“Aerin.” She looked up, but the shadows of her childhood were still in her eyes. He smiled as if it hurt him and said, “Never mind.” And threw the surka wreath over her head. It settled around her shoulders and then rippled into long silver folds that fell to her feet, and shivered like starlight when she moved.
“You look like a queen,” Luthe said,
“Don’t,” she said bitterly, trying to find a clasp to unfasten the bright cloak. “Please don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” said Luthe, and the cloak fell away, and she held only silver ashes in her hands. She let her hands fall to her sides, and she felt ashamed. “I’m sorry too. Forgive me.”
“It matters nothing,” Luthe said, but she reached out and hesitantly put a hand on his arm, and he covered it with one of his. “There may have been a better way than the Meeldtar’s to save your life,” he said. “But it was the only way I knew; and you left me no time. ... I was not trained as a healer.” He shut his eyes, but his hand stayed on hers. “No mages are, usually. It’s not glamorous enough, I suppose; and we’re a pretty vain lot.” He opened his eyes again and tried to smile.
“Meeldtar is the Water of Sight, and its spring runs into the lake here, the Lake of Dreams. We live—here—very near the Meeldtar stream, but the lake also touches other shores and drinks other springs—I do not know all their names. I told you I’m not a healer ... and . . , when you got here, finally, I could almost see the sunlight through you. If it weren’t for Talat, I might have thought you were a ghost. The Meeldtar suggested I give you a taste of the lake water—the Water of Sight itself would only have ripped your spirit from what was left of your body.
“But the lake—even I don’t understand everything that happens in that lake.” He fell silent, and dropped his hand from hers, but his breath stirred the hair that fell over her forehead. At last he said: “I’m afraid you are no longer quite .. .mortal.”
She stared up at him, and the shadows of her childhood ebbed away to be replaced by the shadows of many unknown futures.
“If it’s any comfort, I’m not quite mortal either. One does learn to cope; but within a fairly short span one finds oneself longing for an empty valley, or a mountain top. I’ve been here ...”
“Long enough to remember the Black Dragon.”
“Yes. Long enough to remember the Black Dragon.”
“Are you sure?” she whispered.
“One is never sure of anything,” he snapped; but she had learned that his anger was not directed at her, but at his own fears, and she waited. He closed his eyes again, thinking. She’s being patient with me. Gods, what has happened to me? I’ve been a master mage since old Goriolo put the mark on me, and he could almost remember when the moon was first hung in the sky. And this child with her red hair looks at me once with those smoky feverish eyes and I panic and dunk her in the lake. What is the matter with me?
He opened his eyes again and looked down at her. Her eyes were still smoky, green and hazel, still gleaming with the occasional amber flame, but they were no longer feverish, and their calm shook him now almost as badly as their dying glitter had done. “I followed you, you know, when you went under. I—I had to make a rather bad bargain to bring you back again. It was not a bargain I was expecting to have to make.” He paused. “I’m pretty sure.”
The eyes wavered and dropped. She looked at her one hand tucked over Luthe’s arm, and brought the other up to join it; and gently, as if she might like his comfort no better than she had liked his gift, he put his other arm around her; and she leaned slowly forward and rested her head against his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She laughed the whisper of a laugh. “I was not ready to die yet; very well, I shall live longer than I wished.”
She stirred, and moved away from him, and her arms dropped; but when he took one of her hands she did not try to withdraw it. The wind rustled lightly in the leaves. “You promised me food,” she said lightly.
“I did. Come along, then.”
The way back to Luthe’s hall was narrow, and as they walked side by side, for Luthe would not relinquish her hand, they had to walk very near each other. Aerin was glad when she saw the grey stone of the hall rear up before her, and at the edge of the small courtyard she broke away from the man beside her, and ran up the low steps and into the huge high room; and by the time he rejoined her she was busily engaged in pretending to warm her hands at the hearth. But she had no need of the fire’s warmth, for her blood was strangely stirred, and the flush on her face was from more than the fire’s red light.
Over supper she said, “I have not heard anyone else call it kelar. Just the Gift, or the royal blood.”
He was grateful that she chose to break the silence and answered quickly: “Yes, that’s true enough, although your family made themselves royalty on the strength of it, not the other way round. It came from the North originally.” He smiled at her stricken look. “Yes, it did; you and the demon-kind share an ancestor, and you have both lived to bear kelar through many generations. You need that common ancestor; without the unphysical strength the kelar grants you, you could not fight the demonkind, and Damar would not exist.”
She laughed her whispered laugh again, and said, “One in the eye for those who like to throw up to me my status as a half-blood.”
“Indeed,” said Luthe, and the flicker of temper she had grown accustomed to seeing whenever they discussed her father’s court flashed across his face. “Their ignorance is so great they are terrified by a hint of the truth; a hint such as you are in yourself.”
“You overrate me,” Aerin said. “I may be all you say of me now, but I have been nothing—nothing but an inconvenient nuisance; inconvenient particularly because I had the ill grace to get born to the king, where I could not be ignored as I deserved.”
“Ignored,” said Luthe. “You should be queen after your father. The sober responsible Tor is no better than a usurper.”
“No,” she replied, stung. “Tor is sober and responsible and he will make a far better king than I would a queen. Which is just as well, since he’s for it and I’m not.”
“Why not?” said Luthe. “It is you who is Arlbeth’s child.”
“By his second marriage,” said Aerin. “If Queen Tatoria had borne a child, of course it would have ruled after Arlbeth—or it would certainly have ruled if it were a son. But she didn’t. She died. Kings aren’t supposed to remarry anyway, but they may under extreme duress, like childless widower-hood; but they can’t marry unknown foreigners of questionable blood. I’m sure it was a great relief to all concerned when the unknown foreigner’s pregnancy resulted in a girl—they usually manage not to let even firstborn girls of impeccable breeding inherit, so shunting me aside was as easy as swearing by the Seven Perfect Gods.
“Galanna prefers to think I’m a bastard, but I’ve seen the record book, and I am down as legitimate—but not as a legitimate heir. The priests chose to call my father’s second marriage morganatic—my mother wasn’t even permitted to be Honored Wife. Just in case she had a boy.”
Aerin’s sense of the passage of time had been uncertain since she met Maur; and as her health returned in Luthe’s mountain valley, she yet had difficulty in believing that days and weeks had any meaning. When it occurred to her that one season had passed and another was passing, and that these were things she should take note of, she backed away from that knowledge again, for it was then that what Luthe had told her about the price she had paid to regain her life rose up and mocked her. Immortality was far more terrible a price than any she might have imagined.