The Hero And The Crown

Part Two Chapter 17

 
HER VISION HAD CLEARED with her lungs, and just as she smiled involuntarily every time she took a deep breath, she was also fascinated by the sight of things like leaves on trees, or the way the muscles moved under Talat's skin when he went tearing across his meadow, bucking and kicking like a colt. She went for long directionless walks through the forests of Luthe's high valley, or strolled along the edge of the silver lake, watching tiny rainbows reflect off the water. If she was absent too long, Luthe came to fetch her; he always seemed able to find her without trouble, however far she'd wandered. Occasionally he came with her when she set out.
She had paused, staring at a tree like many other trees, but the leaves of it were waving at her; each tiny, delicate, sharp-edged green oval shivered just for her when the breeze touched it; turned that she might admire its either side, the miniature tracery of green veins, the graceful way the stem fitted to the twig, and the twig to the branch, and the branch set so splendidly into the bole. A green vine clung round the tree, and its leaves too stirred in the wind.
Luthe idly snapped a small twig from the vine and handed it to her. She took it without thinking and then saw what it was - surka - and all her pleasure was gone, and her breath caught in her throat; her fingers were too numb even to drop what they held.
"Hold it," snapped Luthe. "Clutch it as if it were a nettle."
Her frantic fingers squeezed together till the stem broke, and the pale green sap crept across her palm. Its touch was faintly warm and tickly, and she opened her hand in surprise, and a large furry spider walked onto her wrist and paused, waving its front pair of legs at her.
"Ugh," she said, and her wrist shook, and the spider fell to the ground and ambled slowly away. There was no sign of the broken surka twig.
Luthe snorted with laughter, tried to turn it into a cough, inhaled at the wrong moment, and then really did cough. "Truly," he said at least, "the poor surka can be a useful tool. You cannot blame it for the misfortunes of your childhood. If you try to breathe water, you will not turn into a fish, you will drown; but water is still good to drink."
"Ha," said Aerin, still shaken and waiting for the nausea or the dizziness, or something; she hadn't held it long, but long enough for something nasty to result. "The taste of water doesn't kill people who aren't royal."
"Mmm. If the truth be known, the touch of the sap of the surka doesn't kill people who aren't royal either, although eating it will certainly make them very sick, and the royal plant makes a good story. It's the kelar in your blood that brings the surka's more curious properties out - although poor old Merth killed himself just as surely with it. As you would have killed yourself were it not for your mother's blood in your veins - and serve you right for being so stupid about that Galooney woman. Anything powerful is also dangerous, and worth more respect than a silly child's trick like that."
"Galanna."
"Whatever. All she uses her Gift for is self-aggrandizement, with a little unguided malice thrown in. Tor doesn't realize how narrowly he escaped; a flicker more of the Gift in her and less in him and he'd have married her, willy-nilly, and wondered for the rest of his life why he was so miserable." Luthe did not sound as though the prospect caused him any sorrow. "But you have no excuse for falling into her snares."
"What is kelar?"
Luthe pulled a handful of leaves off the surka and began to weave them together. "It's what your family calls the Gift. They haven't much of it left to call anything. You're stiff with it - be quiet. I'm not finished - for all you tried to choke me off by an overdose of surka." He eyed her. "Probably you will always be a little sensitive to it, because of that; but I still believe you can learn to control it."
"I was fifteen when I ate the surka and - "
"The stronger the Gift, the later it shows up, only your purblind family has forgotten all that, not having had a strong Gift to deal with in a very long time. Your mother's was late. And your uncle's," He frowned at the wreath in his hands.
"My mother."
"Most of your kelar is her legacy."
"My mother was from the North," Aerin said slowly. "Was she then a witch - a demon - as they say?"
"She was no demon," Luthe said firmly. "A witch? Mmph. Your village elders, who sell poultices to take off warts, are witches."
"Was she human?"
Luthe didn't answer immediately. "That depends on what you mean by human."
Aerin stared at him, all the tales of her childhood filling her eyes with shadows.
