The Hero And The Crown
Part Two Chapter 15

 
SHE COULD NOT SLEEP, and she coughed, and blood spotted her pillow; and the fever that came and went, and would not leave her alone even as her burns healed and her hair grew, came again that night, and light-headedly she relived the scene in the hall; and she heard the thing laugh, and heard the court say, Witchwoman's daughter.
Near dawn she dreamed of the tall blond man she had seen once before, while she slept in the dragon's valley. He did not speak to her, not did he seem to know she watched him. Perhaps he is only a dream, her dreaming self thought; but she looked at the way his blond eyelashes caught the sunlight, at the freckles on the backs of his hands, at the way the little fingers curled under the base of the cup he held, at the steam that rose from the cup. He blinked when it wafted into his eyes.
Where? her dreaming self thought. If he exists, where?
She woke, coughing.
He had said he would help her. How could he help her? He had said he would tell her how she could aid Damar. Damar didn't seem to like her aiding it. She turned onto her back and stretched till her throat and chest lay flat and straight; sometimes that eased the coughing. She listened to the gurgling rasp of her breathing; no matter how shallowly she breathed, still the air rustled in her lungs. She thought dispassionately, This cough will kill me before too long, and Maur will have slain me after all.
Perhaps the man in my dream could cure my cough.
If she could find him. If he existed. She was so tired; she could not imagine what it was like not to be tired. She fell asleep again, listening to her breath rattle in her chest like dead leaves, and woke tired. She stared into the canopy over her head for several minutes, her eyes tracing the graceful embroidered forms of the galloping horses and their super-naturally long manes and tails, the manes almost like wings, the grass underfoot almost like clouds.
The fever would not let her go. She could not get out of bed that day, nor the next. Tor came to see her, and she would not speak to him; but he came again, and she remembered she had one thing she needed to say to him. "What happened?" he asked her over and over again.
At last she said, "I grew dizzy," but would not say more; and Tor fell silent, holding her hand in a hand almost as feverish as hers.
It was only luck, she had pleaded with Maur. Was it? Maur's head had answered her.
"Aerin." Tor's voice. What was it she needed to say to him?
"Will you ... take Maur's head off the wall ... and put it ... somewhere far away ... that no one may see it?"
"Of course," he said anxiously. "Of course. It shall be done today."
She remembered little clearly after that; she saw Teka's face bent over hers, and Tor's, and her father's, and others' whom she dimly remembered as the healers who had done her so little good before. She did not know how many days or weeks she spent this way; and then one night she woke again from an especially vivid dream of the blond man.
"You stupid woman - climb off your deathbed while you still can, and come to me."
The words still rang in her ears. She sat up slowly. She drew on her boots, and her leggings and tunic; she picked up the red stone on the table by her bed, and thrust it into the breast of her shirt. She looked at her sword - the king's sword - hanging over her bed, and did not touch it, she fumbled for a cloak, and drew it over her shoulders. She had to sit down on the edge of her bed again and catch her breath. I must tell them where I am going, she thought. But I don't know where I am going.
She stood up again, and made her way slowly into her sitting-room, to the desk there. The ink was dry; she had to carry a glass from her bed table, filled with water from the pitcher there, into her sitting-room, to wet it; her hand shook, and she spilled most of it on the desk, and the ink would not mix, but stayed pale and uneven. It would have to do. There was nothing to write on. She sat at the desk, staring at its blank top, as if paper or parchment would appear if she waited for it. She did not seem able to collect her thoughts, but her hand reached out of its own accord, and groped in the rear of the small desk cabinet, and drew something out. It was the note Tor had written her, long ago, asking her to see the king's army off the next morning.
She turned it over, and took up a pen; the ink dripped and ran on the page. "Tor," she wrote. "I have dreamed of someone who might help me, and I go to look for him. I will come back as I may."
Stealthily she made her way to the ground floor and outside. The inner corridors were pitch dark, but she found she could see her way; there was a soft silvery light around her - she was glowing, she realized suddenly; and for the first time since Maur's head had spoken to her she felt a glimmer of hope, and the hope warmed her a little, and steadied her footsteps.
