After the banquet she went to sit in her window seat, staring into the dark courtyard; the torches around its perimeter left great pools of shadow near the castle walls. Her bedroom was dark as well, and Teka had not yet come to be sure she had hung her good clothes up as she should instead of leaving them on the floor where she would step on them. There was a light knock on the door. She turned and said, “Come in,” with surprise; if she had thought about it, she would have been silent and let the visitor leave without finding her. She wished to be alone after the hall full of food and talk and bright smiles.

It was Tor. She could see him outlined in the light from the hall, and she had been sitting in the dark long enough to see clearly. But he blinked and looked around, for her figure was only a part of the heavy curtains that hung around the deep window alcove. She stirred, and he saw the flicker of her red skirt.

“Why do you sit in the dark?”

“There was too much light in the hall tonight.”

Tor was silent. After a moment she sighed, and reached for a candle and flint. It seemed to Tor that the shadows it cast upon her face made her briefly old: a woman with grandchildren, for all her brilliant hair. Then she set the candle on a small table and smiled at him, and she was eighteen again.

She saw that he carried something in his arms: a long narrow something, wrapped in dark cloth. “I have brought you your birthday present—privately, as I thought you might prefer.” And so that I need not do any explaining, he thought.

She knew at once what it was: a sword. She watched with rising excitement as he unrolled the wrappings, and from them, gleaming, came her sword, her very own sword. She reached for it eagerly, and slid it out of its scabbard. It was plain but for some work on the hilt to make the grip sure; but she felt it light and true and perfect in her hand, and her hand trembled with the pride of it.

“Thank you,” she said, her eyes still fixed on the sword, so she did not see the look of hope and pity on Tor’s face as he watched her.

“At dawn you shall try it out,” said Tor, and the tone of his voice shook her out of her reverie, and she raised her eyes to his. “I will meet you at our usual place,” he said, and tried to speak as if this were a lesson like any other lesson; and if he failed, Aerin still did not guess why he failed.

“This is ever so much better than another dressing gown,” she said lightly, and was pleased to see him smile.

“It was a very beautiful dressing gown.”

“If it had been less beautiful, I would not have disliked it so much. You were as bad as Teka, trying to keep me in bed, or trailing about my rooms in a dressing gown forever.”

“And a lot of good it did us, despite the fact that you could not stand on your feet without either fainting or falling over.”

“It was concentrating on my lessons with you that finally sweated the last of the surka out of me,” Aerin said, waving her birthday present gently under his nose.

“I almost believe you,” he replied sadly.

So they were standing, looking at each other, with the naked blade upheld between them, when Teka come through the open door behind them. “Gholotat protect us,” said Teka, and closed the door behind her.

“Is my birthday present not beautiful?” said Aerin, and turned the blade back and forth quickly so that it winked at her old nurse as she stood by the door. Teka looked at her face and then at Tor’s, and then back at Aerin’s, and said nothing.

“I will bid you good night,” said Tor, and because Teka was there he dared reach out his hands to Aerin, and put them on her shoulders, as she slid her sword into its scabbard, and kiss Her cheek as a cousin might; which he would not have dared had they been alone. He bowed to Teka, and left them.

Perhaps it was having a real sword of one’s own. Perhaps it was being eighteen—or that eighteen years’ practice of being stubborn was finally paying off. If she still stumbled over the corners of rugs or bumped into doorways while she was thinking about other things, she no longer bothered looking around anxiously to find out if anyone had seen her: either they had or they hadn’t, and she had other things on her mind; she reveled in those other things. They meant that she did not blush automatically when she caught sight of Perlith, knowing that he would have thought of something to say to her since the last time she had failed to avoid him, and that his little half smile beneath half-lidded eyes would make whatever he said worse. She walked through the halls of the castle and the streets of the City the most direct way instead of the way she would meet the fewest people; and she avoided the surka in the royal garden, but only that it might not make her sick again. She did not cringe from the thought of its presence, or from the shame that she had to avoid it in the first place; nor did she any longer feel that breathing the garden air was synonymous with breathing Galanna’s malice.

She had discovered how to make the dragonfire ointment.

It was, she knew, sheer obstinacy that had kept her at it-over two years of making fractional changes in her mixtures, learning how to find and prepare all the ingredients for the mixtures, for she could not continue raiding Hornmar’s and Teka’s supplies; finding small apothecary shops in the City that might sell the odder ones, and riding out on the reluctant Kisha for the herbs that grew nearby.

At first she had wondered if anyone would try to stop her, and her first visits to shopkeepers, and beyond the City gates, gave her stomachaches of dread. But the shopkeepers attended her respectfully and even helpfully, and slowly the visits stopped seeming so awful. There was no sense in trying to disguise herself; she was the only person in the City with orange hair, and any Damarian who had never in fact seen her would know instantly who she was. She had tried the effect of a scarf over the give-away hair, but as soon as she looked in a mirror she realized this wouldn’t work: the scarf was obviously there to hide her hair, and she still had orange eyebrows. There was stuff Galanna used to blacken her brown lashes, but Aerin had no idea how to get hold of it, and thought that while Teka seemed willing to let her and her peculiar errands alone at present, she would probably throw a fit and spoil everything if she caught her royal charge creeping around with her hair hidden and her brows blackened. And as she wasn’t stopped, her confidence grew, and she swept into the shops she frequented with her head high as a first sol should, and made her purchases, and swept out again. She felt tremendously grand, but the shopmen and women found her charmingly unpretentious, being accustomed to the Perliths and Galannas who never looked anyone in the eye and were never satisfied (it was widely held that the woman who supplied Galanna with her brow-darkener more than earned the fancy price she charged), and who always had lackeys to handle the money and the purchases themselves while they fingered their jewels and looked into the distance. Arlbeth would have been pleased to hear the small new thread of gossip that began to circulate in the City about the witchwoman’s daughter, and how the daughter (like the mother, a few folk now recalled) had a smile for everyone; and this view of the king’s daughter almost eased the fear of her that had begun with the rumor that she was enspelling the first sola. A few of her new supporters decided that Tor, as first sola and king to be, understandably wanted a quiet family life; and the king’s daughter, of all those court ladies, looked the likeliest to give it to him.

There were even those, especially among the older folk, who shook their heads and said that they shouldn’t keep the young first sol mewed up in that castle the way they did; it’d be better if she were let out to mingle with her people. If Aerin could have heard, she would have laughed.