The Hero And The Crown

 

SHE WAS ON THE FLAT TOP of a small mountain of rubble; and off to her right, at its foot, was a break in the surrounding circular wall wide enough that she thought she could probably squeeze herself through it. She made her way slowly and cautiously down the slope toward the broken place in the wall, but the stuff underfoot shifted and slithered, and she came to the bottom sitting back on her heels, with the unwounded hand holding Gonturan up by the scabbard so she wouldn't drag. She stood up and went toward the crack and, indeed, she could push through, although it was a tight fit; and then the sunlight dazzled her, and her abused legs turned abruptly to jelly, and she sat down quickly and put her head between her knees. Staring at the ground, she thought, I wonder how long it's been since I've eaten. Food might help. The mundane thought made her feel better at once, and hungry as well. She raised her head. She still felt shaky, and when she had clambered back to her feet - ungracefully using Gonturan as a prop - her knees were inclined to tremble, but she almost cheerfully put it down to lack of food.

She looked around. Where was she? The black tower had risen from a plain where nothing grew; now all around her she saw jungle, trees with vast climbing vines (though none of surka that she could see), and heavy brush between the trees. The sunlight fell on the ruined tower and the little bramble-covered clearing it made for itself, but the light could not make much headway through the thick leaves. Ugh. It would not be a pleasant journey out. And where might she find Talat? She set out to walk around what remained of the tower.

Nothing but tumbled rock and encroaching forest. Nothing else. No sign of anything else ever having been here either - but where was she? Was the ruined tower she was stumbling around now the same that she and Talat and her wild beasts had faced? She tipped her head back to look up at the remaining walls. They didn't look nearly big enough; the fallen rock was not enough to have been built into such vastness as she remembered. She sighed, and rubbed a hand over her face - and pulled it away again as she remembered that it was the wrong hand. But the cut had already healed; there was nothing on her palm but a narrow white scar. She stared at it, puzzled; but there were more important things to be puzzled about.

So what now? She was alone - somewhere - she was hungry, and the sun was getting low. She did not look forward to a night alone in this place - although it certainly didn't look as if anything big enough to trouble her much could get through that forest, there were always, well, spiders, for example. As she thought of spiders it occurred to her that her chest was only barely itching, almost idly, as if once it had gotten the way of it it didn't particularly want to stop, even though it didn't have much reason left. That's something, I guess, she thought; and glanced again at her scarred palm.

She sat down, closed her eyes, organized one or two of the simpler things Luthe had taught her, and thought about the air. She followed invisible eddies and tiny currents as they strayed over her and back among the trees again; and eventually she found one that felt damp, and she followed that until it sank to the ground, and there she found a spring. It looked all right; it felt like water.

She opened her eyes and stood up. The spring, when she reached it, still looked like water and smelled tike water; and she sighed, because she had no choice. She ducked her head, and then threw her wet hair back, and then drank deep. She sat back on her heels and scowled into the underbrush. The tiny spring was only a few paces from the edge of the clearing, and yet it had taken her some expense of time and energy to hew her way even this far. How was she going to get out?

One thing at a time. Remembering something else Luthe had taught her, she gathered a few dry twigs and a heap of dead leaves together, and set them on fire by glaring at them - though the effort gave her a fierce headache and she couldn't focus her eyes for a long time afterward, and the fire was sullen and inclined to smoke. She wandered around gathering more twigs, and saw at least two for each, and two hands reaching for them, and generally misjudged which hand and which twig were the real ones; but still she gathered enough at last to keep the fire going all night. She hoped. And the fire was beginning to burn a little better.

She had hot water for supper, by filling the pouch that had held the dragon stone with water and hanging it over the fire; it leaked very little. She'd try to figure out food tomorrow; she was weary enough with hunger, but weary too with everything else, and the sun had set, and twilight would soon be darkness. She lay down, making an uncomfortable pillow of a rock, with a piece of her tunic pulled up to protect her ear. She lay as still as the stones she rested against, without even the energy to try to scrabble for a more easy spot; but still her thoughts prowled at the ruin of the black mountain, picking at the rubble. Some of it, perhaps, Luthe could explain to her - but she shied away from the thought of seeing him again, of asking him. The forest troubled her, for she needed to find a way through it; its existence was far more than a philosophical dilemma - as was her solitude. Where was Talat? She could believe that her other allies had melted away as they had come; she had never understood why they joined her in the first place. But Talat would not have left. At least not of his own free will.

Then the worst thought of all hit her: Agsded is gone, or at least he seems to be gone; but I have yet failed, for the Hero's Crown is gone also.

She rolled over and stared at the sky. There was no moon, but the stars shone fiercely down on her. She realized suddenly that Agsded himself had never been quite real to her; her terror had been real enough, and her sick horror at the face he wore; and she had known that she went to a battle she had less chance of winning than she had had even when she faced Maur, But the thing that had held her, the dream that had drawn her on, was the Hero's Crown. It had nothing to do with her own blood and birthright as her mother's daughter, nothing of personal vengeance; it was the idea of bringing the Crown back to her City, of presenting it to Arlbeth and Tor. She had been sure, for all that she had never consciously thought of it, that as Damar's doom lay with Agsded, so must the missing Crown. No one knew of Agsded; no one would believe her even if she told the story, and she could not tell it, for what could she say of the prophecy, of the kinship that made her the only possible champion? What would she say of her uncle?

But who Agsded was did not matter, or mattered only to her. The Crown mattered, and the story of it she might have told: that she had wrested it away from him who held it, to bring it back to her City, to lay it before her king. As it was, for all that she had done, she had done nothing. If she went to the City now - if she went home - it would be as a runaway dog might go home, tail between legs, its highest hope only for forgiveness.

Her eyes closed, and she slept the numbed sleep of failure; but soon after midnight even this was disturbed. The earth seemed to shiver under her, and she heard low rumblings like rocks falling far away; but perhaps she was only dreaming. Later she knew she dreamed, for she saw faces she had never met in her waking life.

A sad-faced girl sat by a pool. The white walls around her were so high there seemed to be clouds resting on their heads; low steps behind her led to an open door, and a room beyond it. There were no doors in the other walls, and the flat earth around the pool was covered with squares of white stone. The girl's long black hair fell forward as she stared into the calm water, and her look of sadness deepened.

Then Aerin, in her dream, saw another walled garden, but the water here played in a fountain, and the walls were blue mosaic; and in the garden stood a tall young woman with yellow hair, taller by a hand's breadth than Aerin herself, and at her side a green-eyed folstza stood. And then she saw three men standing on the side of a mountain, on a little ridge of rock, facing a crack or a hole in the face of the mountain. A burly man with thinning black hair was staring at the crack with a set stubborn expression, and his fair-haired companion was saying, "Don't be a fool. Tommy. Listen to me." The third man was young and brown-skinned and slightly built, and he looked amused, but he said, "Leo, you should know better by now than to argue with him."

Their voices seemed to bring Aerin half awake, for her dreams became more confused, and she saw faces without being sure if she recognized them or not, and she felt the rocky bed beneath her again, and it seemed as if the ground pressed up unevenly, against a shoulder, a hip - then a lurch, and a stone she was sure had not been there before dug painfully into the small of her back. Still she could not awaken - and then, with a gasp, she opened her eyes and sat up; and it was morning, and her fire was out; not only out, but scattered, as if someone with fireproof hands had picked it up and tossed bits of it in all directions; or as if the earth had heaved up under it.

And the forest was gone.

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.