s most careless teacher and Goriolo would have my head if he were around to collect it.” He parted the dry vines and spilled the red stone into his hand. It gleamed in the firelight; he rolled it gently from one hand to the other. “This makes your Hero’s Crown look like a cheap family heirloom.”

  “What is it?” Aerin asked, nervously.

  “Maur’s bloodstone. The last drop of blood from its heart—the fatal one,” Luthe replied. “All dragons who die by bloodletting spill one of these at the last; but you’d need a hawk’s eyes to find that last curdled drop from a small dragon.”

  Aerin shuddered. “Then you keep it,” she said. “I’m grateful for its wizard-defeating properties, and if I have the great misfortune ever to need to defeat another wizard, I shall borrow it from you. But I don’t want it around.”

  Luthe looked at her thoughtfully, cradling it in his hand. “If you bound it into your Damarian Crown, it would make whoever wore it invincible.”

  Aerin shook her head violently. “And be forever indebted to the memory of Maur? Damar can do without.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying. A dragon’s bloodstone is not for good or wickedness; it just is. And it is a thing of great power, for it is its dragon’s death—unlike its skull, which your folk treated like a harmless artifact. The bloodstone is the real trophy, the prize worth the winning; worth almost any winning. You’re letting your own experience color your answer.”

  “Yes, I am letting my own experience color my answer, which is what experience is for. A dragon’s heartstone may not be goodness or evil from your vantage point, but I was born a simple mortal not that long ago and I remember a lot more about the simple mortal viewpoint than maybe you ever knew. A bloodstone is not a safe sort of emblem to hand over to any of us—them—even to the royal family of Damar.” She grimaced, thinking of Perlith. “Or even the sovereigns of Damar only. Even if it were used wisely, it cannot be well enough protected; for there will be others, like you, who know what it is—others with fewer mortal limits than Damarian kings. Look at the amount of harm Agsded did with the Crown alone.”

  She paused and then added slowly, “I’m not even sure I believe you about its being a power of neither good nor evil. Our stories say that the dragons first came from the North. Almost all the evil that has ever troubled our land has come from there, nor has it often happened that something from there was not evil. You said once that Damarian royalty—any of us with the Gift, with kelar have a common ancestor with the Northerners. So why have they and their land turned out their way and we ours?

  “No. I’ll not take the thing with me. You keep it, or I’ll bury it here before we go.”

  Luthe blinked several times. “I’ve grown accustomed to being right—most of the time. Right all of the time in arguments with those who were born simple mortals not that long ago. I think—perhaps—in this case that you are right. How unexpected.” He smiled bemusedly. “Very well. I shall keep it. And you will know where to find it if ever you have the need.”

  “I will know,” said Aerin. “But gods preserve me from needing that knowledge ever again.”

  Luthe looked at her, a small frown beginning. “That’s not a good sort of vow to make, at least not aloud, where things may be listening.”


  Aerin sighed. “You are indeed a terribly careless teacher. You never warned me about vow-making either.” The frown cleared, and Luthe laughed, and it turned into a yawn halfway.

  “Aerin,” he said. “I’m wearied to death from dragging you backward through the centuries by the heel, and I must sleep, but it would comfort my rest to hold you in my arms and know I did succeed.”

  “Yes,” said Aerin. “It was not a comfortable time I spent being so dragged, and I would be glad to know that I do not spend this night alone as I did that one.”

  In the morning Aerin said abruptly, as she fixed Talat’s saddle in place. “Here—how do you travel? Do you float like a mist and waft upon the breeze?”

  “Presumably I would then have to order myself a breeze to waft me in the right direction. No, dearheart, I walk. It’s surprisingly effective.”

  “You walked here from your mountain?”

  “I did indeed,” he said, shouldering his pack. “And I will now walk back. I should, however, be grateful for your company as far as the foot of my mountain. Our ways lie together till then.”

  Aerin stared at him blankly.

  “I can move quite as fast as that antiquated beast you prefer as transportation,” he said irritably. “To begin with, my legs are longer, even if fewer, and, secondly, I carry a great deal less baggage. Stop staring at me like that.”

  “Mm,” said Aerin, and mounted. Luthe was right, however; they covered just as much ground as Aerin and Talat and their army would have on their own—although it could not be said they traveled together. Luthe walked somewhat less fast than Talat cantered, but a great deal faster than Talat walked, and they played a kind of leapfrog all day, Luthe calling directions as needed for the smoother and quicker route as Talat’s heels passed him, and Talat pinning his ears back and snorting when Luthe had the temerity to pass them.

  None of them saw much of the folstza and yerig that day, but at evening, when they camped, Aerin’s four-legged army re-formed around them. “You know, my friends,” she said to the rows of gleaming eyes, “I’m going south—far farther south than your homes and territories. You might want to think about that before you travel many more days with me.”