The castle was the highest point in the City, though the walls around its courtyard prevented anyone standing at ground level within them from seeing the City spread out on the lower slopes. But from the third—and fourth-story windows and balconies overlooking the front of the castle the higher roofs of the City could be seen, grey stone and black stone and dull red stone, in slabs and thin shingle-chips; and chimneys rising above all. From fifth—and sixth-story windows one could see the king’s way, the paved road which fell straight from the castle gates to the City gates, almost to its end in a flat-stamped earth clearing cornered by monoliths, a short way beyond the City wails.

But from any point in the castle or the City one might look up and see the Hills that cradled them; even the break in the jagged outline caused by the City gates was narrow enough not to be easily recognizable as such. The pass between Vasth and Kar, two peaks of the taller Hills that surrounded the low rolling forested land that lay before the City and circled round to meet the Hills behind the castle, was not visible at all. Aerin loved the Hills; they were green in spring and summer, rust and brown and yellow in the fall, and white in the winter with the snow they sheltered the City from; and they never told her that she was a nuisance and a disappointment and a half blood.

She paced around the balcony and looked at the stars, and the gleam of the moonlight on the glassy smooth courtyard. Somehow the evening she’d just endured had quenched much of her joy in her discovery of the morning. That a bit of yellow grease could protect a finger from a candle flame said nothing about its preventive properties in dealings with dragons; she’d heard the hunters home from the hunt say that dragon fire was bitter stuff, and burned like no hearthfire.

On her third trip around the balcony she found Tor lurking in the shadow of one of the battlemented peaks. “You walk very quietly,” he said.

“Bare feet,” she said succinctly.

“If Teka should catch you so and the night air so chill, she would scold.”

“She would; but Teka sleeps the sleep of the just, and it is long past midnight.”

“So it is.” Tor sighed, and rubbed his forehead with one hand.

“I’m surprised you’ve escaped so early; the dancing often goes on till dawn.”

In spite of the dimness of the light she could see Tor make a face. “The dancing may often go on till dawn, but I rarely last half so long—as you would know if you ever bothered to stay and keep me company.”

“Hmmph.”

“Hmmph threefold. Has it ever occurred to you, Aerin-sol, that I am not a particularly good dancer either? It’s probably just as well we don’t dance together often or we would do ourselves a serious injury. Nobody dares mention it, of course, because I am first sola—”

“And a man of known immoderate temper.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere. But I leave the dance floor as soon as I’ve tramped around once with every lady who will feel slighted if I don’t.”

His light-heartedness seemed forced. “What’s wrong?” she said.

Tor gave a snort of laughter. “Having exposed one of my most embarrassing shortcomings in an attempt to deflect you, you refuse to be deflected.”

Aerin waited.

Tor sighed again, and wandered out of the shadows to lean his elbows against the low stone wall surrounding the balcony. The moonlight made his face look pale, his profile noble and serene, and his black hair the stuff of absolute darkness. Aerin rather liked the effect, but he spoiled it by rubbing one hand through his hair and turning the corners of his mouth down, whereupon he reverted to being tired and confused and human. “There was a meeting, of sorts, this afternoon, before the banquet.” He paused again, but Aerin did not move, expecting more; he glanced at her and went on. “Thorped wanted to talk about the Hero’s Crown.”

“Oh.” Aerin joined him, leaning her elbows on the wall next to his, and he put an arm around her. She discovered that she was cold and that she was rather glad of the arm and the warmth of his side. “What did he want to know about it?”

“What does anybody ever want to know about it? He wants to know where it is,”

“So do we all.”

“Yes. Sorry. I mean he wants to know if we’re looking for it now and if not why not and if so by what means and what progress we’ve made. And if we know how important it is, and on and on.”

“I see that you spent a less than diverting afternoon.”

“How does he think we’re supposed to look for it? By the Seven Gods and Aerinha’s foundry! Every stone in Damar has been turned over at least twice looking for it, and there was a fashion there for a while to uproot trees and look for it underneath. We’ve had every seer who ever went off in a fit or brewed a love potion that didn’t work try to bring up a vision of its whereabouts for us.”

Including my mother? thought Aerin.

“Nothing. Just a lot of dead trees and misplaced rocks.”

Galanna had told her once that there was a Crown that kept mischief away from Damar, and that if Arlbeth had had it when he met Aerin’s mother he would never have married her, and if he had found it any time since Aerin was born Galanna would no longer have to put up with having her eyelashes cut off; exactly how the Crown performed its warding functions she did not describe. Aerin also knew that the more strongly Gifted royalty were expected to chew a surka leaf at least once and try to cast their minds toward a sighting of the Crown. She assumed Tor had done so, though it was not something he would have told her about. And all her history lessons had told her was that the current sovereigns of Damar had gone crownless for many generations, in honor of a Crown that was lost long ago.

Aerin said slowly, “I’ve heard of it, of course, but I’m not entirely sure what the Crown is, or is supposed to do.”

There was a silence. “Neither am I,” said Tor. “It’s been lost ... a long time. I used to think it was only a legend, but old Councilor Zanc mentioned it a few weeks ago—that’s when Arlbeth told me that when he was a boy they were looking under trees for it. Zanc’s father’s father used to tell the story of how it was lost. Zanc thinks the increase of the Border raids is somehow due to its absence; that Northern ... mischief ... did not trouble us when the Hero’s Crown lay in the City. And Thorped apparently agrees with him, although he’s not quite so outspoken about it.”

He shrugged, and then settled her more securely in the curve of his arm. “The Hero’s Crown holds much of what Damar is; or at least much of what her king needs to hold his people together and free of mischief. Aerinha was supposed to have done the forging of it. Here we get into the legend, so maybe you know this bit. Damar’s strength, or whatever it is about this land that makes it Damar and us Damarians, was thought to be better held, more strongly held, in a Crown, which could be handed from sovereign to sovereign, since some rulers are inevitably better or wiser in themselves than others. Of course this system runs the risk of the Crown’s being lost, and the strength with it, which is what eventually happened. Zanc’s story is that it was stolen by a black mage, and that he rode east, not north, or the Northerners would have fallen on us long since. Arlbeth thinks ...” His voice trailed away.

“Yes?”

“Arlbeth thinks it has come into the hands of the Northerners at last.” He paused a moment before he said slowly, “Arlbeth at least believes in its existence. So must I, therefore.”

Aerin asked no more. It was the heaviest time of the night; dawn was nearer than midnight, but the sky seemed to hold them in a closing hand. Then suddenly through the weight of the sky and of her new knowledge, she remembered her dragon ointment, and somehow neither the missing Crown nor Perlith’s malice, the reason she had come up to stare at the sky in the middle of the night, mattered quite so much; for, after all, she could do nothing about either Perlith or the Crown, and the recipe for kenet was hers. If she got no sleep, she’d botch making a big trial mixture tomorrow. “I must go to bed,” she said, and straightened up.