Robin McKinley - The Hero And The Crown

Aerin knew how much it cost Teka to say so, and her anger ebbed away and she felt ashamed of herself.

“The journey itself—I do not like it. It is not proper”—and here a smile touched the corners of Teka’s sad mouth—”but you will always be unusual, as your mother was, and she traveled alone as she chose, nor did your father ever try to hinder her. You are a woman grown, and past needing a nursemaid to judge your plans. If your father says you may go—well, then.”

Aerin went off and began to worry about how best to approach her father. She had known she would have to ask his permission at some point, but she had wanted to get Teka on her side first, and had misjudged how alarming the horse-shy Teka would find a war-stallion like Talat, even an elderly, rehabilitated, and good-natured war-stallion. Aerin’s own attitude toward Talat hadn’t been rational for years.

She brooded for days after Teka had withdrawn from the field of combat; but she brooded not only about how to tackle her father, but also about what, precisely, she was setting out to do. Test the fire-repellent properties of her discovery. Toward killing dragons. Did she realty want to kill dragons? Yes. Why? Pause. To be doing something. To be doing something better than anyone else was doing it.

She caught her father one day at breakfast, between ministers with tactical problems and councilors with strategic ones. His face lit up when he saw her, and she made an embarrassed mental note to seek him out more often; he was not a man who had ever been able to enter into a child’s games, but she might have noticed before this how wistfully he looked at her. But for perhaps the first time she was recognizing that wistfulness for what it was, the awkwardness of a father’s love for a daughter he doesn’t know how to talk to, not shame for what Aerin was, or could or could not do.

She smiled at him, and he gave her a cup of malak, and pushed the bun tray and the saha jam toward her. “Father,” she said through crumbs, “do you know I have been riding Talat?”

He looked at her thoughtfully. Hornmar had brought him this information some months back, adding that Talat had looked like pining away and dying before Aerin took him over. Arlbeth had wished that she might bring him the story herself; the sort of fears Teka had did not occur to him.

“Yes,” he said. “And I would have guessed something was up sooner or later when you stopped nagging me to get rid of Kisha and find you a real horse.”

Aerin had the grace to blush. “It’s been ... quite a while. I didn’t think about what I was doing at first.”

Arlbeth was smiling. “I should like to see you ride him.”

Aerin swallowed. “You ... would?”

“I would.”

“Er—soon?”

“As it pleases you, Aerin-sol,” he said gravely.

She nodded wordlessly.

“Tomorrow, then.”

She nodded again, picked up a second bun and looked at it.

“I have guessed that there is some purpose to your joining me at breakfast,” Arlbeth said, as she showed no sign of breaking the silence, “a purpose beyond telling me of something that has been going on for years without your troubling me with it. It has perhaps to do further with Talat?”

She looked up, startled.

“We kings do develop a certain ability to recognize objects under our noses. Well?”

“I should like to ride Talat out of the City. A day’s ride out—sleep overnight, outside. Come back the next day.” She was sorry about the bun, now; it made her mouth dry.

“Ah. I recommend you go east and south—you might follow the Tsa, which will provide you with water as well as preventing you from getting lost.”

“The river? Yes. I’d thought—I’d already thought of that.” Her fingers were crumbling the rest of the bun to tiny bits.

“Good for you. I assume you planned to go soon?”

“I—yes. You mean you’ll let me?”

“Let you? Of course. There’s little within a day’s ride of the City that will harm you.” Momentarily his face hardened. Time had once been, before the loss of the Crown, that any sword drawn in anger within many miles of the City would rebound on the air, twist out of its wielder’s hands, and fall to the earth. “Talat will take care of you. He took excellent care of me.”

“Yes. Yes, he will.” She stood up, looked at the mess on (and around) her plate, looked at her father. “Thank you.”

He smiled. “I will see you tomorrow. Mid-afternoon.”

She nodded, gave him a stricken smile, and fled. One of the hafor appeared to remove her plate and brush the crumbs away.

Aerin was early at Talat’s pasture the next morning. She groomed him till her arms ached, and he loved every minute of it; he preferred being fussed over even to eating.

Maybe she should hang a bridle on him. She’d mended the cut rein on his old bridle the night before, and brought it with her today. But when she offered the bit to him—he who had so eagerly seized it two years before, knowing that it meant he would be really ridden again—he looked at it and then at her with obvious bewilderment, and hurt feelings. He suffered her to lift the bar into his mouth and pull the straps over his ears, but he stood with his head drooping unhappily.

“All right” she said, and ripped the thing off him again, and dropped it on the ground, and picked up the little piece of padded cloth that passed for a saddle and dropped it on his back. He twisted his head around and nibbled the hem of her tunic, rolling his eye at her to see if she was really angry. When she didn’t knock his face away he was reassured, and waited patiently while she arranged and rearranged the royal breastplate to her liking.

Arlbeth came before she expected him. Talat had felt the tension in her as soon as she mounted, but he had cheered her into a good mood again by being himself, and they were weaving nonchalantly around several tall young trees at a canter when she noticed Arlbeth standing on the far side of the stream that ran through the meadow. They forded the water and then halted, and Arlbeth gave them the salute of a soldier to his sovereign, and she blushed.

He nodded at Talat’s bare head. “I’m not sure this would be such a good idea with another horse, but with him ...” He paused and looked thoughtful, and Aerin held her breath for fear he would ask her how it had begun, for she hadn’t decided what to tell him. He said only: “It could be useful to have no reins to handle; but I’m not sure even our best horses are up to such a level of training.” His eyes then dropped to Aerin’s feet. “That’s a very pretty way to ride, with your legs wrapped around his belly, but the first pike that came along would knock you right out of the saddle.”

“You’re not in battle most of the time,” Aerin said boldly, “and you could build a special war saddle with a high pommel and cantle.”

Arlbeth laughed, and Aerin decided that they had passed their test. “I can see he likes your new way.”

Aerin grinned. “Pick up the bridle and show it to him.”

Arlbeth did, and Talat laid back his ears and turned his head away. But when Arlbeth dropped it, Talat turned back and thrust his nose into the breast of his old master, and Arlbeth stroked him and murmured something Aerin could not hear.

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.