Free The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley Page B

severely.
    “There’s that,” said Aerin, and smiled again, and Teka thought, What ails the
    girl? I will look for Tor tonight; his face will tell me something.

Chapter 8
    TOR THOUGHT that night she looked radiant and wished, wistfully, that it had
    something to do with him, while he was only too certain it did not. When, daring
    greatly, he told her as they spun through the figures of the dance that she was
    beautiful, she laughed at him. Truly she has grown up, he thought; even six
    months ago she would have blushed scarlet and turned to wood in my arms. “It’s
    the ribbons round my ankles,” she said. “My darning surpassed itself in atrocity
    today, and Teka said it was this or going barefoot.”
    “I am not looking at your feet,” said Tor, looking into her green eyes; and she
    said without flinching: “Then you should be, dearest cousin, for you have never
    seen me thus bedecked previously, nor likely are ever to see me so again.”
    “I am not looking at your feet,” said Tor, looking into her green eyes; and she
    said without flinching: “Then you should be, dearest cousin, for you have never
    seen me thus bedecked previously, nor likely are ever to see me so again.”
    But then so was he. Neither of them would ever forget it for a moment.
    Aerin floated through the evening. Since she was first sol, she never had the
    embarrassment (or the relief) of being able to sit out. She wasn’t particularly
    aware that—most unusually—she had stepped on no one’s feet that night; and
    she was accustomed to the polite protests, at the end of each set when partners
    were exchanged, of what a pleasure it was to dance with her, and her thoughts
    were so far away that she failed to catch the unusual ring of truth in her dancing
    partners’ voices. She didn’t even mind dancing three figures with Thorped’s son
    (what was his name again?), for while his height did not distress her, his
    chinlessness, on another occasion, would have.
    She did notice when she danced with Perlith that there was an unwonted
    depth of malignance in his light remarks, and wondered in passing what was
    biting him. Does the color of my gown make his skin look sallow? But Perlith too
    had noticed Thorped’s son’s admiration of the king’s only daughter, and it
    irritated him almost as much as it irritated Galanna. Perlith knew quite well that
    when Galanna had stopped playing hard to get back in the days when he was
    punctiliously courting her it was because she had decided to make a virtue of
    necessity after it became apparent that a second sola was the best she was going
    to get. But a second sola was an important personage, and Perlith wanted
    everyone to envy him his victory to the considerable extent that his blue blood

    and irresistible charm—and of course Galanna’s perfect beauty-deserved. How
    dare this common runt admire the wrong woman?
    Being Perlith, he had, of course, timed his courtship to coincide with the
    moment that Galanna admitted defeat on the score of future queenship; but he’d
    never been able to bring himself to flirt with Aerin. He had as much right to the
    king’s daughter as anyone—what a pity she had to have orange hair and
    enormous feet—and while he would never have married her, king’s daughter or
    no, with that commoner for a mother, it might have been amusing to make her
    fall in love with him. In his conscious mind he preferred to think that he hadn’t
    made her fall in love with him by choice; in a bleaker moment it had occurred to
    him that Aerin probably wouldn’t like being flirted with, and that his notorious
    charm of manner (when he cared to use it) might have had no effect on her
    whatsoever. He had banished the thought immediately, and his well-trained self-
    esteem had buried it forever.
    He could admit that she looked better than usual tonight; he’d never seen her
    in the fashionable ribbons before, and she had nice trim ankles, in spite of the
    feet. This realization did