Luthe was wearing his inscrutable look again, although he bent it only on the surka wreath. "Time was, you know, there were a goodly number of folk not human who walked this earth. Time was - not so long ago. Those who were human, however, never liked the idea, and ignored those not human when they met them, and now they ..." The inscrutable look faded, and he looked up from his hands and into the trees, and Aerin remembered the creatures on the walls of her sleeping-hall.
"I'm not," he said carefully, "the best one to ask questions about things like humanity. I'm not entirely human myself." He glanced at her. "Time I fed you again."
She shook her head, but her stomach roared at her; it had been almost ceaselessly hungry since she had swum in the silver lake. Luthe seemed to take a curious ironic pleasure in pouring food into her; he was an excellent cook, but it didn't seem to have much to do with culinary pride. It was more as if a mage's business did not often extend to the overseeing of convalescents, and the interest he took in his humble role of provider ought to be beneath his dignity, and he was a little sheepish to discover that it wasn't.
"Aerin." She looked up, but the shadows of her childhood were still in her eyes. He smiled as if it hurt him and said, "Never mind." And threw the surka wreath over her head. It settled around her shoulders and then rippled into long silver folds that fell to her feet, and shivered like starlight when she moved.
"You look like a queen," Luthe said,
"Don't," she said bitterly, trying to find a clasp to unfasten the bright cloak. "Please don't."
"I'm sorry," said Luthe, and the cloak fell away, and she held only silver ashes in her hands. She let her hands fall to her sides, and she felt ashamed. "I'm sorry too. Forgive me."
"It matters nothing," Luthe said, but she reached out and hesitantly put a hand on his arm, and he covered it with one of his. "There may have been a better way than the Meeldtar's to save your life," he said. "But it was the only way I knew; and you left me no time. ... I was not trained as a healer." He shut his eyes, but his hand stayed on hers. "No mages are, usually. It's not glamorous enough, I suppose; and we're a pretty vain lot." He opened his eyes again and tried to smile.
"Meeldtar is the Water of Sight, and its spring runs into the lake here, the Lake of Dreams. We live - here - very near the Meeldtar stream, but the lake also touches other shores and drinks other springs - I do not know all their names. I told you I'm not a healer ... and . . , when you got here, finally, I could almost see the sunlight through you. If it weren't for Talat, I might have thought you were a ghost. The Meeldtar suggested I give you a taste of the lake water - the Water of Sight itself would only have ripped your spirit from what was left of your body.
"But the lake - even I don't understand everything that happens in that lake." He fell silent, and dropped his hand from hers, but his breath stirred the hair that fell over her forehead. At last he said: "I'm afraid you are no longer quite .. .mortal."
She stared up at him, and the shadows of her childhood ebbed away to be replaced by the shadows of many unknown futures.
"If it's any comfort, I'm not quite mortal either. One does learn to cope; but within a fairly short span one finds oneself longing for an empty valley, or a mountain top. I've been here ..."
"Long enough to remember the Black Dragon."
"Yes. Long enough to remember the Black Dragon."
"Are you sure?" she whispered.
"One is never sure of anything," he snapped; but she had learned that his anger was not directed at her, but at his own fears, and she waited. He closed his eyes again, thinking. She's being patient with me. Gods, what has happened to me? I've been a master mage since old Goriolo put the mark on me, and he could almost remember when the moon was first hung in the sky. And this child with her red hair looks at me once with those smoky feverish eyes and I panic and dunk her in the lake. What is the matter with me?
He opened his eyes again and looked down at her. Her eyes were still smoky, green and hazel, still gleaming with the occasional amber flame, but they were no longer feverish, and their calm shook him now almost as badly as their dying glitter had done. "I followed you, you know, when you went under. I - I had to make a rather bad bargain to bring you back again. It was not a bargain I was expecting to have to make." He paused. "I'm pretty sure."
The eyes wavered and dropped. She looked at her one hand tucked over Luthe's arm, and brought the other up to join it; and gently, as if she might like his comfort no better than she had liked his gift, he put his other arm around her; and she leaned slowly forward and rested her head against his shoulder. "I'm sorry," he said.
She laughed the whisper of a laugh. "I was not ready to die yet; very well, I shall live longer than I wished."
