A Heroine of the World Read online

  DAW Books presents classic works of imaginative fiction by multiple award-winning author TANITH LEE

  THE BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY

  THE BIRTHGRAVE

  SHADOWFIRE

  (originally published as Vazkor, Son of Vazkor)

  HUNTING THE WHITE WITCH

  (originally published as Quest for the White Witch)

  TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH

  NIGHT’S MASTER

  DEATH’S MASTER

  DELUSION’S MASTER

  DELIRIUM’S MISTRESS

  NIGHT’S SORCERIES

  THE WARS OF VIS

  THE STORM LORD

  ANACKIRE

  THE WHITE SERPENT

  AND MORE:

  COMPANIONS ON THE ROAD

  VOLKHAVAAR

  ELECTRIC FOREST

  SABELLA

  KILL THE DEAD

  DAY BY NIGHT

  LYCANTHIA

  DARK CASTLE, WHITE HORSE

  CYRION

  SUNG IN SHADOW

  TAMASTARA

  THE GORGON AND OTHER BEASTLY TALES

  DAYS OF GRASS

  A HEROINE OF THE WORLD

  REDDER THAN BLOOD

  A Heroine of the World

  Tanith Lee

  DAW Books, Inc

  Donald A. Wollheim, Founder

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Elizabeth R. Wollheim

  Sheila E. Gilbert

  Publishers

  www.dawbooks.com

  Copyright © 1989 by Tanith Lee.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover design by Lila Selle.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 788.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY, 10019.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  The uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780698404625

  First Paperback Printing, August 1989

  First New Electronic Edition, January 2022

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Tanith Lee

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Book One

  Part One: The Black House

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two: The Retreat

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Part Three: Krase Holn

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Part Four: The Painted House

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Five: The Harvest

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Book Two

  Part One: The Ships

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Part Two: Genchira

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Three: The House by the Ocean

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Part Four: The House of Night

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  About the Author

  BOOK ONE

  PART ONE

  THE BLACK HOUSE

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  My aunt’s house stood at the corner of Hapsid Forum. It was thought unusual, and so it probably was, with its midnight walls, thick scarlet columns and shutters picked out in red. From the garden a gigantic pine thrust its way high over the roof, the branches becoming visible the moment one drove into East Avenue. And, “There is your aunt’s pine tree,” my mother would say briskly.

  “There is your aunt’s pine tree.”

  “Yes, mama.”

  “The gales have not been kind to it,” remarked my mother, with slight malice.

  I turned myself in the carriage to see what had happened to the pine.

  “Don’t wriggle so, child. Did we bring you up to be a stoat?”

  “I’d like that. Being a stoat.”

  “No, you would not. What’s worse, you would be shedding your winter coat all over my carriage. That is, if I hadn’t already lost patience with you and had you made into a muff.”

  But my mother, despite this interchange, was preoccupied. My father, a major of the White Lions, had been recalled to the mysterious and valiant war at some hour during the night. I had dimly heard the flurry in my sleep, but he did not come to say good-bye to me. This was a grievance. Also, I suspected that I was to be fobbed off for the day on my aunt, of whom I was not entirely certain. My mother I knew and loved, but she was only mine when she was not being my father’s, and the same might be said of him with her. My aunt, though my father’s sister, was no one’s. She belonged only to herself.

  Our carriage turned the corner of the Avenue, was walked across the edge of the Forum, and drew up under a pair of black iron gates.

  “Pansy,” said my mother to her maid, “get down and ring the bell. Must I tell you everything?”

  Pansy, a girl of sixteen, only three years older than I, and looking, I thought, more frightened than was necessary, obeyed. The bell rang, the porter came and unlocked the gate.

  The pine, bursting over the rooftop, seemed the same as ever as we went up the steps. The red shutters were wide on the polished windows. Vines crept over the pillars out of their lacquered urns.

  “Dia,” said my mother, as we waited in the Red Salon, “it’s all been a great rush, and I suppose that I should have explained to you earlier. Darling, your father has to go back to Fort Hightower, as you know, and I—I’m to join him.”

  It was unimaginably worse than I had feared. My mouth dropped open.

  “Sweetheart, victory is sure, very soon. I’ll be home again with you—oh, long before winter.”

  Before I properly realized why I should, I began to cry.

  My mother held out her arms and I fled into them.

  “Don’t go! Don’t go!”

  “I must, I must. There now, is this the proper way for a sensible little stoat to behave?”

  At that crucial, personal moment, my Aunt Elaieva entered the room.