Someone should have seen her as she crossed the open courtyard, particularly as she persisted in glowing like foxfire in a rotting tree; but no one came. She dragged Talat's small light saddle from its peg opposite his stall, but left the trappings of the king's breastplate as she had left her sword. Talat's pale head thrust over the stall half-door at her. His nostrils moved in a silent whicker of welcome, but from his campaigning days he could recognize secrecy when he saw it. She had to wrestle the saddle onto his back, for she was too weak to lift it; but it was on at last, and Talat stepped after his lady as softly and carefully as a lover going to his beloved's bed.
She was surprised to find that it was high summer, for she had lost all sense of the passing of time within the walls of her illness. "Although lucky for me," she whispered into Talat's pointed ears. She ate the fruit from the trees, when she remembered to eat, and at night she slept leaning against Talat's side, as he rested his nose on the earth near his folded knees. Sometimes he flicked his tail in his sleep, after flies, real or imaginary, and Aerin would come half awake - she was never profoundly asleep in the first place - and feel the silky hairs slip down her face like raindrops.
They traveled west at first, then north, with the mountains on their right and the heavy Airdthmar forests on their left, forests that had never been completely explored, that held creatures no one had ever named. When times were peaceful the kings of Damar had set up expeditions to drive deeper into the forest, for it stood in the way of their kingdom's free trade and concourse from one town to the next; but the Airdthmar was not kind to the folk who tried to chart it and lay roads through it. Arlbeth claimed to be fond of it. "It is quiet, it causes no courteous passer-by any trouble, it keeps its own counsel," he said. "Would that all the quarters of the Damarian compass were so civilized."
Aerin gazed into the trees as she rode, but she saw only blackness looking back at her. She had thought to go west originally because the Airdthmar seemed like the obvious place to look for a mysterious mage who visited dreams; but as they cleared the foothills Talat shied away and veered north, and Aerin half permitted, half agreed with him.
There was no trail for them to follow; they wove their way back into the foothills again, away from the smooth way that Arlbeth and his army had gone to meet with Nyrlol, or that any folk with legitimate business took around the eastern edge of the Airdthmar; Aerin did not want to meet anyone who might take word of her back to the City, nor be overtaken by any party sent in pursuit.
They came at last to a pocket valley in the hills, a small undistinguished valley like many others, well furnished by the thick purple color grass, which did not grow in the City, and with a few trees. The sun was setting as they paused, and Aerin, seeing a rock that would do for a mounting block, thought that this would be a good place to stop for the night; but she made no move to dismount, and Talat remained standing, ears pricked, uninterested in the lush lolor, which generally he preferred to anything else. As the sun disappeared it seemed to Aerin that the light never quite faded; but that might have been the glitter of her fever.
Talat looked back over his shoulder at her, and Aerin's knee as if of its own volition bent him toward the mountains behind the foothills - east again; and Talat at once found the hidden trail that began at the edge of the pocket valley.
The way was soon so steep that Aerin worried about Talat's weak leg; but when she tried to slip off his back and walk beside him for a while he sidled all around and rubbed her against the trees that grew close around them, and she at last gave it up. He was right; climbing uphill would make her cough. He went slowly, and all four feet hit the ground evenly, and Aerin concentrated on hanging on to the front of the saddle with both hands. And breathing. It had seemed to her lately that she had to remember to breathe, that her lungs would prefer to be still.
By dawn she was light-headed with fever and altitude and exhaustion, for even though she slept little, lying quietly on the earth was an easier way to pass the time than clinging to a heaving saddle. Still Talat toiled on, the sweat running down his shoulders, though the air was cool. Aerin let go the saddle and wound her cold fingers in his mane to warm them.
