Especially she avoided the garden at the center of the castle. The surka stood by the main gate, wrapped around one of the tall white pillars. Its presence was symbolic only; anyone might pass the gate without danger of touching its leaves, and there were several other ways into the garden. But she felt that the surka exhaled hallucinations into the very air around it, waiting gleefully for her to breathe them in, and that it clattered its leaves at her if she came too near. She heard it mocking her if she even dared step out on one of the balconies that overlooked the garden from three or four stories up. Her protracted illness more nearly proved Galanna’s contention about her heritage than her own, whatever Tor said, but she saw no reason to remind herself of it any oftener than she had to.
It was a kind of trapped restlessness combined with a feeling of kinship for the equally trapped and restless Talat that drew her to his pasture. She had visited him before, or tried to, in the last three years, but he was no politer to her than he was to Hornmar, and it hurt her so much just to look at him that out of cowardice she had stopped going. Now she felt she no longer cared; she couldn’t see clearly two feet beyond the end of her nose anyway. But it was a somewhat laborious process to carry out even so simple a plan as to walk to one of the smaller pastures beyond the royal barns. First she wanted a cane, that she might have something to tap her way with; so she persuaded Tor to open the door of the king’s treasure house for her, which required a lock-relaxing charm she couldn’t perform any more than she could mend plates.
She told Tor only that she wanted to borrow a walking stick to help her up and down stairs. Tor knew perfectly well that she had something further on her mind, but he did it anyway. She chose a cane with a pleasantly lumpy head, since her sense of touch was sometimes a little vague too.
Talat’s first impulse had been to charge her. She’d not moved, just looked at him, leaning on her cane and swaying gently. “If I try to run away from you, the earth will leap up and throw me down.” Two tears rolled silently down her cheeks. “I can’t even walk properly. Like you.” Talat dropped his head and began grazing—without much interest, but it gave him something to pretend to be doing while he kept an eye on her.
She went back the next day, and the next. The exercise, or the fresh air, or both, seemed to do her some good; her vision began to clear a bit. And it was quiet and peaceful in Talat’s pasture, where no one came, and she went back to the swarming castle more and more reluctantly. Then the thought of the royal library occurred to her. Galanna would never set foot in the library.
She went there the first time only to escape her own rooms, which had begun to seem the size of shoeboxes, and for some of the same imprecise restlessness that had inspired her to visit Talat. But, idly, she ran her fingers over the spines of the books fined up on the shelves, and pulled down one that had an interestingly tooled binding. More idly still she opened it, and found that her poor muddled eyes focused quite nicely on a printed page held not too far from her nose—found that she could read. The next day she took it with her to Talat’s pasture.
He didn’t exactly meet her with an eager whinny of greeting, but he did seem to spend most of his time on the unmuddy shore of the pool, where she leaned against the bole of a convenient tree and read. “It’s funny,” she said, chewing a grass gem, “you’d think if I couldn’t walk I couldn’t read either. You’d think eyes would be at least as hard to organize as feet.” She leaned over, and laid a mik-bar down on the ground as far away from her as she could reach, and sat up again, looking only straight before her. Thoughtfully she hefted the big book in her lap and added, “Even carrying it around is useful. It sort of weighs me down, and I don’t stagger so much.” She could hear his hoofbeats: thunk-thunk-thunk-drag. “Maybe what I need for my feet is the equivalent of the muscular concentration of reading.” The hoofbeats paused. “Now if only someone could tell me what that might be.”
The mik-bar had disappeared.
Chapter 4
TEKA FOUND HER OUT very soon; she’d been keeping a very sharp eye on her wayward sol since she first crawled out of bed after the surka episode. She’d been appalled when she first discovered Aerin under the tree in the vicious stallion’s paddock; but she had a bit more sense than Aerin gave her credit for (“Fuss, fuss, fuss, Teka! Leave me alone!”) and with her heart beating in her mouth she realized that Talat knew that his domain had been invaded and didn’t mind. She saw him eat his first mik-bar, and when they thereafter began disappearing at an unseemly rate from the bowl on Aerin’s window seat, Teka only sighed deeply and began providing them in greater quantity.
The book with the interesting binding was a history of Damar. Aerin had had to learn a certain amount of history as part of her royal education, but this stuff was something else again. The lessons she’d been forced to learn were dry spare things, the facts without the sense of them, given in the simplest of language, as if words might disguise the truth or (worse) bring it to life. Education was one of Arlbeth’s pet obsessions; before him there hadn’t been a king in generations who felt much desire for book learning, and there was no precedent for quality in royal tutors.
The book was faded with age, and the style of lettering was strange to her, so she had to puzzle out some of the words; and some of the words were archaic and unfamiliar, so she had to puzzle out the meanings. But it was worth it, for this book told her stories more exciting than the ones she made up for herself before she fell asleep at night. And so, as she read, she first learned of the old dragons.
Damar had dragons still; little ones, dog-sized, nasty, mean-tempered creatures who would fry a baby for supper and swallow it in two gulps if they could; but they had been beaten back into the heavy forest and the wilder Hills by Aerin’s day. They still killed an occasional unwary hunter, for they had no fear, and they had teeth and claws as well as fire to subdue their prey, but they were no longer a serious threat. Arlbeth heard occasionally of one—or of a family, for they most often hunted in families—that was harassing a village or an outlying farm, and when that happened a party of men with spears and arrows—swords were of little use, for if one were close enough to use a sword, one was close enough to be badly burned—went out from the City to deal with them. Always they came back with a few more unpleasant stories of the cunning treachery of dragons; always they came back nursing a few scorched limbs; occasionally they came back a horse or a hound the less.