As the air grew colder and the grass in the meadow turned brown and dull violet and as the flowers stopped blooming she pretended to notice these things only as isolated phenomena. Luthe watched her, and knew much of what she thinking, but had no comfort for her; all he could offer was his knowledge, of magic, of history, of Damar; of the worlds he had traveled, and the wonders he brought back. He taught her eagerly, and eagerly she learned, each of them distracting the other from something each could not yet face. Snow fell, and Talat and the cattle and sheep spent their days in the low open barn at the edge of their meadow; and sometimes a few deer joined them at their hay and oats; but the deer came mostly for the company—and the oats—because winter never fell harshly where Luthe was, nor did ice ever rime even the shores of the Lake of Dreams.
Sometimes what she learned frightened her, or perhaps it was that she could learn such things from a mage that frightened her; and one day, almost involuntarily she asked: “Why do you tell me ... so much?”
Luthe considered her. “I tell you ... some you need to know, and some you have earned the right to know, and some it won’t hurt you to know—” He stopped.
“And some?” He raised his hands and his eyebrows; smiled faintly. The pale winter sun gleamed on his yellow hair and glinted in his blue eyes. There were no lines in his face, and his narrow shoulders were straight and square; but still he looked old to her, old as the mountains, older than the great grey hall he inhabited, that looked as though it had stood there since the sun first found the silver lake. “Some things I tell you only because I wish to tell them to you.”
Aerin’s lessons grew longer and longer, for her brain’s capacity seemed to increase as the strength of her body did; and she began to love the learning for its own sake, and not merely for the fact that there was kelar in her blood, and that the house of the king of Damar need not be ashamed to claim her; and then she could not learn enough.
“I shall have to give you the mage mark soon,” Luthe said, smiling, one grey afternoon as the snow fell softly outside.
Aerin stood up and paced restlessly, twice the length of the hall to the open door and back to the hearth and the table where Luthe sat. It was a wonderful hall for pacing, for it took several minutes, even for the fidgetiest, to get from one end of it to the other and back again. The door stood open all year long, for the cold somehow stayed outside, and the only draughts were warm ones from the fire. Aerin stared at the glinting white courtyard for a moment before returning to Luthe and the table before the fire.
“I came here first for healing and second for knowledge—but by the gods and their hells I do not know if I can bear either. And yet I have no choice. And yet I do not know even what I wished to know.”
Luthe stood up, but came only a few steps nearer the fireplace. “I tell you all that I may.”
“May,” said Aerin fiercely. “What can you tell me that you may not? What am I, now that I am neither human—which I understand I never was—nor mortal, which I used to be? Why did you heal me? Why did you call me here at all? Why do you teach me now so much that you threaten me with the mage mark, that all who look upon me may know to fear me? That will be splendid fun at home, you know; I’m so popular already. Why? Why don’t you tell me to go away?” She stopped and looked down at her feet. “Why don’t I just leave?”
Luthe sighed. “I’m sorry. Again. I thought that perhaps it would be easier if you first had some idea of your own strength.”
She was still staring at her shoes, and he stepped toward her, and hesitantly touched one shoulder. The shoulder hunched itself up and the face turned away from him. Her hair was almost shoulder length now, and it fell across her face like a curtain. Luthe wanted to tell her the reasons she ought to stay—good honest Damarian reasons, reasons she would understand and acknowledge; reasons that were born with her as the king’s daughter, however outcast her people made her; reasons that he had to tell her soon anyway. But he wanted ... “Do you wish so desperately to leave?” he said almost wistfully.
“It matters little,” said a low voice from behind the hair. “I am not missed.”
“Tor,” said Luthe darkly.
“Oh, Tor,” said the voice, and it unexpectedly gave a choke of laughter, and then she raised her hands and parted the curtain, rubbing her cheeks hastily with her palms as she did so. Her eyes were still a little too bright. “Yes, Tor, and Arlbeth too, and I do feel badly for Teka; but I would guess they live hopefully, and guess to see me again. I do not mind staying here ... a little longer. I don’t much care to travel in winter anyway.”
“Thank you,” Luthe said dryly. “By spring I shall be ready ... to send you on your way again.”
Aerin said lightly, “And what shall that way be?”
“To Agsded,” Luthe said. “He who holds Damar’s future in his hands.”
“Agsded?” Aerin said. “I do not know the name.”
“He it is who sends the mischief across your borders; he it is who stirred Nyrlol to rebellion just long enough to distract and disturb Arlbeth, and he who awoke your Maur, and who even now harries your City with his minions, whose army will march south in the spring. Agsded, although none know his name now, and the Northern generals believe they band together through no impulse but their mutual hatred of Damar.
“Agsded is a wizard—a master mage, a master of masters. The mark on him is so bright it could blind any simple folk who look upon it, though they knew not what they saw. Agsded I knew long ago—he was another of Goriolo’s pupils; he was the best of all of us, and he knew it; but even Goriolo did not see how deep his pride went.—. . Goriolo had another pupil of Agsded’s family: his sister. She feared her brother; she had always feared him; it was fear of what his pride might do that led her to Goriolo with him, but it was on her own merit that Goriolo took her.
“And I—I must send you into the dragon’s den again, having barely healed you, and that at great cost, from your encounter with the Black Dragon. Maur is to your little dragons what Agsded is to Maur. I teach you what I may because it is the only shield I may—can—give you. I cannot face Agsded myself—I cannot. By the gods and hells you have never heard of,” Luthe broke out, “do you think I like sending a child to a doom like this, one I know I cannot myself face? With nothing to guard her but half a year’s study of the apprentice bits of magery?
“I know by my own blood that I cannot defeat him; though by some of that blood I have held him off these many years longer, that the chosen hero, the hero of his blood, might grow up to face him; for only one of his blood may defeat him.” Luthe closed his eyes. “It is true your mother wanted a son; she believed that as only one of his blood might defeat him, so only one of his own sex might, for to such she ascribed her own failure. She felt that it was because she was a woman that she could not kill her own brother.”
“Brother?” whispered Aerin.
Luthe opened his eyes. “Had she tried, she might yet have failed,” he went on as though he had not heard her, “but she could not bear to try; until Agsded, who knew the prophecy even as she did, from long before there was apparent need to know it, sought to bring her under his will or to destroy her.
“He could not do the former; almost he did the latter, and in the end she died of the poison he gave her.” Luthe looked at her, and she remembered the hand that was not her own holding a goblet, and a voice that was not Luthe’s saying “Drink.”
“But she had meanwhile fled south, and found a man with kelar in his blood, and been got with child by him. She had only the strength left to bear that child before she died.”