  Like guilty lovers my mother and I sprang apart. I wondered later if my mother and father had ever had to do so in front of her; there was a sense of repetition in it. But my mother had the wit to keep hold of my hand as, messed with tears, I turned.

  I had not met Aunt Elaieva for several months, which interim seemed years to me. She appeared always a stranger. Unlike the fairness of my mother’s side, she was, like my father, olive-skinned and dark. Black hair smoothed itself back from her forehead, below which brows and eyes had been marked with such ebony decision. Her
clothing was neither in the fashion nor out of it. Really, you could not say where it was exactly. But if her style was ambivalent, also it was bold: a viridian sash, a pair of silver earrings. My mother was like some busy flower before her, a hyacinth or sweetpea.

  “Elaieva,” she said, in the brisk tone that invested all their dealings, even at the remove of a pine tree, “you’ll have heard, he was recalled last night.”

  “The wide-open gape of war,” said Elaieva, in a beautiful, cold, unremembered voice.

  “Well, there it is. And here, I’m afraid, are the child and I.”

  “I received your message. You wish me to take your daughter off your hands.”

  “To take her rather under your wing,” amended my mother, most civilly. “My husband has some claim on me. I believe you’ll have been told the strategy—”

  “A singularly stupid one,” said Aunt Elaieva. She did not look angry, but she had interrupted.

  “Dear sister,” said my mother, with every ounce of falseness she could summon, “I have only this one morning to arrange it. I’m to have an escort and must be ready to leave—”

  “Dry your eyes,” Elaieva said to me, interrupting again. “It’s useless to cry. She’s going.”

  I turned back and stared at my mother in anguish. To be informed of my defeat by the enemy was more than I could bear. But my mother only bent her hyacinth head to me and retracted me into her embrace. “Sweetest, your things are to come round before midday. Our rooms will be shut up and you are on no account to go there and bother the servants. Pansy is coming with me—” Oh, lucky hateful Pansy, might the earth swallow her—“And you, my dear, must be splendid and make your aunt, who is so kind as to take you in, not regret for a single second that she has done so. Now, have you listened? Do you understand?”

  I sobbed that I did. My tears had stained her silk bodice dark as blood. As she left me, I felt bereft beyond words, or thoughts. I seemed to have lost my mind. But I choked down my weeping before my dreadful aunt, not to please her, but because she was an alien.

  She allowed me, as if to try to break me nevertheless, a last view of my mother and Pansy being driven away from me across the Forum. My heart strained and cracked within me, but I cannot say it was a premonition. I had no idea at that time I would never see my mother again.

  2

  During the next two weeks I settled sullenly into the new temporary life. I had only one flash of respite, when I decided, as my birthday fell in early autumn, and as it was unthinkable my mother should miss it, she was sure to have returned by then. Even so, ultimately, this only made things worse, for autumn was an age away. We had never seriously been parted before. Indeed, I was born in a village in the hills on a long-ago campaign when she had, against advice, gone visiting my father, then a mere lieutenant. Afterward she had had to leave him and bring me home to cheap lodgings in the City. We were poor in those days.

  My aunt was very far from poverty. Her black house was filled by efficient and nearly invisible servants, some of whom, when seen, alarmed me, for they acted as if scarcely human, more like ensorcelled dolls. It was these beings who tidied my bed, brought my breakfast, and water for my bath. The midday meal was served for me alone in a small pleasant purposeless chamber on the first floor. This had become for me a sort of playroom, where I might do very much as I wanted. I was also allowed the garden, but to roam the house was discouraged. For my aunt’s bedroom, library, study and chapel, they were forbidden and in fact kept locked against the world. I saw my aunt rarely during the day, but at night we would normally eat together in the Sphynx Salon. Elaieva did not bother to keep me to a child’s hours of dining, or retiring, which until then I had had fairly rigidly observed on my behalf. At home my supper was presented to me at the fifth hour of the evening, and Pansy would have packed me into my bed by the time the old cracked bell of the Pantheon gave tongue for ten. But in Elaieva’s house we took dinner between seven and eight at night, reclining on the scrolled couches of the Sphynx Salon in the classical way my family seldom troubled with. After dinner Elaieva might offer a scatter of sentences to me. My education had been rather random. I was taught to read and thereafter what I learned was largely dependent on what books I chose to put in front of my eyes. Those tutors I had had never properly succeeded in convincing me of the true reality of anything beyond my home life. This had been so happy and comforting, and just strict enough, and just eccentric enough to content me to the exclusion of most other matters. My aunt detected my shortcomings. I could not follow her most ordinary flights. For example, she spoke of the East and at once I saw—and vocalized—golden domes rising from a magician’s mist and princesses riding upon flying carpets. She raised her brows, and the conversation closed. I seemed to bore her. And even the treat of falling asleep on the carpet of the first floor room, my head on a game of Temples, at midnight, did not make up for the loss of love and happiness.

