Hawkmistress! (41 page)

And yet, in men’s clothing, I travelled all through the Hellers. I would rather live in such a way that I need not be prey to any man.

Yet there was pride, too, in knowing that she could defend herself and need never ask for mercy from anyone. Later the lessons in swordplay seemed easier to her, but they brought another fear to the surface of her mind.

It was all very well to practice with wooden batons where the only penalty for a missed stroke was a bad bruise. But could she face sharp weapons without terror, could she actually bring herself to strike with a sharp weapon at anyone? The thought of slicing through human flesh made her feel sick.

I am not a Swordswoman, no matter what they call me. I am a horse trainer, a bird handler … fighting is not my business.

The days passed, filled with lessons and hard work. When she had been there for forty days, she realized that Midsummer was approaching. Soon she would have been absent from her home for a whole year. No doubt her father and stepmother thought her long dead, and Darren was being forced to take his place as Heir to Falconsward. Poor Darren, how he would hate that! She hoped for her father’s sake that little Rael was able to take her place, to learn some of the MacAran gifts,- if Rael was what her father would have called “true MacAran”, perhaps Darren would be allowed to return to the monastery. Or perhaps he would go as she had done, without leave.

A year ago her father had betrothed her to Dom Garris. What changes there had been in a year! Romilly knew she had grown taller - she had had to put all the clothes she had worn when she came here, into the box of castoffs, and find others which came nearer to fitting her. Her shoulders were broader, and because of the continuous practice at swordplay and her work with the horses, her muscles in upper arms and legs were hard and bulging. How Mallina would jeer at her, how her stepmother would deplore it - You do not look like a lady, Romilly. Well, Romilly silently answered her stepmother’s imagined voice, I am not a lady but a Swordswoman.

But all her troubles disappeared every day when she was working with the horses, and especially for the hour every day when she worked with the black stallion. No hand but hers ever touched him; she knew that one day, this would be a mount fit for the king himself. Day followed day, and moon followed moon, and season followed season; winter closed in, and there were days when she could not work even with the black stallion, let alone the other horses. Nevertheless, she directed their care. Time and familiarity had changed the strange faces in the hostel to friends. Midwinter came, with spicebread, and gifts exchanged in the hostel among the Sisterhood. A few women had families and went home to visit them; but when Romilly was asked if she wished for leave to visit her home, she said steadily that she had no kin. It was simpler that way. But she wondered; how would her father receive her, if she came home for a visit, asking nothing, a professional Swordswoman in her tunic of crimson, and the ensign of the Sisterhood in her pierced ear? Would he drive her forth, say that she was no daughter of his, that no daughter of his could be one of those unsexed women of the Sisterhood? Or would he welcome her with pride, smile with welcome and even approve of her independence and the strength she had shown hi making a life for herself away from Falconsward?

She did not know. She could not even guess. Perhaps one day, years from now, she would risk trying to find out. But in any case she could not travel into the depths of the Hellers at the midwinter-season; most of the women who took leave for family visits lived no further away than Thendara or Hali, which was, perhaps, seven days ride.

In this desert country there were few signs of spring. One day it was cold, icy winds blowing and rain sweeping across the plains, and the next day, it seemed, the sun shone hot and Romilly knew that far away in the Hellers the roads were flooding with the spring-thaw. When she could work the horses, she took off her cloak and worked in a shabby, patched tunic and breeches.

With the spring came rumors of armies on the road, of a battle far away between Carolin’s forces and the armies of Lyondri Hastur. Later they heard that Carolin had made peace with the Great House of Serrais, and that his armies were gathering again on the plains. Romilly paid little heed. All her days were taken up with the new group of horses brought in to them early in the spring - they had put up a shelter for them and rented a new paddock outside the walls of the hostel, where Romilly went with the women she was training, every afternoon. Her world had shrunk to stables and paddock, and to the plain outside the city where they went, two or three days in every ten, to work and exercise the horses. One afternoon when they left the city and went out through the gates, leading the horses, Romilly saw tents and men and horses, a bewildering crowd.

