Robin McKinley - The Hero And The Crown

She sat up again, and the cat dropped to the ground, and Talat turned his head to look at the cat, and the cat turned his head to look back. Talat’s ears, half back, eased a little, and one reluctantly came forward and pointed toward the cat, and the cat walked up to him and put up his nose. Talat’s other ear came forward and pricked, and he lowered his nose, and the two breathed gently into each other’s faces. Then they went on.

The mountains opened suddenly into an ugly uneven plain; the footing was bad, crumbly and full of small hidden crevasses, and there were no trees at all. Aerin’s army stepped and glided and shambled out of the shadows of the rocks and the last leaves, and billowed up around her till she and Talat were the hub of a wheel; and all looked around them. “We are no longer in Damar,” she said calmly, and Talat heaved a great sigh. Aerin unslung Gonturan from her saddle, and carried the blade in her hand, for the comfort of her only, for there was nothing for a sword to do in the wide bleak brooding space before them, where no spring could come.

The silence hammered at her, and she heard the little gibbering voices again, but indifferently this time, as if she heard them from behind a locked door whose strength she did not doubt. “Come along, then,” she said, and Talat walked forward, yerig and folstza making way for them and then falling in beside them. There was nothing to see but the heavy grey sky and the bleak grey landscape. Mountains again there must be on the far side of this flat grey space; but the clouds ringed them in, and there was no horizon. Her beasts followed her because she led them, but they could not see what she led them to.

Neither could she see aught that was useful; but the small nasty voices in her mind seemed to push harder on one side of her skull than another; and so she went toward them.

And before them suddenly was a black mountain, or crag, or tower, or all three; for it was the size of a mountain, but of the looming impossible shape of a crag that will be ripped into an avalanche in the next great storm; and yet it was also a worked shape, however improbable, as if a hand had built it—surely in its peak was the glint of windows?—but the hand must have belonged to a madman. Around it twined a vast vine of the surka, and Aerin’s stomach turned over and fell back in her belly like a stone, and the gibbering voices could be heard to laugh.

She dismounted and walked slowly forward. She raised Gonturan, and Gonturan blazed blue, and the black tower suddenly glowed red, fire red, and the peak of the tower lifted and turned toward her, and the glint of windows was a dragon’s red eyes, and the black shadow that bent toward her was a dragon’s black head, and it opened its mouth to breathe flame at her. Her left arm went suddenly dead, and then the pain of old burns bit deeply into it, new and fresh; and she smelled her own flesh burning. “No!” she screamed, and dropped Gonturan, and threw up her right arm against the glare of flames, her left arm hanging limp beside her. She turned to run, but something was in her way; something sleek and black tripped her, and she fell against Talat’s flank, and her mind cleared, and she no longer smelled scorched flesh. She turned back fearfully, for her left arm still throbbed with memory, but there was no fire, and no dragon; only the black monstrous shape twisted round with leaves.

She bent and picked up her sword; but the blue fire had gone out, and the blade was as dull as the grey plain around them. She looked again to the glint that might be windows, for she knew now that she had come to the place she looked for, knew that Agsded was here. And she knew also that there was no way in, for the way that Gonturan might have won her was lost to her now.

Slowly she circled the great tower, but there were no doors, and now it looked like a mountain after all, and nothing that should have had a door, it was foolish to have supposed otherwise; and her quest was a failure, for if not here then she knew not where. She crawled over the rocks below the surka that wrapped itself around the black crag, for she would not touch the surka if she could help it, this surka that the eye of Agsded must have touched, that his breath might have stirred; but she went alone, for Talat and the folstza and yerig waited where she had challenged the tower with Gonturan’s flame and then lost it.

She came round the full circle and knew herself defeated, and she went up to Talat and put her arms around his neck and her face in his mane, as she had done so often before for little hurts and dismays; and now in this great hurt she had no other recourse. He tucked his chin against her arm, but it was no comfort, and she stepped away from him again—and he bolted forward, and reared, and neighed, a war-horse going to battle. She stared at him open-mouthed, the hilt of her dull sword prodding her elbow.

Talat scrambled up the rocks before them, and neighed again; and plunged into the twining surka, which slowed him little. Aerin watching felt that the leaves pulled at him and hindered his passage as best they might; but he surged through them and did not care. He neighed again as he reached the foot of the smoother walls of the tower itself; he was above the vines now, and Aerin could see streaks of their sap on him. He shook his head, and reared again, and struck the walls with his front feet; and sparks flew, and there was a smell as of burning, but of the burning of unclean things. He came to all fours, and then reared and struck again; and then the folstza and the yerig were flowing up over the rocks and through the clinging surka to join him, and the yerig queen flung herself at a high outthrust knob of rock, and scrabbled at it.

“It won’t work,” Aerin whispered, and Talat reared and struck again, and the smell of burning was stronger.

The folstza were clawing great ropes of vine from the base of the tower, and flinging them down, and the tower seemed to quiver in her sight. The sharp little elbow of rock that the yerig queen clung to gave way suddenly, dumping her at Talat’s feet; but where it had been there was a crack in the black wall; and when Talat struck at the crack a fine rain of stone powder pattered down.

The torn vines thrashed like wild things when they touched the sandy grey ground. Aerin reached to touch one of the dark leaves, and it turned into a small banded snake with venomous eyes; but she picked it up anyway, and it was only a leaf. She stood staring as her army sought better purchase on the black rock face; distantly she heard the patter of stone chips, and she picked up another leaf, and wove it through the stem of the first; and another, and then another, and when, suddenly, there was a crash and a roar and she looked up, what she held in her hands was a thick heavy green wreath of surka; and her hands were sticky with the sap.

A great face of the crag had fallen, and within, Aerin saw stairs winding up into the black mountain, red with torchlight; and her army turned its eyes on her, and panted, and many of their mouths dripped pink foam, and many of their feet had torn and bleeding pads. Talat was grey with sweat. With the wreath in her hands, and Gonturan banging lifelessly at her side, she stepped carefully through the rubble, and through the ranks of her army, many of whom touched her lightly with their noses as she passed them, and set her foot on the first stair.

THE STAIRS WENT UP and up in a long slow spiral, and Aerin followed, turning round and round till it seemed to her she must be climbing the well of the sky and at the end of the staircase she would step onto the moon’s cold surface and look down, far away, upon the green earth. For a little while she could hear her friends, who waited restlessly at the foot of the stair; once she heard the thinnest thread of a whine, but that was all. None tried to follow her. Then she could no longer hear anything but the soft sound of her footsteps and the occasional slow stutter of a guttering flame. Her legs ached with climbing, and her back ached with tension, and her neck ached with keeping her head tipped up to look at the endless staircase; and her mind ached with thoughts she dared not think. Daylight had disappeared long since, had gone with the last sounds of her beasts; the light in her eyes was red. In the edges of her vision she saw gaping black doors that led into chambers she would not imagine, let alone turn her gaze to see; and sometimes the soft noise of her footsteps echoed strangely on a stair that opened into such a room.