Talat himself was as vain and cheerful as ever after a few weeks’ holiday, and had as bottomless a hunger for mik-bars, but he was beginning to feel his age at last, and Aerin or Hornmar had to chase him around with a stick to make him exercise his weak leg on the days Aerin did not have time to ride. But the leg was strong enough that when a few mares were cautiously introduced to him in his pasture, desirable results were born eleven months later. His foals were all bright-eyed and bouncy from their first breath, and Hornmar and Aerin were very careful about who had the handling of them; and all of them grew up to go bridleless like their sire, and many of them had his courage.
The royal kennels were expanded, and the yerig and folstza who chose to stay near their lady were given their own quarters, although the door to the back stairs that led to Aerin’s old rooms was always left open. It was observed, though the thotor kennel-masters were at first too timid to do any crossbreeding deliberately, that some of the royal bitches gave birth to taller and hairier puppies than any official royal bloodlines could explain; and it was from these crosses that the long-legged desert dogs eventually came. And after a few generations of kittens grew up and had more kittens, the folstza began to accept more human masters than Aerin, and to hunt on command, at least mostly. Even tamed cats have minds of their own.
Having her own quarters did not stop the yerig queen, now Kala, from bearing her first City litter in the middle of Aerin and Tor’s bed. “Oh, gods,” said Aerin, who found her, or them: five excellent puppies, and a very proud Kala. “Teka will flay you alive.” Teka, so far from flaying anyone alive, adopted one of the puppies, named it Ursha after a small pink wild flower, and it grew up to be a great hulking beast, bigger than its mother, with a singularly wicked look, and a disposition as gentle as a featherbed.
Tor had been king less than three years when he was first called the Just, for the even-handedness of his wisdom; a wisdom, they said, that was never cold, and that sat strangely in the eyes of a man not yet forty. Aerin knew where some of that old wisdom came from, for she had first seen it the afternoon that he had told her she should be queen, had asked her to marry him; the same afternoon that he had not asked her about Luthe. She hoped that she might never be careless of Tor’s feelings: Tor, who had been her best friend all her life, and sometimes her only friend. Perhaps the memory of the reek of Maur’s despair made her a little forgetful too, for she began to think of the wide silver lake as a place she had visited only in dreams, and of the tall blond man she had once known as a creature of those dreams; for the not quite mortal part of her did sleep, that she might love her country and her husband.
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The Hero And The Crown d-2 Page 26