“What is it?” she asked, and one of the women, who went out every morning to shop for fresh milk and fresh fruits, told her, “It is the advance guard of Carolin’s army; they will establish their camp here, and from here they will move down again across the Plains of Valeron, to give battle to King Rakhal,” her face twisted with dislike, and she spat.

“You are a partisan of Carolin, then?” Romilly asked.

“A partisan of Carolin? I am,” the woman said vehemently, “Rakhal drove my father from his small holding in the Venza Hills and gave his lands to a paxman of that greedy devil Lyondri Hastur! Mother died soon after we left our lands, and Father is with Carolin’s army - I shall ride out tomorrow, if Clea will give me leave, and try to find my father, and ask if he has word of my brothers, who fled when we were driven from our lands. I am here with the Sisterhood because my brothers were with the armies and could no longer make a home for me; they would have found a man for me to marry, but the man they chose was one Lyondri and his master Rakhal had left in peace, and I would not many any man who sat snug in his home while my father was exiled!”

“No one could blame you, Marelie,” said Romilly. She thought of her travels in the Hellers with Orain and Carlo and the other exiled men; Alaric, who had suffered even more from Lyondri Hastur than Marelie’s family. “I too am a follower of Carolin, even though I know nothing about him, except that men whose judgment I trust, call him a good man and a good king.”

She wondered if Orain and Dom Carlo were in the camp. She might go with Merelie, when she went to seek her father in the camp. Orain had been her friend, even though she was a woman, and she hoped he had come safe through the winter of war.

“Look,” said Clea, pointing, “There is the Hastur banner in blue with the silver fir-tree. King Carolin is in the camp - the king himself.”

And where Orain is, Carolin is not far away, Romilly remembered. That night in the tavern, when he had wanted her to make a diversion - had that shadowy figure to whom he spoke, been Carolin himself?

Would he welcome a visit from her? Or would he only find it an embarrassment? She decided that when next Jandria visited the hostel - she had been coming and going all year, on courier duty between Serrais and the cities to the south, Dalereuth and Temora - she would ask what Jandria thought.

She should have remembered that when a telepath’s mind was drawn unexpectedly to someone she had not seen for a time, it was not likely to be coincidence. It was the next day, when she had finished working with the black stallion, and finally led him back into the stable - after a year of work, he was perfectly trained, and docile as a child, and she had spoken to the housemother of the hostel about, perhaps, presenting him to the king’s own self - she saw Jandria at the door of his stall.

“Romy! I was sure I would find you here! He has come a long way from that first day when I saw you bridle him, and we were all sure he would kill you!”

Jandria was dressed as if she had just come from a long journey; dusty boots, dust-mask such as the Drylanders used for travel hanging unfastened at the side of her face. Romilly ran to embrace her.

“Janni! I didn’t know you were back?”

“I have not been here long, little sister,” Jandria said, returning her hug with enthusiasm. Romilly smoothed back her flying hair with grubby hands, and said, “Let me unsaddle him, and then we will have some time to talk before supper. Isn’t he wonderful? I have named him Sunstar - that is how he thinks of himself, he told me.”

Jandria said, “He is beautiful indeed. But you should not give the horses such elaborate names, nor treat them with such care - they are to go to soldiers and they should have simple names, easy to remember. And above all you should not grow so fond of them, since they are to be taken from you very soon - they are for the army, though some of them will be ridden by the women of the Sisterhood if they go with Carolin’s men when they break camp. You have seen the camp? You know the time is at hand when all these horses are to go to the army. You should not involve yourself so deeply with them.”

“I can’t help growing fond of them,” Romilly said, “It is how I train them; I win their love and trust and they do my will.”

Jandria sighed. “We must have that laran of yours, and yet I hate to use you like this, child,” she said, stroking Romilly’s soft hair. “Orain told me, when first he brought you to us, that you have knowledge of sentry-birds. I am to take you to Carolin’s camp, so you can show a new handler how to treat them. Go and dress yourself for riding, my dear.”

