Robin McKinley - The Hero And The Crown

“Talat,” she croaked, and discovered that her voice was not entirely gone after all. Talat raised his drooping head and looked at her; he had not recognized the thing in the stream as his beloved Aerin, and he whinnied eagerly but uncertainly.

“If you’re still around,” Aerin whispered, “then perhaps I’d better stay too,” and she hunched herself painfully into a sitting position.

Talat backed a step or two away from the thing in the stream as it rose up at him, but it croaked “Talat” at him again and he paused. The voice did not sound the way Aerin’s voice should sound, but he was quite sure it had something to do with his Aerin, and so he waited. Aerin found out that sitting up was as far as she could go in that direction, so she lay down again, rolled over on her belly, and hitched her way slowly up onto the shore of the stream, Talat lowered his head anxiously and blew, and the touch of his breath on her face made her grunt with pain. She worked her right hand out of its sodden gauntlet, and raised her good hand to her horse, and he lipped her fingers and then gave a great sigh—of relief, she thought; but she turned her face away from his warm breath, “A lot you know,” she whispered, but for the first time since they had fallen together before the dragon it occurred to her that she might not die.

Her burns and her broken ankle throbbed more harshly once she was out of the water, and she thought, I could spend the rest of my life lying in streams. A very small thought added, That may be no very long time anyway. Then she thought: I have to find a way at least to stand up and get Talat’s saddle off before it galls him. Well, I still have one arm and one leg.

It was very awkward, and Talat was unhappy at the way she pulled herself up his left foreleg till she could grab the girth and pitch her shoulders across the saddle and prop herself up that way; but he stood as still as the dead dragon, and only the stiffness of his neck and back told her he was worried. “I’m worried too, my friend,” she murmured. She managed to unbuckle the girth and let the saddle slide to the ground; there was a pink, almost raw spot behind his elbow where the sweaty girth had rubbed him for too long. There were also two long angry red weals, one across his croup and one other down his flank. Dragonfire.

She slithered back to the ground again, landing on the saddle. She found herself staring at the buckles that had held the saddlebags. Food. Where did I leave my gear? It was near the stream here somewhere. Behind a rock. She looked around, but her sight was blurry, and she could not tell which smaller humps were rocks and which might be saddlebags. Her mouth and throat throbbed. I probably can’t eat anything but mush, she thought, and grimaced, but wrinkling her face for the grimace was so painful that she could think of nothing for a few minutes.

It was Talat who found her saddlebags. He ambled away from her, snuffling along the ground by the edge of the stream; and he paused by one particular group of small dim hummocks and bumped them with his nose; and Aerin knew by the noise that they were not rocks. He moved away from them again, and one hoof in passing glanced off them, and again the noise was a faint rustle instead of the tunk of hoof against stone.

It was another long afternoon before she dragged herself within reach of her saddlebags, for she had often to climb back into the water and soothe her burns and her throbbing ankle. She lay with one hand on their smooth leather, and then thought: A fire. If I could boil something to a pulp till I could swallow it .... She fumbled one of the flaps open; there was still bread, and she put it in her hand and held her hand in the water till she felt it begin to disintegrate, and then lapped it up slowly.

She did build a fire; she found a way to wedge her tinder between stones so that she could strike it with her good hand; and fortunately there was plenty of fuel by the shores of the stream. Trees still grew here, for they were a little protected from the dragon’s valley by the long stone shoulder that had hidden Maur from Aerin’s campsite. She found the remains of her campfire, and it looked old and weathered; and she thought to notice that the stream was running clear again, and she wondered again how long she had lain in the stream. She found a flat rock for a lid, and began the long process of boiling dried meat in her tin till it was soft enough for her to eat. She didn’t dare make the fire very large, for she could not go far to fetch wood for it; nor could she bear the heat of it.

She slept, or fainted again, often, drifting back and forth across the boundary of selfhood; it was no longer only oblivion that those periods of blank ness brought her, but the beginning of healing. She pried the boot off her right foot, gingerly felt the ankle, wrapped it in strips made from spare clothing, tying knots with one hand and her teeth; and hoped she was doing something useful. The wrappings reminded her, if they did no other good, to keep the foot quiet, and the ache of it ebbed away to a dull mutter.

She had looked only once at her left arm, and had felt so sick at the sight that she did not look again. But not looking reminded her the same way as bandaging her foot reminded her; and the pain of the burns had subsided but little, and she had often to crawl back to the stream and soak herself in it. And how long before I get sick from the cold? she thought, shivering; for now that her body was trying to fight back it recognized that lying in cold water for long periods of time is not generally a good thing to do, and the unhurt bits of it shivered. She sneezed, and sneezed again. Great, she thought dully, and her eyes fell again on the saddlebags. It was hard to think because of the pain.

Kenet, she thought. Kenet. It can’t hurt to try.

Hope rose up and blocked her aching throat. She crept to the saddlebags and unrolled the long wallet that held the kenet; and twitched her left arm forward and let it lie in the thick yellow ointment. She closed her eyes, trying not to hope so desperately; she feared the pain might drive her mad soon, and she could not spare the strength to withstand too great a disappointment. But as she grappled with herself the pain in her arm dwindled and ebbed and finally died away to a vague queasy discomfort. I’m imagining this, she thought, holding perfectly still so as not to disrupt the beautiful unexpected dream of peace. She opened her eyes. Her arm was still black and horrible-looking. She lay down, very, very slowly, til her left cheek was cradled as well in the dragonfire ointment; and slowly her face, too, hurt less and less till it did not hurt at all. She fell into sleep, real sleep, the first real sleep she had had since the evening she had read Tor’s note.

She dreamed that she woke up, lying with her left arm curled around her head, and her left cheek pressed to the ground. She rose up on both elbows and noticed without finding it remarkable that both arms were whole and strong. She sat up, hands falling easily and languorously into her lap. She rubbed her palms together and thought uncomfortably that she had had a most unpleasant dream about a very large dragon .... As she bent her head forward her hair fell forward too, and she noticed two things: first, that her hair was short, barely chin length. This disturbed her, for she knew that she would never cut her hair; Teka was adamant about this, and Aerin was secretly a little proud of the fact that her hair was even longer than Galanna’s, falling unbound almost to her ankles, the weight of it stretching the curls into long ripples. It was also nearly straight now; and when she was younger and her hair shorter, it had been mercilessly curly. But, worst of all, it was the wrong color. It was still red, but it was the darker color of flaring embers, not the paler shade of the leaping flames. Panic seized her; she was not herself; she had died; or, worse, she, Aerin still existed, but the dream of the dragon had not been a dream at all, but real, and the real Aerin still lay somewhere with a burned face and a blackened arm and a broken ankle, and this healthy painless body she presently inhabited belonged to someone else; she would not be permitted to stay.