The Hero And The Crown

Part Two Chapter 24

 
AERIN WOKE TWO DAYS later in her own bed in her father's castle - Tor's castle now. It was turning over that woke her; her muscles were so sore and stiff that her weariness was finally less than her aches and pains, and as she rolled onto her right shoulder she woke with a groan.
There was an immediate rustle from somewhere just beyond the bed curtains, and the curtains themselves were pushed back and daylight flooded in. Aerin couldn't imagine where she was for a moment; her first thoughts were that wherever it was it was doubtless dangerous, and she groped vaguely for Gonturan's hilt; instead her fingers buried themselves in a heavy fur ruff, and a long tongue licked her hand. She tried to sit up, and a voice, attached to the hands that had just parted the curtains, said brokenly, "Oh, my lady." Aerin recognized Teka first, and then realized where she was, and then Teka bent down and buried her face in the bedclothes and sobbed.
"Teka," Aerin said, horrified by her tears.
"My lady, I thought I should never see you again," Teka muttered without lifting her face, but when Aerin tentatively patted a shoulder and smoothed the sleek black-and-grey head, Teka sat back on her heels, sniffed, and said, "Well, I am seeing you again, and have been seeing you again now for two and a half days, and I am very sorry to have been so silly. You'll want food and a bath."
"Two and a half days?" Aerin repeated.
"Two and a half days. Tor-sola is not awake yet."
Aerin smiled. "And, of course, you've been sitting in that chair" - she nodded at a high-backed wooden chair with a pillow propped up for the waiter's back and neck, and a cushioned footrest, and a small table with sewing paraphernalia tidily arranged on it - "the whole time."
Teka opened her eyes wide in the old way that had so terrorized the very young Aerin caught out at some misbehavior. "Of course. Bath or a meal first?"
Aerin considered. Even the muscles that made her tongue move and her jaw open and shut to speak and her lips smile hurt. "Malak, very hot, and a very hot bath first, and then food." There was a thrashing behind her and a long pointed face poked over her shoulder. "And food for this one, too. She'll skip the bath. Where are the rest of them?"
Teka scowled. "Wherever it pleases them to lay themselves. I did manage to herd them all into your rooms, lady, and the back hall; they terrify all the staff and most of the court. But they won't leave - and, well, I for one am capable of acknowledging that we owe them a debt, and loyalty is very admirable even in mute beasts, but," she said in a tone of suppressed rage. "I do not approve of animals sharing their sol's bed." The yerig queen yawned widely, and then a long piece of black shadow stood up from the still curtained foot of the bed, stretched himself, and flowed off the bed to the floor. He leaned against the backs of Teka's legs and began to purr and, to Aerin's delight, a slow flush crept up Teka's throat and face.
"I'm glad not everyone in my father's house is terrified by my friends," said Aerin.
"No, my lady," Teka said in a low voice. The king cat poked his head around Teka's waist to smile smugly at Aerin, and Aerin said, "You know, my wild friends, if you are planning to move in with me permanently, you will have to have names. If you live in a house, you are domesticated, and if you are domesticated, you must be named." The yerig sitting beside her licked her ear.
Aerin began the long excruciating process of getting out of bed; she felt that she would never move easily again. "I'll help you, my lady," said Teka, as Aerin touched her feet to the floor and hissed involuntarily. Teka was thinner than she had been when Aerin saw her last, and as Teka put out a hand to help her, Aerin saw a long bandage wrapped around her forearm under her sleeve. She jerked her eyes away and looked up at Teka's face again. "Must you call me lady?" she said crossly. "You never did before."
Teka looked at her oddly. "I know that perfectly well," she said. "If you're up. I'll look to your bath."
The hot water helped the deeper aches but just about killed the blisters, and Aerin herself with them. She padded the back of the bath with two or three towels so that she could at least lie softly; and after three cups of very strong malak she dared climb out of the bath. Teka laid her down on a cushioned bench and rubbed a little more of the soreness out with the help of some astringent solution (that smelted, of course, very strongly of herbs) that was even worse than the hot water on blisters; Aerin shrieked.
"Quiet," said Teka remorselessly. She finished by smoothing on a silky pale ointment that almost made up for the astringent, as Aerin told her. "Your adventures have made you no more polite, Aerin-sol," Teka said with asperity.
"You could not possibly have hoped for so much," Aerin responded as she eased into the undershift Teka had laid out for her.
"No," Teka admitted, and turned down the corners of her mouth, which meant she was suppressing a smile.
Aerin turned to pick up the tunic. "Why am I getting all dressed up to eat breakfast?" she inquired. The tunic was new to her, blue and heavy, with a lot of gold thread worked into it.
"It's mid-afternoon," Teka said repressively. "The honor of your company for an early dinner has been requested by Tor-sola."
Aerin grunted, and put the tunic on - and grunted again. "He woke up, then."
