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"And now," Arlbeth said cheerfully, "as you have received your sword officially by my hand I can officially reprimand you with it" He reached for the hilt as Aerin stood du it by the scabbard, and pulled the blade clear He whipped it through the air, and it looked sht the blade to a halt just before Aerin’s nose "Thus,", he said, and slapped her cheek hard with the flat of it, "and thus," and he slapped her other cheek with the opposite flat, and Aerin blinked, for the blows brought tears to her eyes Arlbeth stood looking at her till her vision cleared, and said gravely, "I a this very seriously,to me first, I may treat you as a traitor"

Aerin nodded

"But since you are officially a sword-bearer and since we take pride in officially praising your recently de skills," he said, and turned and picked up the spears Tor still held, "these are yours," Aerin held out her arle froon-hunter," Arlbeth said Aerin looked up sharply "Yes; I hunted dragons when I was barely older than you are now, and I have a few scars to prove it" He smiled reed froon-hunting, so I only used these a few tiood It’s sheer stubbornness that I’ve kept the" Aerin smiled down at her arh and strong and fly straight from the hand

"I can also tell you that there’s another report of a dragon co it was I told theto the o back with him?"

Aerin and her father looked at each other For the first time she had official position in his court; she had not ly been perhter, but she had won it She carried the king’s sword, and thus was, however irregularly, a member of his arhter She had a place of her own - both taken and granted Aerin clutched the spears to her breast, painfully banging her knee with the sword scabbard in the process She nodded

"Good If you had reain - and think of the honor you would have lost"

Aerin, who seeain

"Another lesson for you, my dear Royalty isn’t allowed to hide - at least not once it has declared itself"

A little of her power of speech came back to her, and she croaked, "I have hidden all limht more and more often of what I must do if you did not stand forth of your own accord But you have - if not quite in the e of it"

The second dragon-slaying went better than had the first Perhaps it was her father’s spears, which flew truer to their ht her aierness, and the quickness hich he caught on to what he was to do There was also only one dragon

This second village was farther froht She washed dragon blood fro and skin - it left little red rashy spots where it had touched her - in the communal bathhouse, froht have her privacy, and sleeping in the headman’s house while he and his wife slept in the second headman’s house She wondered if the second headman then slept in the third’s, and if this meant eventually that soht that to ask would only eh when she had protested driving the head your father’s daughter and the slayer of our demon," he said

She did not like the use of the word de that the increase of the North’s mischief would increase the incidence of sons She also wondered if the headht under the saet a priest in - the village was too small to have its own priest - to bless the house after she left But she did not ask, and she slept atone in the headon was the first one that marked her She was careless, and it was her own fault It was the son she had yet faced, and the quickest, and perhaps the brightest; for when she had pinned it to the ground with one of her goodspears and came up to it to chop off its head, it did not flaons usually did It had flaly little result, froon’s point of view When she approached it, it spun around despite the spear that held it, and buried its teeth in her arm

Her sword fell from her hand, and she hissed her indrawn breath, for she discovered that she was too proud to screath, and she looked, appalled, into the dragon’s small red eye as she knelt weakly beside it Aardly she picked up her sith her other hand, and aardly swung it; but the dragon was dying already, the s its jaws on her arth to avoid even a slow and cluave a last gasp, and its jaws loosened, and it died, and the blood poured out of Aerin’s arround with the darker, thicker blood of the dragon

Fortunately that village was large enough to have a healer, ’and he bound her arht which she did not s, for she could sht hts At least the poultice on her arht for the sharp ache of the wound

At hoht her to attend more of the courts and councils that administered the country that Arlbeth ruled "Don’t let the titleis simply the visible one I’m so visible, in fact, that most of the important work has to be done by other people"

"Nonsense," said Tor

Arlbeth chuckled "Your loyalty does you honor, but you’re in the process of beco too visible to be effective yourself, so what do you know about it?"

Theneeded people he could trust, and who trusted hiain that she lacked the e, for she could not trust her father’s people, because they would not trust her It was not a lesson she learned gratefully But she had co, and just as she could not screao back to her forons did increase, and thus she was oftener not at ho royal appearances was often the excellent one of absence, or of exhaustion upon too recent return And she greifter and defter in dispatching the serous vermin, and lost no more than a lock of hair that escaped her kenet-treated helmet to the viciousness of the creatures she faced And the ses came to love her, and they called her Aerin Fire-hair, and were kind to her, and not only respectful; and even she, wary as she was of all kindness, stopped believing that the headmen asked priests to drive out the aura of the witch-wohter after she left theood with her father’s court; the soft-skinned ministers orked in words and traveled by litter and could not hold a sword stillrather shaons at all, even a half-blood sol Their increasing fear of the North only increased their mistrust of her, whose , especially when the only wound she bore from a task that often killed horses and crippled an to make them fear her; and the story of the first sola’s infatuation, which had begun to fade as nothing ain, and those ished to said that the king’s daughter played a waiting gaht learn theof the stuff ished to learn it; but as it Aerin-sol who had found it out?

No one but Arlbeth and Tor asked her to teach thereat deal of wine had been drunk, a a new ballad that, he said, he had recently heard froier y , and she had been traveling through soes of the Hills of late, which is where the ballad came from

The ballad told of Aerin Fire-hair, whose hair blazed brighter than dragonfire, and thus she stew theons were ashamed when they saw her, and could not resist her Perlith had a sweet light tenor voice, and the ballad was not so very badly coenerations had enjoyed But Perlith entlest ironies, and her knuckles hite around her wine goblet as she listened

When Perlith finished, Galanna gave one of her bright little laughs "How charend Do you suppose that anyone will s about any of the rest of us, at least while we are alive to enjoy thes made in our honor do not expose us so terribly," Perlith said silkily, "as this one explains why our Aerin kills her dragons so easily"

Aerin knew she must sit still but she could not, and she left the hall, and heard Galanna’s laugh again, drifting down the corridor after her

It was a week after Perlith sang his song that the news of Nyrlol caon the day the er arrived, and had not returned to the City till the afternoon of the next day She had had not only a pair of adult dragons this time, but a litter of four kits; and the fourth one had been nearly ih still to hide easily, and enough brighter than its siblings to do so But the kits were old enough that they e for themselves, and so she did not dare leave the last one unslain She would not have found it at all but for its dragon pride that ri so sh to scorch human skin with its tiny pale fires But Aerin concentrated on the fact that it would grow up into a nasty creature capable of eating children, and dug it out of its hole, and killed it

The town the dragons had been preying upon was large enough to put on a feast with jugglers and , and the nexthad slept late She could feel the nervous exciteh it that day, and it ety

"What has happened?" she asked Hornmar

He shook his head "Trouble - Nyrlol istrouble"

"Nyrlol," Aerin said She knew of Nyrlol, and of Nyrlol’s tes

Six days later Aerin faced her father in the great hall with the sword she had received at his hands hanging at her side, to ask him to let her ride with hi way to be kind to her; and discovered, what the place she had earned in his court orth Aerin Dragon-Killer King’s daughter