Robin McKinley - The Hero And The Crown

She had gone but a few steps in no particular direction when a long low black object slammed into her and knocked her flat. She had only just begun frantically to grope for Gonturan when she recognized him: it was the black king cat, and he, it would appear, was delighted to see her. His forepaws were tucked over her shoulders and he was rubbing her face with his own bristles-and-velvet face, and purring loudly enough, she thought, to bring what remained of the tower down on top of them.

He permitted her, eventually, to sit up, although he remained twined around her. She gingerly felt the places she had fallen on, and looked at him severely. “I had bruises enough before,” she said aloud, and was rewarded by Talat’s ear-shattering whinny, and Talat himself appeared around the edge of the tower. He trotted up and nosed her eagerly, and she stroked his chest and tumbled the cat off her lap that she might stand up, and Talat heaved a sigh of relief after he had done so. The last time he had rediscovered her after battle it had not been a merry meeting. He whiffled down her shirt and she pulled his ears, and the black cat twined among her legs and Talat’s forelegs both, and Aerin said, “Something has come of my absence: you two have made friends.” Whereupon the cat left off at once and stalked away. Aerin laughed.

She and Talat followed him and came shortly to where the rest of the great cats were, and the wild dogs were there as well, and while the two camps still held mostly to their own, Aerin had a strong sense that there was a reliable peace, if not exactly friendship, between them.

The folstza and yerig were curled up among mounds of rubble nearly under the shadow of the last standing walls; yet Aerin knew she had gone completely around the remains of the black mountain the day before, and had seen no sign of her friends. She ascended the slope toward them, and the dog queen came up to her, with the barest wave of her long tail. Aerin tentatively held out her hand and the dog queen tentatively took it between her jaws. Aerin stood quite still, and one narrow blue eye looked up at her, and she looked back. The tail waved again, and then she dropped Aerin’s hand and trotted off, and some invisible command she gave to her folk, for they all followed her; and they rounded the edge of the mountain of rubble, going away from her, and disappeared.

Aerin felt a little forsaken. Had they only waited to—to see who won? Would they have known if Agsded had killed her, and run off then to spread the evil news to others of their kind, perhaps to all who lived wild in their forests and mountains? She had not known why the animals first came to her, but, knowing a little too much about the wrong kind of solitude, she had been glad of their company; and had been simply happy to find them here again after she fell asleep last night alone and comfortless, without thinking beyond the fact that they were her friends and she had missed them. But the cats showed no sign of leaving; and always there was Talat.

She pulled his saddle off, and was glad to see that he had no starting sores underneath; and then she eagerly opened the saddlebags and chewed a little of the end of the tough dried meat she had brought with her. Her stomach was grateful but it rumbled for more. She looked around her again, leaning into the solid reality of Talat’s shoulder. The bare lands met her eye just as they had before. Her gaze dropped to the tumbled remains of her fire. Beyond just what she had laid her hands on last night there was no wood in sight nearer than the green verge of the boundary Hills of Damar. “Well,” she said aloud to whoever was listening. “At least we can see where to go, to get back now.”

As she spoke, a yerig trotted around the edge of the tower and into view again, and two or three others followed. She tried to suppress the little bubble of happiness that popped up in her throat when she saw them coming back to her; but then the yerig queen came into sight as well, and swung her head around at once to catch Aerin’s eye, and Aerin couldn’t help smiling. The queen held something in her mouth, and the young brown dog beside her also was carrying something. The queen dropped back a little, and her companion reached Aerin first; he had a fine fierce ruff and copper-colored eyes, and far less dignity than his leader, for he wagged his tail enthusiastically and flattened his ears as he came near. He dropped what he held on the ground at her feet: it was a charred circlet of surka leaves. So black and withered it was she would not have recognized it but for the red glint it showed: the dragon stone, still woven securely in its place. She stooped to pick it up as the one-eyed queen dropped what she held: it was the Hero’s Crown.

THEY STARTED BACK toward the mountains before the sun had risen much higher. Aerin had buried the ashes of the fire, out of habit, for there was certainly nothing around that might burn; and she reverently wrapped the surka wreath and its stone, and the Crown, and stowed them in one of Talat’s saddlebags. There was nothing else left to do.

Her entourage strung out behind her, cats on one flank, dogs on the other. Only once did she look back, when they were already well across the plain and the sun was beginning to drop toward evening. The way did slope down from the dark mountain, and she was sure that this one thing had changed, even if there had been a disappearing forest between. But if this was the worst of what remained, she thought, they were getting off very lightly.

The ruins of the black tower were small in the distance, and they seemed to leer at her, but it was a small nasty, useless leer, like a tyrant on the scaffold as the rope is placed around his neck. This plain would not be a healthy or attractive place for many years to come, but it would not be a dangerous one either. She went on with a lighter heart.

She was eager to reach the edge of her beloved Damarian Hills by nightfall, that she might camp in their shadow and drink from their clean waters, and so kept on into the beginning twilight. She wanted to sing when she caught the first breath of the evening breeze from the kindly trees; but her voice had never adapted itself to carrying a tune, so she didn’t. Her army all seemed to be glad to be under familiar leaves again, and the dogs wagged their tails and made cheerful playful snaps at one another, and the cats knocked each other with clawless feet, and rolled on the ground. Talat pranced. And so they came merrily to a turn in the path they followed, paying attention to nothing but their own pleasure; and then Aerin caught a sudden whiff of smoke as from a small fire, and then the smell of cooking. She sat down hard, but Talat’s ears flicked back at her. What do you mean stop here? and went on. And there was a small campfire, tucked in the curve of the trail where there was a little clearing and a stream curving around the other side of it.

“Good day to you,” said Luthe.

Talat whickered a greeting, and Aerin slid off him and he went forward alone to nose Luthe’s hands and browse in his hair. “I thought you never left your hall and your lake,” said Aerin.

“Rarely,” said Luthe. “In fact, increasingly exceedingly rarely. But I can be prodded by extraordinary circumstances.”

Aerin smiled faintly. “You have had plenty to choose from here recently.”

“Yes.”

“May I ask which particular circumstance was sufficiently extraordinary in this case?”

“Aerin—” Luthe paused, and then his voice took on its bantering tone again. “I thought you might like to be dragged back to the present, that you might arrive in time to give Tor his Crown and end the siege; and of course now instead of a few hundred years hence there is no jungle to be compelled to claw your way through. I’ve no doubt you could have done it, but it would have put you in a foul temper, and you would have been in a fouler one by the time you came back to the Lake of Dreams—assuming you would have had the sense to make your way there, not in your case something one can count on. You would have needed my assistance to regain your own time—if lighting a little fire made you see double, charging about in time without assistance would have blinded you for good—and the longer you’re out of it, the harder it would have been to get you back in. So I came to meet you.”