She stirred, and moved away from him, and her arms dropped; but when he took one of her hands she did not try to withdraw it. The wind rustled lightly in the leaves. "You promised me food," she said lightly.
"I did. Come along, then."
The way back to Luthe's hall was narrow, and as they walked side by side, for Luthe would not relinquish her hand, they had to walk very near each other. Aerin was glad when she saw the grey stone of the hall rear up before her, and at the edge of the small courtyard she broke away from the man beside her, and ran up the low steps and into the huge high room; and by the time he rejoined her she was busily engaged in pretending to warm her hands at the hearth. But she had no need of the fire's warmth, for her blood was strangely stirred, and the flush on her face was from more than the fire's red light.
Over supper she said, "I have not heard anyone else call it kelar. Just the Gift, or the royal blood."
He was grateful that she chose to break the silence and answered quickly: "Yes, that's true enough, although your family made themselves royalty on the strength of it, not the other way round. It came from the North originally." He smiled at her stricken look. "Yes, it did; you and the demon-kind share an ancestor, and you have both lived to bear kelar through many generations. You need that common ancestor; without the unphysical strength the kelar grants you, you could not fight the demonkind, and Damar would not exist."
She laughed her whispered laugh again, and said, "One in the eye for those who like to throw up to me my status as a half-blood."
"Indeed," said Luthe, and the flicker of temper she had grown accustomed to seeing whenever they discussed her father's court flashed across his face. "Their ignorance is so great they are terrified by a hint of the truth; a hint such as you are in yourself."
"You overrate me," Aerin said. "I may be all you say of me now, but I have been nothing - nothing but an inconvenient nuisance; inconvenient particularly because I had the ill grace to get born to the king, where I could not be ignored as I deserved."
"Ignored," said Luthe. "You should be queen after your father. The sober responsible Tor is no better than a usurper."
"No," she replied, stung. "Tor is sober and responsible and he will make a far better king than I would a queen. Which is just as well, since he's for it and I'm not."
"Why not?" said Luthe. "It is you who is Arlbeth's child."
"By his second marriage," said Aerin. "If Queen Tatoria had borne a child, of course it would have ruled after Arlbeth - or it would certainly have ruled if it were a son. But she didn't. She died. Kings aren't supposed to remarry anyway, but they may under extreme duress, like childless widower-hood; but they can't marry unknown foreigners of questionable blood. I'm sure it was a great relief to all concerned when the unknown foreigner's pregnancy resulted in a girl - they usually manage not to let even firstborn girls of impeccable breeding inherit, so shunting me aside was as easy as swearing by the Seven Perfect Gods.
"Galanna prefers to think I'm a bastard, but I've seen the record book, and I am down as legitimate - but not as a legitimate heir. The priests chose to call my father's second marriage morganatic - my mother wasn't even permitted to be Honored Wife. Just in case she had a boy."
Aerin's sense of the passage of time had been uncertain since she met Maur; and as her health returned in Luthe's mountain valley, she yet had difficulty in believing that days and weeks had any meaning. When it occurred to her that one season had passed and another was passing, and that these were things she should take note of, she backed away from that knowledge again, for it was then that what Luthe had told her about the price she had paid to regain her life rose up and mocked her. Immortality was far more terrible a price than any she might have imagined.
As the air grew colder and the grass in the meadow turned brown and dull violet and as the flowers stopped blooming she pretended to notice these things only as isolated phenomena. Luthe watched her, and knew much of what she thinking, but had no comfort for her; all he could offer was his knowledge, of magic, of history, of Damar; of the worlds he had traveled, and the wonders he brought back. He taught her eagerly, and eagerly she learned, each of them distracting the other from something each could not yet face. Snow fell, and Talat and the cattle and sheep spent their days in the low open barn at the edge of their meadow; and sometimes a few deer joined them at their hay and oats; but the deer came mostly for the company - and the oats - because winter never fell harshly where Luthe was, nor did ice ever rime even the shores of the Lake of Dreams.
Sometimes what she learned frightened her, or perhaps it was that she could learn such things from a mage that frightened her; and one day, almost involuntarily she asked: "Why do you tell me ... so much?"
