Free The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

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.
    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.
    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.
    And the things she bought were such harmless things, even if some of them
    were odd, and even though, as the months passed, she did buy quite a quantity of
    them. Nothing there that could cause any ... mischief. Hornmar had mentioned,
    very quietly, to one or two of his particular friends the first sol’s miraculous cure
    of old Talat; and somehow that tale got around too, and as the witch woman’s
    easy smile was remembered, so did some folk also begin to remember her way
    with animals.
    It was a few months before her nineteenth birthday that she put a bit of
    yellowish grease on a fresh bit of dry wood, held it with iron pincers, and thrust it
    into the small candle flame at the corner of her work table—and nothing
    happened. She had been performing this particular set of motions—measuring,
    noting down, mixing, applying and watching the wood burn-—for so long