Aerin’s eyes rose involuntarily to the old plain sword hanging at the head of her tall curtained bed.

“You know Perlith and Galanna are horrid because they’re horrid themselves—”

“Yes,” said Aerin slowly. “And because I’m the only daughter of the witchwoman who enspelled the king into marrying her, and I’m such a desperately easy butt. Teka,” she said before the other had a chance to break in, “do you suppose it was Galanna who first told me that story? I’ve been trying to remember when I first heard it.’’

“Story?” said Teka, carefully neutral. She was always carefully neutral about Aerin’s mother, which was one of the reasons Aerin kept asking about her. ‘ “Yes. That my mother enspelled my father to get an heir that would rule Damar, and that she turned her face to the wall and died of despair when she found she had borne a daughter instead of a son, since they usually find a way to avoid letting daughters inherit.”

Teka shook her head impatiently.

“She did die, “Aerin said.

“Women die in childbed.”

“Not witches, often.”

“She was not a witch.”

Aerin sighed, and looked at her big hands, striped with callus and scarred with old blisters from sword and shield and pulling her way through the forest tangles after her dragons—Dragon-Killer—and from falling off the faithful Talat. “You would certainly think she wasn’t from the way her daughter goes on. If he was going to turn out like me, it wouldn’t have done my poor mother any good to have had a son.” She paused, brooding over her last burn scar, where a dragon had licked her and the ointment hadn’t gone on quite evenly. “What was my mother like?”

Teka looked thoughtful. She too looked toward Aerin’s sword and dragon spears, but Aerin was pretty sure she did not see them, for Teka did not approve of her first sol’s avocation. “She was much like you but smaller—frail almost.” Her shoulders lifted. “Too frail to bear a child. And yet it was rather as though something was eating her from the inside; there was a fire behind that pale skin, always burning. I think she knew she had only a little time and she was fighting for enough time to bear her baby.” Teka’s eyes refocused on the room, and she looked hastily away from the dragon spears. “You were a fine strong child from the first.”

“Do you think she enspelled my father?”

Teka looked at her, frowning. “Why do you ask so silly a question?”

“I like to hear you tell stories.”

Teka laughed involuntarily. “Well. No, I don’t think she enspelled your father—not the way Galanna and her lot mean, anyway. She fell in love with him, and he with her; that’s a spell if you like.”

They had had this conversation before; many times since Aerin was old enough to talk and ask questions. But over the years Teka sometimes let fall one more phrase, one more adjective, as Aerin asked the same questions, and so Aerin kept on asking. That there was a mystery she had no doubt. Her father wouldn’t discuss her mother with her at all, beyond telling her that he still missed her, which Aerin did find reassuring as far as it went. But whether the truth behind the mystery was known to everyone but her and was too terrible to speak of, particularly to the mystery’s daughter, or whether it was a mystery that no one knew and therefore everyone blamed her for endlessly reminding them of, she had never been able to make up her mind. On the whole she inclined to the latter; she couldn’t imagine anything so awful that Galanna would recoil from using it against her. And if there were something quite that awful, then Perlith wouldn’t be able to resist ceasing to ignore her long enough to explain it.

Teka had turned back to the tray and poured a cup of hot malak, and handed it to Aerin, who settled down cross-legged on her bed, the hanging scabbard just brushing the back of her neck. “I brought mik-bars too, for Talat, so you need not go to the kitchens if you don’t wish to.”

Aerin laughed. “You know me too well. After sulking, I sneak off to the stables after dark—preferably after bedtime—and talk to my horse.”

Teka smiled and sat down on the red-and-blue embroidered cushion (her embroidery, not Aerin’s) on the chair by Aerin’s bed. “I have had much of the raising of you, these long years.”

“Very long years,” agreed Aerin, reaching for a leg of turpi. “Tell me about my mother.”

Teka considered. “She came walking into the City one day. She apparently owned nothing but the long pale gown she wore; but she was kind, and good with animals, and people liked her.”

“Until the king married her.”

Teka picked up a slab of dark bread and broke it in half. “Some of them liked her even then.”

“Did you?”

“King Arlbeth would never have chosen me to nurse her daughter else.”

“Am I so like her as folk say?”

Teka stared at her, but Aerin felt it was her mother Teka looked at. “You are much like what your mother might have been had she been well and strong and without hurt. She was no beauty, but she ... caught the eye. You do too.”

Tor’s eye, thought Aerin, for which Galanna hates me even more enthusiastically than she would anyway. She is too stupid to recognize the difference between that sort of love and the love of a friend who depends on the particular friendship—or a farmer’s son’s love for his pet chicken. I wonder if Perlith hates me because his wife hoped to marry Tor, or merely for small scuttling reasons of his own. “That’s just the silly orange hair.”

“Not orange. Flame-colored.”

“Fire is orange.”

“You are hopeless.”

Aerin grinned in spite of a large mouthful of bread. “Yes. And besides, it is better to be hopeless, because—” The grin died.

Teka said anxiously: “My dear, you can’t have believed your father would let you ride in the army. Few women do so—”

“And they all have husbands, and go only by special dispensation from the king, and only if they can dance as well as they can ride. And none at all has ridden at the king’s side since Aerinha, goddess of honor and of flame, first taught men to forge their blades,” Aerin said fiercely. “You’d think Aerinha would have had better sense. If we were still using slingshots and magic songs, I suppose we’d still all be riding with them. They needed the women’s voices for the songs to work—”

“That’s only a pretty legend,” said Teka firmly. “If the singing worked, we’d still be using it.”

“Why? Maybe it got lost with the Crown. They might at least have named me Cupka or Marli or—or Galanna or something. Something to give me fair warning.”

“They named you for your mother.”

“Then she has to have been Damarian,” Aerin said. This was also an old argument. “Aerinha was Damarian.”

“Aerinha is Damarian,” said Teka, “and Aerinha is a goddess. No one knows where she first came from.”

There was a silence. Aerin stopped chewing. Then she remembered she was eating, swallowed, and took another bite of bread and turpi. “No, I don’t suppose I ever thought the king would let his only, and she somewhat substandard, daughter ride into possible battle, even though sword-handling is about the only thing she’s ever gotten remotely good at—her dancing is definitely not satisfactory.” She grunted. “Tor’s a good teacher. He taught me as patiently as if it were normal for a king’s child to have to learn every sword stroke by rote, to have to practice every maneuver till the muscles themselves know it, for there is nothing that wakes in this king’s child’s Wood to direct it.” Aerin looked, hot-eyed, at Teka, remembering again Perlith’s words as he left the hall last night. “Teka, dragons aren’t that easy to kill.”

“I would not want to have to kill one,” Teka said sincerely. Teka, maid and nurse, maker of possets and sewer of patches, scolder and comforter and friend, who saw nothing handsome in a well-balanced sword and who always wore long full skirts and aprons.