Luthe considered her. "I tell you ... some you need to know, and some you have earned the right to know, and some it won't hurt you to know - " He stopped.
"And some?" He raised his hands and his eyebrows; smiled faintly. The pale winter sun gleamed on his yellow hair and glinted in his blue eyes. There were no lines in his face, and his narrow shoulders were straight and square; but still he looked old to her, old as the mountains, older than the great grey hall he inhabited, that looked as though it had stood there since the sun first found the silver lake. "Some things I tell you only because I wish to tell them to you."
Aerin's lessons grew longer and longer, for her brain's capacity seemed to increase as the strength of her body did; and she began to love the learning for its own sake, and not merely for the fact that there was kelar in her blood, and that the house of the king of Damar need not be ashamed to claim her; and then she could not learn enough.
"I shall have to give you the mage mark soon," Luthe said, smiling, one grey afternoon as the snow fell softly outside.
Aerin stood up and paced restlessly, twice the length of the hall to the open door and back to the hearth and the table where Luthe sat. It was a wonderful hall for pacing, for it took several minutes, even for the fidgetiest, to get from one end of it to the other and back again. The door stood open all year long, for the cold somehow stayed outside, and the only draughts were warm ones from the fire. Aerin stared at the glinting white courtyard for a moment before returning to Luthe and the table before the fire.
"I came here first for healing and second for knowledge - but by the gods and their hells I do not know if I can bear either. And yet I have no choice. And yet I do not know even what I wished to know."
Luthe stood up, but came only a few steps nearer the fireplace. "I tell you all that I may."
"May," said Aerin fiercely. "What can you tell me that you may not? What am I, now that I am neither human - which I understand I never was - nor mortal, which I used to be? Why did you heal me? Why did you call me here at all? Why do you teach me now so much that you threaten me with the mage mark, that all who look upon me may know to fear me? That will be splendid fun at home, you know; I'm so popular already. Why? Why don't you tell me to go away?" She stopped and looked down at her feet. "Why don't I just leave?"
Luthe sighed. "I'm sorry. Again. I thought that perhaps it would be easier if you first had some idea of your own strength."
She was still staring at her shoes, and he stepped toward her, and hesitantly touched one shoulder. The shoulder hunched itself up and the face turned away from him. Her hair was almost shoulder length now, and it fell across her face like a curtain. Luthe wanted to tell her the reasons she ought to stay - good honest Damarian reasons, reasons she would understand and acknowledge; reasons that were born with her as the king's daughter, however outcast her people made her; reasons that he had to tell her soon anyway. But he wanted ... "Do you wish so desperately to leave?" he said almost wistfully.
"It matters little," said a low voice from behind the hair. "I am not missed."
"Tor," said Luthe darkly.
"Oh, Tor," said the voice, and it unexpectedly gave a choke of laughter, and then she raised her hands and parted the curtain, rubbing her cheeks hastily with her palms as she did so. Her eyes were still a little too bright. "Yes, Tor, and Arlbeth too, and I do feel badly for Teka; but I would guess they live hopefully, and guess to see me again. I do not mind staying here ... a little longer. I don't much care to travel in winter anyway."
"Thank you," Luthe said dryly. "By spring I shall be ready ... to send you on your way again."
Aerin said lightly, "And what shall that way be?"
"To Agsded," Luthe said. "He who holds Damar's future in his hands."
"Agsded?" Aerin said. "I do not know the name."
"He it is who sends the mischief across your borders; he it is who stirred Nyrlol to rebellion just long enough to distract and disturb Arlbeth, and he who awoke your Maur, and who even now harries your City with his minions, whose army will march south in the spring. Agsded, although none know his name now, and the Northern generals believe they band together through no impulse but their mutual hatred of Damar.
"Agsded is a wizard - a master mage, a master of masters. The mark on him is so bright it could blind any simple folk who look upon it, though they knew not what they saw. Agsded I knew long ago - he was another of Goriolo's pupils; he was the best of all of us, and he knew it; but even Goriolo did not see how deep his pride went. - . . Goriolo had another pupil of Agsded's family: his sister. She feared her brother; she had always feared him; it was fear of what his pride might do that led her to Goriolo with him, but it was on her own merit that Goriolo took her.