"So it would appear. There is nothing that can be done with your hair."
Aerin grinned and shook her head so that the fine not-quite-shoulder-length tips swung across her cheeks. "Nothing at all. It doesn't seem to want to grow."
Tor looked haggard but convalescent, as Aerin felt she probably looked as well. She'd worn Gonturan as a way of acknowledging the formality of the occasion, but the swordbelt only reminded her more intensely of certain of her blisters, and she was glad to hang it on the tall back of her chair. Tor came to her at once and put his arms around her, and they stood, leaning against each other, for a long time.
He put her away from him only an arm's length then and looked down at her. "I - " He broke off, and dropped his arms, and paced around the room once. He turned back like a man nerving himself for a valorous deed, and said, "I'm to be made king tomorrow. They seem to think I already am, you know, but there's a ceremony ..." His voice trailed off.
"Yes, I know," Aerin said gently. "Of course you're king. It's what my - what Arlbeth wanted. We both know that. And," she said with only a little more difficulty, "it's what the people want as well."
Tor stared at her fiercely. "You should be queen. We both know it. You brought the Crown back; you've won the right to wear it so. They can't doubt you now. Arlbeth would agree. You won the war for them." Aerin shook her head. "The gods give me patience. You did. Stop being stubborn."
"Tor - calm down. Yes, I know I helped get the Northerners off our doorstep. It doesn't really matter. Come to that, I'd rather you were king." Tor shook his head. Aerin smiled sadly. "It's true."
"It shouldn't be."
Aerin shrugged. "I thought you invited me here to feed me. I'm much too hungry to want to stand around and argue."
"Marry me," said Tor. "Then you'll be queen." Aerin looked up, startled at the suddenness of it. "I mean, I'll marry you as queen, none of this Honored Wife nonsense. Please I - I need you." He looked at her and bit his lip. "You can't mean that you didn't know that I would ask. I've known for years. Arlbeth knew, too. He hoped for it.
"It's the easy way out, I know," he said, hope and hurt both in his eyes. "I would have asked you even if you hadn't brought the Crown back - believe me. If you'd never killed a dragon, if you broke all the dishes in the castle. If you were the daughter of a farmer. I've loved you - I've loved you, to know it, since your eighteenth birthday, but I think I've loved you all my life. I will marry no one if you'll not have me."
Aerin swallowed hard. "Yes, of course," she said, and found she couldn't say anything else. It had not been only her doom and her duty that had brought her back to the City, and to Tor, for she loved Damar, and she loved its new king, and a part of her that belonged to nothing and no one else belonged to him. She had misunderstood what her fate truly was a few days ago, as she rode to the City to deliver up the Crown into the king's hands; it was not that she left what she loved to go where she must, but that her destiny, like her love, like her heritage, was double. And so the choice at last was an easy one, for Tor could not wait, and the other part of her - the not quite mortal part, the part that owed no loyalty to her father's land - might sleep peacefully for many long years. She smiled.
"Yes-of-course what?" said Tor in anguish.
"Yes-of-course-I'll-marry-you," said Aerin, and when he caught her up in his arms to kiss her she didn't even notice the shrill pain of burst blisters.
It was a long story she told him after that, for all that there was much of it that she left out; yet she thought that Tor probably guessed some of the more bitter things, for he asked her many questions, yet none that she might not have been able to answer, like what face Agsded had worn, or what her second parting from Luthe had been.
They ate at length and in great quantity, and their privacy was disturbed only by the occasional soft-footed hafor bearing fresh plates of food; yet somehow by the end of the meal the shadows on the floor, especially those near Aerin's chair, had grown unusually thick, and some of those shadows had ears and tails.
Tor looked thoughtfully at the yerig queen, who looked thoughtfully back at him. "Something must be done for - or with - your army, Aerin."
"I know," Aerin said, embarrassed. "Teka's been feeding them only bread and milk these last two days, since she says she refuses to have the rooms smelling like a butcher's shop, and fortunately there's that back stair nobody uses - the way I used to sneak off and see Talat. But I never knew why they came to me in the first place, and so I don't know how long they plan to stay, or - or how to get rid of them." She gulped, and found herself staring into two steady yellow eyes; the folstza king's tail twitched. "Nor, indeed, do I wish to be rid of them, although I know they aren't particularly welcome here. I would be lonesome without them." She remembered how they had huddled around her the night after she had left Luthe, and stopped speaking abruptly; the yellow eyes blinked slowly, and Tor became very busy refilling their goblets. She picked hers up and looked into it, and saw not Luthe, but the long years in her father's house of not being particularly welcome; and she thought that perhaps she would enjoy filling the castle with not particularly welcome visitors that were too many and too alarming to be ignored.
"They shall stay here just as long as they wish," Tor said. "Damar owes you any price you feel like asking, and," he said dryly, "I don't think it will hurt anyone to find you and your army just a little fear-inspiring." Aerin grinned.