  There had been, in the apartment below that of my parents, another girl, of fourteen, with whom I had sometimes played, and gone walking in the public gardens. One morning, finding my aunt in a corridor, I suggested I should go to call on this other girl. To add weight, I virtuously murmured she and I might put flowers before the shrine of Vulmartis, at the Pantheon.

  “No,” said Elaieva, her black eyes already moving by me and the rest of her about to.

  “But Litty and I have often done it. My mother always lets me go. Litty will take her maid—”

  “I mean,” said my aunt, “that your friend’s family have left the city.”

  I was amazed, outraged. Had my and Litty’s mother taken her away to the fortress in my stead? Something of this dashed from me.

  “Not everyone rushes into the cannon’s mouth,” said my aunt. “The people you refer to have escaped in another direction.”

  I could not fathom this. My aunt did not say another word.

  * * *

  • • •

  That afternoon, sitting under the pine tree in the spring sunshine, I heard male voices very near. Two pairs of army boots came around a lilac hedge with two beautiful uniformed officers in them. I was overcome, and my face caught fire, not being used to sudden meetings alone with exotic unknown young men. Even so, I recognized the insignia instantly. They were captains, and their regiment was the Eagles.

  They seemed very much at home in Aunt Elaieva’s garden, and had been chatting about gambling, not that I really knew what gambling was. Now they stood above me and exclaimed.

  “It’s a child.”

  “Origos! Can it be hers?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” said the shorter of the two. He looked vexed, but then laughed. He had a mane of light-colored hair and unnerving odd-shaped humorous eyes. “Madam,” he said to me gravely, “it is a delight to find you so prettily here on the grass. Pray tell us to whom you belong.”

  Old training not to speak to strangers set in. I held my tongue and gazed at the flowers I had been plaiting.

  My aunt spoke from over the hedge. She had come up soundlessly as was her wont. “This is my brother’s daughter, gentlemen. Her name is Aradia.”

  I glanced up proudly at my proper title, and so saw the light-haired young man going as red in the face for my aunt as I had done for him. But he carried it better, seeming amused to blush, and bowing to her soldier-fashion as she moved around the hedge. She gave both men her cold slim hand to kiss. It was not that I had thought her elderly especially, she was only on the timeless plateau of the adult. But it had certainly never occurred to me that, like one of our flighty maids, my aunt received admirers.

  She allowed them to walk with her across the lawn to the sundial, and the pond where the marble swan with a woman’s head sat stilly in the water.

  Curious, nostalgic for the elements of my father’s army, I trailed after.

  “Finished by the winter?” the second, taller, young man was saying. “High
summer should see it out. Half their troops are sick with dysentery. The other half are rebelling and clamoring to go home. I tell you, Elaieva, for us it’s just a little holiday. And, as you see, eternal leaves.”

  “Your brother, of course, the major, is distinguishing himself in all directions,” said Fair-Hair, laughing again.

  Elaieva seemed not to notice. But I wanted more.

  “What is he doing?” I inquired.

  Fair-Hair turned round and looked at me intently.

  “Why, madam, riding at the head of the charge, making gallant sorties, taking prisoners. And at night, in full dress uniform, he dances with your lovely mother between banquet tables groaning with game and cakes.”

  This only bewildered me, but since he had been good enough to offer it, I tried to seem enlightened.

  “They go to bed,” added the tall captain, not to be left out, “at four in the morning, and rise at six to bombard the enemy positions.”

  “And may we stay to dine with you?” asked the other, gazing at my aunt.

  Her assent was indifferent. Yet he sat down at her feet, and they all began to talk of the entire universe I did not know, in forms I could not follow. Presently I left them, having crowned the swan-woman with my flowers.

  I went to playdream under the pine. Where my remorseful mother was soon hurrying home and finding me pale and sad, and my father was leading a charge, flying through the air on a horse with wings.

  Fair-Hair’s name was Thenser, as I found out that evening.

  He and his companion lounged elegantly on the scrolled couches and red and yellow wine was served in glass kraters. Otherwise nothing seemed any different. We ate from the Sphynx service, to match the salon, as always, only more of it. There were, as usual, no flowers on the table, and Thenser’s companion—whose name I heard but forgot—offered to have some sent my aunt from the hothouses.