“Dress for riding? What do you think I have been doing all morning?” Romilly demanded.

“But not outside the hostel,” Jandria said severely, and suddenly Romilly saw herself through Janni’s eyes, her hair tangled and with bits of straw in it, her loose tunic unfastened because it was hot and sweaty, showing the curve of her breasts. She had put on a patched and too-tight pair of old breeches she had found in the box of castoffs which the Sisterhood kept for working about the house. She flushed and giggled.

“Let me go and change, then, I’ll only be a minute or so.”

She washed herself quickly at the pump, ran into the room she shared now with Clea and Betta, and combed her tousled hair. Then she got swiftly into her own breeches and a clean under-tunic. Over her head she slipped the crimson tunic of the Sisterhood and belted it with her dagger. Now she looked, she knew, not like a woman in men’s clothes, nor yet like a boy, or a street urchin, but like a member of the Sisterhood; a professional Swordswoman, a soldier for Carolin’s armies. She could not quite believe it was herself in that formal costume. Yet this was what she was.

Jandria smiled with approval when she came back; Janni too wore the formal Swordswoman tunic of crimson, a sword in her belt, a dagger at her throat, her small ensign gleaming in her left ear. Side by side, the two swordswomen left the gates of the hostel and rode toward the city wall of Serrais.

CHAPTER FOUR

Now Romilly had a closer look at the encampment of Carolin’s men, the silver and blue fir-tree banner of the Hasturs King above the central tent which, Romilly imagined, must be either the king’s personal quarters or the headquarters of his staff. They rode toward the encampment, past orderly stable-lines, a cookhouse where army cooks were boiling something that smelled savory, and a field roped off, where a Swordswoman Romilly knew only slightly was giving a group of unshaven recruits a lesson in unarmed combat; some of them looked cross and disgruntled and Romilly suspected that they did not like being schooled by a woman; others, rubbing bumps and bruises where she had tossed them handily on the ground, were watching with serious attention.

A guard was posted near the central part of the camp, and he challenged them. Jandria gave him a formal salute.

“Swordswoman Jandria and Apprentice Romilly,” she said, “and I seek the Lord Orain, who has sent for me.”

Romilly tried to make herself small, supposing that the guard would say something sneering or discourteous, but he merely returned her salute and called a messenger, a boy about Romilly’s age, to request Lord Orain’s attention.

She would have recognized the tall, gaunt figure, the lean hatchet-jaw, anywhere; but now he was dressed in the elegant Hastur colors and wore a jewelled pendant and a fine sword, and Romilly knew that if she had met him first like this, she would have been too much in awe of him to speak. He bowed formally to the women, and his voice was the schooled accent of a nobleman, with no trace of the rough-country dialect.

“Mastra’in, it is courteous of you to come so quickly at my summons,” he said, and Jandria replied, just as formally, that it was her pleasure and duty to serve the king’s presence.

A little less formally, Orain went on “I remembered that Romilly was schooled in the training, not only of hawks but of sentry-birds. We have a laranzu come with us from Tramontane, but he has had no experience with sentry-birds, and these are known to you, damisela. Will it please you to introduce the skills of handling them to our laranzu?”

“I’d be glad to do it, Lord Orain,” she said, then burst out, “but only if you stop calling me damisela in that tone!”

A ragged flush spread over Orain’s long face. He did not meet her eyes. “I am sorry - Romilly. Will you come this way?”

She trailed Jandria and Orain, who walked arm in arm. Jandria asked, “How’s Himself, then?”

Orain shrugged. “All the better for the news you sent ahead, love. But did you see Lyondri face to face?”

Romilly saw the negative motion of the older woman’s head. “At the last I was too cowardly; I sent Romilly in my place. If I had met him then-” she broke off. “I do not know if you saw those villages last year, along the old North road. Still blighted, all of them …” she shuddered; even at this distance, Romilly could see. “I am glad I am an honest Swordswoman, not a leronis! If I had had to have a part in the blighting of the good land, I know not how I could ever again have raised my eyes to the clean day!”