The ground leveled abruptly. Talat paused disbelievingly, all four feet braced; then he went on again, and the trees gave way before them, and the secret track Talat had followed so trustingly was a plain trail before them, and at the end of a short way was a small bare courtyard, set round with pillars, and a great grey stone building. Talat walked into the courtyard and stopped. Aerin unwound her hands from his mane and stared down past his wet shoulder to the ground, and thought about dismounting; and then a tall blond man was standing beside her. She wished to feel alarm, for she had not seen or heard his approach; but Talat was not disturbed, and she recognized the man's face from her dreams. He lifted her bodily from the saddle, and as his arms took her weight, fear crossed his face: "May all the gods listen - there's nothing left of you."
He carried her into the stone hall, and she leaned her head against his chest, and thought of nothing. His boots were soft-soled and his footsteps silent; but the rustle of her breathing echoed through the hall like the wings of a flock of small birds. He set her in a high-backed chair at the far end of the hall, and picked up a goblet from a small table, glared at it, muttered over it, said, "This will have to do," and gave it to her. She held it, dreamily, but even with both hands around it, it swayed and began to sag, and the man, with a muffled exclamation, leaned over her and grasped the stem of the goblet around her two hands. His hand was warm, like Talat's mane, and the goblet was cool. "Who are you?" she asked, looking into the frowning face bending over her.
"I am Luthe," he said. "Drink."
She took the first sip, obediently, as she had drunk Teka's draughts when she was young and had fevers. She did not remember a second sip.
She awoke, pressed down with blankets, in a narrow curtain-less bed. The bed was one of many, set side by side down a long narrow corridor; the heads were pushed up against one wall where slit windows high above shed sunlight on their feet; and beyond the beds was a narrow passage and then the far wall, taller than the window wall, the roof slanting up sharply from the one to the other. She blinked drowsily at the far wall; it was blank grey stone, like the rest of Luthe's hall. Or not blank: Aerin sat up, shedding blankets, and frowned; etched into the grey stone were faint relief pictures, but she could not quite decide what they depicted: men with antlers, women with wings, trees with eyes that watched. She blinked again; her vision hadn't been trustworthy in a long time.
Her fever was gone. She felt as weak as when she had first dragged herself to the stream after Maur's death, but she felt happy, with a senseless transparent happiness like that of a very young child. She wrestled cheerfully with the enshrouding blankets, got feebly to her feet, and began to make her way down the row of beds by clinging to the foot of each in turn - all of them empty, and all but hers neatly made up with coarse dark blankets, and pillows wrapped in smooth dark cloth. She came to an arch of doorway and looked through; the thickness of the wall it pierced made the entrance dark, but beyond it the great hall was bright with daylight. There were windows cut high into the two lengthwise walls of the great chamber, the walls themselves high enough that the windows looked out over the roofs of the sleeping corridors; and yet far above them all the ceiling was invisible in darkness.
Luthe saw her and frowned. "You should have slept longer."
"No, I shouldn't. I have slept just the right amount; I feel dazzlingly" - she ran out of breath, and leaned against the threshold - "hungry. I haven't felt hungry in a long time."
"I will claim that as my consolation; but evidently I still have not learned to get simple sleeping draughts right. Lily would be ashamed of me. Come eat, then." He watched her drift toward him; it seemed to be a long way from the sleeping-chamber door to the table before the hearth, where he was. His hands closed over the high back of the chair he stood behind as he watched her, but he did not offer to help her. She fetched up against the table at last; it was a small delicate table, but she was little more than a wraith, and when she flattened both hands on the top of it to steady herself it held her slight weight easily.
She looked up at him and smiled: a lover's smile, sweet and brilliant, but it was not directed at him; her eyes looked at something invisible that she herself did not recognize, and yet his heart stirred in a way he did not like. He returned her smile with a deeper frown, and she chuckled - a little tapping sound, like mouse feet on a stone floor. "I am not blind, sir, though I do seem to see light where there is only darkness and strange pictures on a blank wall; and I am quite sure that I see you scowling furiously at me, like a tutor at a student who persists in misbehaving. Pray tell me what I have done."
"You have waited too long to come here."
Her smile ebbed away. "I have not been thinking clearly for long ... I had so many strange dreams." She thought of Maur's head speaking to her from a wall in her father's castle, and a spasm crossed her face, and she raised one hand from the table to cover it., "It was easy," she said through her fingers, "not to believe there was any use in them."
