At last she climbed wearily out of bed and wrapped herself in the dressing gown Tor had given her, and made her way through back hallways and seldom-used stairs to the highest balcony in her father’s castle. It looked out to the rear of the courtyard; beyond were the stables, beyond them the pastures, and beyond them all the sharp rise of the Hills. From where she stood, the wide plateau where the pastures and training grounds were laid out stretched directly in front of her; but to her left the Hills crept close to the castle walls, so that the ground and first-floor rooms on that side got very little sunlight, and the courtyard wall was carved out of the Hills themselves.
The castle was the highest point in the City, though the walls around its courtyard prevented anyone standing at ground level within them from seeing the City spread out on the lower slopes. But from the third—and fourth-story windows and balconies overlooking the front of the castle the higher roofs of the City could be seen, grey stone and black stone and dull red stone, in slabs and thin shingle-chips; and chimneys rising above all. From fifth—and sixth-story windows one could see the king’s way, the paved road which fell straight from the castle gates to the City gates, almost to its end in a flat-stamped earth clearing cornered by monoliths, a short way beyond the City wails.
But from any point in the castle or the City one might look up and see the Hills that cradled them; even the break in the jagged outline caused by the City gates was narrow enough not to be easily recognizable as such. The pass between Vasth and Kar, two peaks of the taller Hills that surrounded the low rolling forested land that lay before the City and circled round to meet the Hills behind the castle, was not visible at all. Aerin loved the Hills; they were green in spring and summer, rust and brown and yellow in the fall, and white in the winter with the snow they sheltered the City from; and they never told her that she was a nuisance and a disappointment and a half blood.
She paced around the balcony and looked at the stars, and the gleam of the moonlight on the glassy smooth courtyard. Somehow the evening she’d just endured had quenched much of her joy in her discovery of the morning. That a bit of yellow grease could protect a finger from a candle flame said nothing about its preventive properties in dealings with dragons; she’d heard the hunters home from the hunt say that dragon fire was bitter stuff, and burned like no hearthfire.
On her third trip around the balcony she found Tor lurking in the shadow of one of the battlemented peaks. “You walk very quietly,” he said.
“Bare feet,” she said succinctly.
“If Teka should catch you so and the night air so chill, she would scold.”
“She would; but Teka sleeps the sleep of the just, and it is long past midnight.”
“So it is.” Tor sighed, and rubbed his forehead with one hand.
“I’m surprised you’ve escaped so early; the dancing often goes on till dawn.”
In spite of the dimness of the light she could see Tor make a face. “The dancing may often go on till dawn, but I rarely last half so long—as you would know if you ever bothered to stay and keep me company.”
“Hmmph.”
“Hmmph threefold. Has it ever occurred to you, Aerin-sol, that I am not a particularly good dancer either? It’s probably just as well we don’t dance together often or we would do ourselves a serious injury. Nobody dares mention it, of course, because I am first sola—”
“And a man of known immoderate temper.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere. But I leave the dance floor as soon as I’ve tramped around once with every lady who will feel slighted if I don’t.”
His light-heartedness seemed forced. “What’s wrong?” she said.
Tor gave a snort of laughter. “Having exposed one of my most embarrassing shortcomings in an attempt to deflect you, you refuse to be deflected.”
Aerin waited.
Tor sighed again, and wandered out of the shadows to lean his elbows against the low stone wall surrounding the balcony. The moonlight made his face look pale, his profile noble and serene, and his black hair the stuff of absolute darkness. Aerin rather liked the effect, but he spoiled it by rubbing one hand through his hair and turning the corners of his mouth down, whereupon he reverted to being tired and confused and human. “There was a meeting, of sorts, this afternoon, before the banquet.” He paused again, but Aerin did not move, expecting more; he glanced at her and went on. “Thorped wanted to talk about the Hero’s Crown.”
“Oh.” Aerin joined him, leaning her elbows on the wall next to his, and he put an arm around her. She discovered that she was cold and that she was rather glad of the arm and the warmth of his side. “What did he want to know about it?”
“What does anybody ever want to know about it? He wants to know where it is,”
“So do we all.”
“Yes. Sorry. I mean he wants to know if we’re looking for it now and if not why not and if so by what means and what progress we’ve made. And if we know how important it is, and on and on.”
“I see that you spent a less than diverting afternoon.”
“How does he think we’re supposed to look for it? By the Seven Gods and Aerinha’s foundry! Every stone in Damar has been turned over at least twice looking for it, and there was a fashion there for a while to uproot trees and look for it underneath. We’ve had every seer who ever went off in a fit or brewed a love potion that didn’t work try to bring up a vision of its whereabouts for us.”
Including my mother? thought Aerin.
“Nothing. Just a lot of dead trees and misplaced rocks.”
Galanna had told her once that there was a Crown that kept mischief away from Damar, and that if Arlbeth had had it when he met Aerin’s mother he would never have married her, and if he had found it any time since Aerin was born Galanna would no longer have to put up with having her eyelashes cut off; exactly how the Crown performed its warding functions she did not describe. Aerin also knew that the more strongly Gifted royalty were expected to chew a surka leaf at least once and try to cast their minds toward a sighting of the Crown. She assumed Tor had done so, though it was not something he would have told her about. And all her history lessons had told her was that the current sovereigns of Damar had gone crownless for many generations, in honor of a Crown that was lost long ago.
Aerin said slowly, “I’ve heard of it, of course, but I’m not entirely sure what the Crown is, or is supposed to do.”