"And I - I must send you into the dragon's den again, having barely healed you, and that at great cost, from your encounter with the Black Dragon. Maur is to your little dragons what Agsded is to Maur. I teach you what I may because it is the only shield I may - can - give you. I cannot face Agsded myself - I cannot. By the gods and hells you have never heard of," Luthe broke out, "do you think I like sending a child to a doom like this, one I know I cannot myself face? With nothing to guard her but half a year's study of the apprentice bits of magery?
"I know by my own blood that I cannot defeat him; though by some of that blood I have held him off these many years longer, that the chosen hero, the hero of his blood, might grow up to face him; for only one of his blood may defeat him." Luthe closed his eyes. "It is true your mother wanted a son; she believed that as only one of his blood might defeat him, so only one of his own sex might, for to such she ascribed her own failure. She felt that it was because she was a woman that she could not kill her own brother."
"Brother?" whispered Aerin.
Luthe opened his eyes. "Had she tried, she might yet have failed," he went on as though he had not heard her, "but she could not bear to try; until Agsded, who knew the prophecy even as she did, from long before there was apparent need to know it, sought to bring her under his will or to destroy her.
"He could not do the former; almost he did the latter, and in the end she died of the poison he gave her." Luthe looked at her, and she remembered the hand that was not her own holding a goblet, and a voice that was not Luthe's saying "Drink."
"But she had meanwhile fled south, and found a man with kelar in his blood, and been got with child by him. She had only the strength left to bear that child before she died."
Luthe fell silent, and Aerin could think of nothing to say. Agsded beat in her brain; a moment ago she had told Luthe she did not know the name, and yet now she was ready to swear that it had haunted all the shadows since before her birth; that her mother had whispered it to her in the womb; that the despair she had died of was the taste of it on her tongue. Agsded, who was to Maur what Maur had been to her first dragon; and the first dragon might have killed her - and Maur had killed her, for the time she lived now was not her own. Agsded, of her own blood; her mother's brother.
She felt numb; even the new sensitivities that had awoken in her since her dive into the Lake of Dreams and Luthe's teaching - all were numb, and she hung suspended in a great nothingness, imprisoned there by the name of Agsded.
After a pause Luthe said, as if talking to himself: "I did not think your kelar would so hide itself from you. Perhaps it was the hurt you did yourself and your Gift by eating the surka. Perhaps your mother was not able entirely to protect the child she carried from the death so close to her. I believed that you had to know at least something of the truth - I believed it until I saw you face Maur with little more than simple human courage and a foolhardy faith in the efficacy of a third-rate healer's potion like kenet against the Black Dragon. And I knew then not only that I was wrong about you, but that I was too late to save you from the pain your simplicity would cause you; and I feared that without your kelar to draw upon, you would not survive that meeting. And I was terribly near right.
"I have been much occupied while you were growing up, and I do not mark the years as you do; and I have not watched over you as I should have. As I promised your mother I would. Again I am sorry. I have been often sorry, with you, and there is so little I can do about any of it.
"I believed that you would grow up knowing some destiny awaited you; I thought what ran in your veins could not help but tell you so much. I thought you would know the true dreams I sent you as such. I thought many things that were wrong."
"The kelar may have tried to tell me," Aerin said dully; "but the message did get a little confused somehow. Certainly I was left in no doubt that my destiny was different than Arlbeth's daughter's should have been, but that was a reading anyone could have done."
Luthe looked at her, and saw her uncle's name like a brand on her face. "If you wish," he said lightly, "I shall go personally to your City and knock together the heads of Perlith and Galooney."
Aerin tried to smile. "I shall remember that offer."
"Please do. And remember also that I never leave my mountain any more, so believe how apologetic I must be feeling to make it in the first place."
Aerin's smile disappeared. "Am I truly just as my mother was?" she asked, as she had asked Teka long ago.
Luthe looked at her again, and again many things crowded into his mind that he might say. "You are very like her," he said at last. "But you are to be preferred."