There was silence between them; Aerin stirred, and dropped her hand, but her face was still sad. "Talat?" she asked.
" ... is eating his head off in a meadow among my cattle. You need have no fear for him."
"I have none." Abruptly she asked: "Am I dying?"
"Yes."
"Can you cure me?"
Luthe sighed. "I'm not sure. I think so. Had not ..."
"Had I not listened to Maur's head, I would have come here long since," Aerin said dreamily. "Had it not told me that I could not win against the Black Dragon, for no one could, I might have believed that there was enough left of my life to be worth healing; but I am Dragon-Killer, the least of my family, and if I have done a great thing, then I must die of it." Her words floated on the air, half visible, like spider silk.
"You are not the least of your family," Luthe said violently; "your mother was worth seven of her husband, and you've the courage she had, or she'd not have borne you, and you would not be standing here now after what Maur has done to you - and does to you yet."
Aerin stared at him. "Does to me yet? ... They hung its skull in the great hall, and it spoke to me. I was stronger for a while, till I saw it there, and it spoke to me."
"Spoke - ? How could anyone, even a hundred generations later, be so stupid as to bring back the Black Dragon's head as a trophy and hang it on a wall for folk to gape at? Surely - "
"I asked them to take it away - where no one might look at it again."
Luthe paced twice around the table before he said anything. "Dragon-Killer indeed. They do not know how lucky they are to have had you. To have had you at all. And I am fool enough to want to give you back to them."
Witchwoman's daughter, Aerin thought. But I told Tor I would come back if I could.
Luthe sat wearily down. "I have sat up here too long; it is so pleasant, not meddling. Perhaps after a hundred generations it is possible to forget."
"You knew my mother?"
"Yes."
It was not an answer, nor a tone of voice, to encourage further questions. She looked down, and noticed that there was bread and fruit on the table she leaned on, and she picked up a handful of cora berries and began to eat them one at a time.
"She was like you, but smaller," Luthe said after she finished the last berry and had begun on a piece of bread. "The burden she carried was different from yours, and it had worn on her for many years. When I knew her she had forgotten joy, although I believe Arlbeth gave her a little back again."
Aerin's low rough voice seemed to come from the high grey walls and not from the thin figure bowed over the table before him: "It is said in the City that she died of despair when she found she had had a daughter and not a son."
"It is probably true," Luthe said, his voice level. "She had courage enough, but little imagination; or she would not have forgotten joy, whatever the weight on her, and heavy enough it truly was."
"Is it a weight a son might have lifted from her?"
"It is a weight any of her blood and courage may lift. Damn you," he said, his voice rising. "Couldn't you tell the difference between a true dream and dragon poison?"
"Evidently not," she replied, and looked straight at him, although she still leaned on the table. "If it was so important, and the Black Dragon, even in death, so insidious, why did you not come and fetch me?"
There was a little pause, and Luthe smiled faintly. "I shan't try to bully you again."
"You have not answered my question."
"I don't wish to answer it."
She could not help herself, and she laughed: he sounded so much like a sulky child. And her laugh rang out, clear and free, as it had not done since she had first heard the name of Maur.
Luthe looked at her in wonder. "Yes, I believe I can cure you. I cannot believe that I will be let fail."
"I am glad to hear that," she said, and found herself surprised that she spoke the truth, and her mouth curled in a wry smile. "I am glad."
Luthe, watching her, knew both the truth of her words and the surprise they had caused her. She wandered around the little table till she came to another chair, and settled lightly into it; and with the smile still on her lips, her eyelids drooped, and she fell into the light doze of the chronic invalid, and sagged against the side of her chair, and Luthe watched over her sleep as Tor often had, and their thoughts were very similar. But Luthe had a choice to make, and a choice that he did not like; and it was a choice that must be made soon. Even as he thought of this choice, he knew the decision had already been made. But he was in no hurry that Aerin wake again, and he do what he must.