The Hero and the Crown Read Online Free PDF

hallucinations into the very air around it, waiting gleefully for her to
    breathe them in, and that it clattered its leaves at her if she came too near. She
    heard it mocking her if she even dared step out on one of the balconies that
    overlooked the garden from three or four stories up. Her protracted illness more
    nearly proved Galanna’s contention about her heritage than her own, whatever
    Tor said, but she saw no reason to remind herself of it any oftener than she had
    to.
    She told Tor only that she wanted to borrow a walking stick to help her up and
    down stairs. Tor knew perfectly well that she had something further on her mind,
    but he did it anyway. She chose a cane with a pleasantly lumpy head, since her
    sense of touch was sometimes a little vague too.
    Talat’s first impulse had been to charge her. She’d not moved, just looked at
    him, leaning on her cane and swaying gently. “If I try to run away from you, the
    earth will leap up and throw me down.” Two tears rolled silently down her
    cheeks. “I can’t even walk properly. Like you.” Talat dropped his head and began
    grazing—without much interest, but it gave him something to pretend to be doing
    while he kept an eye on her.
    She went back the next day, and the next. The exercise, or the fresh air, or
    both, seemed to do her some good; her vision began to clear a bit. And it was
    quiet and peaceful in Talat’s pasture, where no one came, and she went back to
    the swarming castle more and more reluctantly. Then the thought of the royal
    library occurred to her. Galanna would never set foot in the library.
    She went there the first time only to escape her own rooms, which had begun
    to seem the size of shoeboxes, and for some of the same imprecise restlessness
    that had inspired her to visit Talat. But, idly, she ran her fingers over the spines of
    the books fined up on the shelves, and pulled down one that had an interestingly

    tooled binding. More idly still she opened it, and found that her poor muddled
    eyes focused quite nicely on a printed page held not too far from her nose—
    found that she could read. The next day she took it with her to Talat’s pasture.
    He didn’t exactly meet her with an eager whinny of greeting, but he did seem
    to spend most of his time on the unmuddy shore of the pool, where she leaned
    against the bole of a convenient tree and read. “It’s funny,” she said, chewing a
    grass gem, “you’d think if I couldn’t walk I couldn’t read either. You’d think eyes
    would be at least as hard to organize as feet.” She leaned over, and laid a mik-bar
    down on the ground as far away from her as she could reach, and sat up again,
    looking only straight before her. Thoughtfully she hefted the big book in her lap
    and added, “Even carrying it around is useful. It sort of weighs me down, and I
    don’t stagger so much.” She could hear his hoofbeats: thunk-thunk-thunk-drag.
    “Maybe what I need for my feet is the equivalent of the muscular concentration
    of reading.” The hoofbeats paused. “Now if only someone could tell me what that
    might be.”
    The mik-bar had disappeared.

Chapter 4
    TEKA FOUND HER OUT very soon; she’d been keeping a very sharp eye on her
    wayward sol since she first crawled out of bed after the surka episode. She’d been
    appalled when she first discovered Aerin under the tree in the vicious stallion’s
    paddock; but she had a bit more sense than Aerin gave her credit for (“Fuss, fuss,
    fuss, Teka! Leave me alone!”) and with her heart beating in her mouth she
    realized that Talat knew that his domain had been invaded and didn’t mind. She
    saw him eat his first mik-bar, and when they thereafter began disappearing at an
    unseemly rate from the bowl on Aerin’s window seat; Teka only sighed deeply
    and began providing them in greater quantity.
    The book was faded with age, and the style of lettering was strange to her, so
    she had to puzzle out some of the words; and some of the