The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley Read Free Book Online Page B

her pretty, spoiled
    ponies had made her wish to give up riding altogether. He had shown her how to
    hold a bow, and to send an arrow or a spear where she wished it to go; how to
    skin a rabbit or an oozog, and how best to fish in running streams and quiet pools.
    The complete older brother, he thought now, and for the first time with a trace of
    bitterness.
    “Train you?” he said. He was afraid he knew where her thoughts were tending,
    although he tried to tell himself that this was no worse than teaching her to fish.
    He knew that even if he did grant her this it would do her no good; it didn’t
    matter that she was already a good rider, that she was, for whatever inbred or
    circumstantial reasons, less silly than any of the other court women; that he knew
    from teaching her other things that he could probably teach her to be a fair
    swordswoman. He knew that for her own sake he should not encourage her now.
    The gods prevent her from asking me anything I must not give, he thought, and
    said aloud, “Very well.”
    Their eyes met, and Aerin’s dropped first.
    The lessons had to be at infrequent intervals because of Tor’s ever increasing
    round of duties as first sola; but lessons still Aerin had, as she wished, and after
    several months’ time and practice she could make her teacher pant and sweat as
    they danced around each other. Her lessons were only a foot soldier’s lessons;
    horses were not mentioned, and she was wise enough, having gained so much,
    not to protest.
    She took pride, in a grim sort of way, in learning what Tor taught her; and he
    need not know the hours of drill she put in, chopping at leaves and dust motes,
    when he was not around. She made what she considered to be obligatory
    protests about the regular hiatuses in her progress when Tor was sent off
    somewhere, but in truth she was glad of them, for then she had the time to put

    in, grinding the lessons into her slow, stupid, Giftless muscles. But she was always
    eager for her next meeting with the first sola, and what he guessed about her
    private practice sessions was not discussed, any more than the fact that he had
    not fought unhorsed since he was a little boy and learning his first lessons in
    swordplay. A sola always led cavalry. Aerin knew pretty well when the time came
    that if she had been in real training she would have been put on a horse; but this
    moment too passed in silence.
    But there was one good thing that also passed in silence, for Aerin was too
    proud, for different reasons, to mention it: the specific muscular control and
    coordination of learning to wield a sword finally sweated the last of the surka out
    of her system. It had been two years since her meeting with Galanna in the royal
    garden.
    Tor and Aerin’s meetings on the farthest edge of the least used of the practice
    fields also gave them an excuse to be together, as they had always been together,
    without having to acknowledge the new restraint between them, without
    discovering that conversation between them was growing awkward.
    Aerin knew that Tor was careful not to use his real strength when he forced her
    back; but at least, as she learned, he had to be quick to keep her off; and
    strength, she hoped, would come. She was growing like a weed; her seventeenth
    birthday had come and gone, with the tiresome pomp necessary to a king’s
    daughter, and the stiff courtesy inspired by an unsatisfactory king’s daughter, and
    she was far too old to be suddenly growing taller. Not that she minded towering
    over Galanna; Galanna’s perfect profile, when seen from above, seemed to beetle
    slightly at the brows and narrow slightly around the eyes. Aerin also had hopes
    that she would outgrow the revolting Kisha and be given a real horse.
    A real horse. She began to have to close her lips tighter over her determination
    not to mention horses to Tor. A mounted man’s strength was his horse—or a
    mounted woman’s. But if she asked Tor to teach her to fight from