“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.