Robin McKinley - The Hero And The Crown

They wound their way up the smooth broad track that led between Vasth and Kar to the low forested hills before the City. As they reached the top of the pass Talat snorted and shied away, and Aerin clung to the saddle, not believing the glimpse she had had of the scene below them. Grimly she kneed Talat around, and reluctantly he obeyed her, but still he tried to sidle sideways, to turn and bolt. Even Maur had not been so bad as what lay before them.

The trees were gone; even, it seemed, the gentle hills were flattened, and where there had been the greens and browns and deep blue shadows of leaves and trees there was the grisly heave and thrust of battle. The Northerners were there, between her and her City. She could see small human bands, the largest near the City gates, fighting desperately; but they were outnumbered, and they fought defensively, because their honor demanded it, and because fear of being captured alive by the Northerners drove them on; not because they had any hope left. And the Northerners knew this.

Aerin stared numbly at the ragged scarred landscape, and listened to the terrible cries and the heavy sound of blows, and the fumes of the fighting choked her, and made her eyes water. It was as though the forest she had daily seen from the highest towers of her father’s castle had never been; it was as if, when Luthe dragged her back to her own time, he had miscalculated and she was some other Aerin on some other world. She waited for panic to take her. Talat quieted and stood, ears forward, tense, but awaiting her orders; and her army surrounded her, and made a huge pool behind her that splashed like surf up the rock sides of the pass.

“Well,” she said aloud, and the calmness of her own voice frightened her. “Maybe not being quite mortal any more is going to count for less than I thought.” She settled the Crown more firmly on her shoulder, and drew Gonturan, who gleamed blue along her edge; the blue rippled up, over the hilt and grip, and flowed over Aerin’s hand. There was an odd subtle tingle at the touch of the blue shimmer, but it was not unpleasant; Aerin put it down to the twitching of her own nerves.

“I hope, my friends, that you will help me now: escort me—there,” she said, and pointed with her sword; and from Gonturan’s tip a blue spark jumped, and fell sizzling to the ground, and the cat king paced gravely over to examine the spot where it had fallen.

Then Aerin thought that perhaps it wasn’t her nerves after all.

She shook the sword, and the blue light brightened till it lit the air around her, and the pit below her shimmered with it, and the cat king’s eyes glinted with it as he looked up at her; and the light made it easier, somehow, to see, for just beyond where Gonturan’s tip pointed she saw Kethtaz quite clearly, and Arlbeth on his back; and the blue light seemed to settle around him too, across the eerie ground so far away. It outlined Tor as well, not far from his king; and she wondered where the standard-bearer was, for it was this lack that had made her unsure that she had seen her father aright; but she had no time to think about it now.

“Listen,” she said, and many pairs of bright eyes turned to her. “The Crown must fall only into the hands of Arlbeth or Tor. No one else. I will give it to one of them if I can”—she swallowed—“and if I fail, then you must; or if neither should leave this battle alive, then you must carry it far from here—far from here, far from Damar; as far as your feet can bear you.” Her voice echoed oddly, as if the blue light reflected it or focused it, or held it together; and she had no doubt, suddenly, of her army, and a great sense of relief came to her, and almost a sort of joy.

“Come on, then,” she said. “I’d really best prefer to deliver it myself.”

She raised Gonturan, and Talat leaped forward, and the yerig and folstza fanned out around her; and the first Northerner to feel the teeth of Aerin’s army fell beneath the dog queen, and the second was beheaded by Gonturan, and the third was pulled down by the tall black cat.

The Northerners had no scouts looking back over the mountains, for they had no reason to think a watch was necessary; they had the best strength of Damar bottled up in the City before them, and what few folk there were stilt scattered in small towns and mountain villages had been sufficiently terrorized by marauding bands of Northerners that they could be relied on to stay shivering at home. Furthermore, the Northern leaders could hear their enemies from afar, and could tell from whence they came, just as Perlith could turn a handful of nothing into a bouquet of flowers at a court ball.

Or so they had been able to do. They had had no foreknowledge of Aerin’s approach, and the Northerners, while no cowards, knew much of magic and perhaps more of kelar than the Damarians did; and the unexpectedness of this feat frightened them far more than the simple fact of Aerin’s presence. And so they did not rally at once, as they should have, for, had they done so, they might have cut her down and won the day for themselves, and won Damar forever. But they did not. They wheeled their riding beasts, some of them nearly horses but most of them nothing like horses at all, and tried more to get out of her way than to engage her and test her strength.

The common soldiery of the North was more frightened yet. They saw that their leaders did not like this blue flame that dazzled their eyes and, if it came too near, parted their queerly jointed limbs from their thick bodies; and so they scrambled to be free of the thing, whatever it was; and the blue light only rippled farther and farther out from its center, and spread all around them. Frequently it felt like teeth at their throats, and their brown-and-purple blood soon tinged the ethereal blue a darker shade; and sometimes it fell from above them, like the lashing hoofs of a war-horse; and their own dying cries were in their ears, and a high singing note as well that they had never heard before, although in it were also the sharp snarls of the wild mountain cats, and the dangerous baying of a yerig pack, and the shrill screams of a fighting stallion.

The blue dazzled Aerin’s eyes too, but it was a useful sort of dazzlement because it seemed to break the Northerners’ clumsy movements into arcs whose sweep she could judge so precisely that as they tried to escape her she knew just where to let Gonturan fall across them. She did not think of how many she killed or maimed; she thought of them only as obstacles that must be overcome that she might rejoin her own people. Merely to let them part before Talat’s trampling hoofs, as they showed a great willingness to do, was not enough, for they might then close in again behind her; and so Gonturan fell, and rose and fell again, and Aerin’s blue-brightened eyes watched and followed, and looked ahead to where the Damarians were making their last stand. She had one landmark to guide her, one of the tall standing stones that marked the last uphill stretch of the king’s way into the City; the one of the four stones that did still stand. But she could no longer see Tor or Arlbeth. Nor did she often dare raise her eyes to look; for there were those who stood to oppose her, who as they tried to step out of her way still showed the glint of metal, to disembowel Talat if they could, or hurl a poisoned throwing knife at her from behind; she could not spare her vigilance. Her army kept pace with her; a swathe they were cutting through the Northerners; occasionally she saw, from the corners of her eyes, a cat body, or a lean dog shape, fling itself on the twisted helm or misshapen body of a Northerner; but then at once she had to aim Gonturan for another blow. There was a high-pitched hum in her ears, though she could still hear the hoarse shouts of the Northerners, and the harsh ugly sound of the words of their language in those shouts.