He told then of what had come to them during her absence; much of it she knew or guessed already. Nyrlol had rebelled for once and for all soon after she had ridden into Luthe's mountains; and immediately the local sols and villages near him had either gone over to him or been razed. The division of his army Arlbeth had left to help Nyrlol patrol the Border had been caught in a Northern trap; less than half of their number survived to rejoin their king. Arlbeth had ridden out there in haste, leaving Tor in the City to prepare for what they now knew was to come; and it had come. It had come already, for when Arlbeth met Nyrlol in battle, the man's face had been stiff with fear, but with the fear of what rode behind him, not what he faced; and when Arlbeth killed him, the fear, in his last moments of life, slid away, and a look of exhausted peace closed his eyes forever.
"Arlbeth wasn't surprised, though," Tor said. "We had known we were fighting a lost war since Maur first awoke."
"I didn't know," said Aerin.
"Arlbeth saw no reason that you should," said Tor. "We - we both knew you were dying." He swallowed, and tapped his fingers on the tabletop. "I thought you would not likely live to see us fail, so why further shadow what time remained to you?
"When you left I felt hope for the first time. That note you left me - it wasn't the words, it was just the feeling of the scrap of paper in my hands. I took it out often, just to touch it, and always I felt that hope again." He smiled faintly. "I infected both Arlbeth and Teka with hope." He paused, sighed, and went on. "I even chewed a leaf of surka, and asked to dream of you; and I saw you by the shore of a great silver lake, with a tall blond man beside you, and you were smiling out across the water, and you looked well and strong." He looked up at her. "Any price is worth paying to have you here again, and cured of that which would have killed you long since. Any price .... Neither Arlbeth nor Teka was sure, as I was. I knew you would come back."
"I hope at least the Crown was a surprise," said Aerin.
Tor laughed. "The Crown was a surprise."
The lifting of Maur's evil influence was as important a relief to the beleaguered City as the unexpected final victory in the war; but there was still much healing to be done, and little time for merrymaking. Arlbeth was buried with quiet state. Tor and Aerin stood together at the funeral, as they had been almost always together since Aerin had ridden across the battlefield to give Tor the Crown; as the two of them had never publicly been together before. But the people, now, seemed to accept it, and they simply gave Aerin the same quiet undemonstrative respect that the first sola had received since the battle; it was as if they did not even differentiate between the two.
Everyone still felt more than a little grey, and perhaps in the aftermath of the Northerners a witch woman's daughter whom they had, after all, grown used to seeing for over twenty years past seemed a small thing to worry about; and she was, after all, their Arlbeth's daughter too, and Arlbeth they sincerely mourned, and they read in her face that she mourned too. She stood at Tor's side while Arlbeth's final bonfire burned up wildly as the incense and spices were thrown on it, and the tears streamed down her face; and her tears did more good for her in her people's eyes than the Crown did, for few of them really understood about the Crown. But she wept not only for Arlbeth, but for Tor and for herself, and for their fatal ignorance; the wound that had killed the king had not been so serious a one, had he had any strength left. Maur's weight on the king of the country it oppressed had been the heaviest, and the king had been old.
When Tor was proclaimed king in the long Damarian ceremony of sovereignty officially bestowed, it was the first time in many generations that a Damarian king wore a crown, the Hero's Crown, for it had been tradition that the kings went bare-headed in memory of that Crown that was the heart of Damar's strength and unity, and had been lost. After the ceremony the Crown was placed carefully back in the treasure hall.
When Aerin and Tor had gone to look for it three days after they hurled Maur's skull out of the City, they had found it lying on the low vast pedestal where the head had lain. They had looked at it, and at each other, and had left it there. It was a small, flat, dull-grey object, and there was no reason to leave it on a low platform, little more than knee high, and wide enough for several horses to stand on; but they did. And when the treasure keeper, a courtier with a very high opinion of his own artistic integrity, tried to open the subject of a more suitable keeping-place, Aerin protested before the words were all out of his mouth, although they had been directed at Tor.
Tor simply forbade that the Crown be moved, and that was the end of it; and the treasure keeper, offended, bowed low to each of them in turn, and left. He might not have wished to be quite so polite to the witchwoman's daughter, for the courtiers were inclined to take a more stringent view of such things than the rest of Damar. But any lack of courtesy that survived the highborn Damarians' knowledge that Aerin-sol had fought fiercely in the last battle against the Northerners (although of course since she'd shown up only on the last day she'd had more energy left to spend), and the inalterable fact that their new king was planning to marry her, tended to back down in the face of the baleful glare of her four-legged henchmen. Not that they ever did anything but glare. But the treasure keeper's visit had been watched with interest by nine quite large hairy beasts disposed about Aerin's feet and various corners of the audience chamber.