Talat did not like the fire ointment at all. He pranced and sidled and slithered out of reach and flared his nostrils and snorted, little rolling huff-huff-huffs, when she tried to rub it on him. “It smells like herbs!” she said, exasperated; “And it will probably do your coat good; it’s just like the oil Hornmar put on you to make you gleam.”
He continued to sidle, and Aerin said through clenched teeth: “I’ll tie you up if you’re not good.” But Talat, after several days of being chased, step by step and sidle by sidle, around his pasture, decided that his new master was in earnest; and the next time Aerin ran him up against the fence, instead of eluding her again, he stood still and let his doom overtake him.
They went on their overnight journey a fortnight after Arlbeth had watched them work together, by which time Talat had permitted Aerin—sometimes with more grace than other times—to rub her yellow grease all over him. Aerin hoped it would be a warm night since most of what looked like a roll of blankets hung behind her saddle was a sausage-shaped skin of kenet.
They started before dawn had turned to day, and Aerin pushed Talat along fairly briskly, that they might still have several hours of daylight left when they made camp. There was a trail beside the little river, wide enough for a horse but too narrow for wagons, and this they followed; Aerin wished to be close to a large quantity of water when she tried her experiment; and not getting lost was an added benefit.
She made camp not long after noon. She unrolled the bundle that had looked like bedding and first removed the leather tunic and leggings she’d made for herself and let soak in a shallow basin of the yellow ointment for the last several weeks. She’d tried setting fire to her suit yesterday, and the fire, however vigorous it was as a torch, had gone out instantly when it touched a greasy sleeve. The suit wasn’t very comfortable to wear; it was too sloppy and sloshy, and as she bound up her hair and stuffed it into a greasy helmet she thought with dread of washing the stuff off herself afterward.
She built up a big bonfire, and then smeared kenet over her face, and last pulled on her gauntlets. She stood by the flames, now leaping up over her head, and listened to her heart beating too quickly. She crept into the fire like a reluctant swimmer into cold water; first a hand, then a foot. Then she took a deep breath, hoped that her eyelashes were greasy enough, and stepped directly into the flame.
Talat came up to the edge of the fire and snorted anxiously. The fire was pleasantly warm—pleasantly. It tapped at her face and hands with cheerful friendliness and the best of good will; it murmured and snapped in her ears; it wrapped its flames around her like the arms of a lover.
She leaped out of the fire and gasped for breath.
She turned back again and looked at the fire. Yes, it was a real fire; it burned on, unconcerned, although her booted feet had disarranged it somewhat.
Talat thrust a worried nose into her neck. “Your turn,” she said. “Little do you know.”
Little did he know indeed, and this was the part that worried her the most. Talat was not going to walk into a bonfire and stand there till she told him to come out again. She’d already figured out that for her future dragon-slaying purposes, since dragons were pretty small, Talat could get away with just his chest and legs and belly protected. But she would prefer to find out now—and to let him know—that the yellow stuff he objected to did have an important use.
She reached up to feel her eyelashes and was relieved to discover that they were still there. Talat was blowing at her anxiously—she realized, light-headedly, that in some odd way she now smelted of fire—and when she swept up a handful of kenet he eluded her so positively that for a bad moment she thought she might have to walk home. But he let her approach him finally and, after most of his front half was yellowish and shiny, permitted her to lead him back to the fire.
And he stood unmoving when she picked up a flaming branch and walked toward him. And still stood when she held the branch low before him and let little flames lick at his knees.
Kenet worked on horses too.
Chapter 10
SHE RODE HOME in a merry mood. The time and the soap (fortunately she had thought to bring a great chunk of the harsh floor-scrubbing soap with her) it had taken to get the yellow stuff out of her hair could not dampen her spirits, any more than had the cold night, and she with only one thin blanket.
Even another dreadful court affair, with an endless diplomatic dinner after it, could not completely quell her happiness, and when the third person in half an hour asked her about her new perfume—there was a slightly herby, and a slightly charred, smell that continued to cling to her—she couldn’t help but laugh out loud. The lady, who had been trying to make conversation, smiled a stiff smile and moved away, for she resented being laughed at by someone she was supposed to pity and be kind to.
Aerin sighed, for she understood the stiff smile, and wondered if she were going to smell of herbs and burning—and slightly of clean floors—forever.
There was an unnatural activity at her father’s court at present; Thorped had been only the precursor of a swelling profusion of official visitors, each more nervous than the last, and a few inclined to be belligerent. The increasing activity on Damar’s northern Border worried everyone who knew enough, or cared to pay attention; there was more traveling among the villages and towns and the king’s City than there had been for as long as Aerin could remember, and the court dinners, always tense with protocol, were now stretched to breaking point with something like fear.
Aerin, after the morning her father had given her permission to take Talat out alone, had begun to visit the king at his breakfast now and then, and always he looked glad to see her. Sometimes Tor ate with the king as well, and if Arlbeth noticed that Tor joined him at breakfast more often now that there was a chance he would see Aerin as well, he said nothing. Tor was home most of the time now, for Arlbeth had need of him near.
Aerin persisted in being unaware of the way Tor watched her, but was acutely aware that conversation between them was awkward at best these days; a new constraint seemed to have come between them since the night Tor had told his cousin of the Hero’s Crown. Aerin decided the new awkwardness probably had something to do with his having finally begged off crossing swords with her. She had perfectly understood that with the current workload he had had to, so she tried to be polite to show she didn’t mind. When this didn’t seem to help, she ignored him and talked to her father. It did seem odd that Tor should take it so seriously—surely he gave her credit for some understanding of what the first sola’s life was like?—but if he wanted to be stiff and formal, that was his problem.