Hawkmistress! (46 page)

Maura gripped her hands with her own warm ones, and Romilly, confused, came back to her own body’s awareness. She felt the unfamiliar, intrusive touch … somehow Maura was within her body, touching it with mental fingers, checking heart and breathing … she made a gesture of refusal, and Maura said gently, “Lie still, let me monitor you. Have you had many attacks of this kind of threshold sickness?”

Romilly pushed her away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about; I had a bad dream, that is all. I must have been tired. I’ve never done that before with the birds, and it was exhausting. I suppose the leroni are accustomed to it.”

“I wish you would let me monitor you and be sure.”

“No, no. I’m all right.” Romilly turned her back to the other woman and lay still, and after a moment Maura sighed and put out the lantern, and Romilly picked up a fragment of her thought, stubborn, but I should not intrude, she is no child, perhaps her brother … before she slept again, without dreams this time.

In the morning she still had a headache, and the smell of the carrion for bird-food made her as queasy - she told herself impatiently - as if she were four months pregnant! Well, whatever ailed her, it was not that, for she was as virgin as any pledged leronis. Perhaps it was her woman’s cycles coming on her - she had lost track, with the army coming and her intense work with Sunstar. Or perhaps she had eaten something that did not agree with her; certainly she had no mind for breakfast. After caring for the birds, she got into her saddle without enthusiasm; for the first time in her life she thought it might be rather pleasant to sit inside a house and sew or weave or even embroider.

“But you have eaten nothing, Romilly,” Ruyven protested.

She shook her head. “I think I caught a chill yesterday, sitting so still after sunset in my saddle,” she said. “I don’t want anything.”

He surveyed her, she thought, as if she were Rael’s age, and said, “Don’t you know what it means when you cannot eat? Has Lady Maura monitored you?”

It was not worth arguing about. She said sharply, “I will eat some bread in my saddle as we ride,” and took the hunk of bread, smeared with honey, that he handed her. She ate a few bites and surreptitiously discarded it.

Ranald was riding with the blank look Romilly knew enough, now, to associate with a telepath whose mind was elsewhere. At last he came out of it and said, “I should know how far it is to the main branch of the armies; Carolin will join with us sometime today, though they are some way behind us. Romilly, will you take your bird and see if you can spy out Carolin’s armies, and see how far they are behind us?”

She felt some alarm after her last experience with the flight with birds. Yet when she flung the bird in the air and followed it with her linked mind, she found that there was none of the disquieting disorientation; to her intense relief, it was only like flying Preciosa; she could see with a strange doubled sight, but that was all. The bird’s sight, keener than her own a hundred times, told her that Carolin’s armies lay half a day’s ride behind where she rode with their little advance party, and she could sense, but with no sense of intrusion, that Ranald had picked up then: position and relayed it to Carolin himself.

“We will camp here and wait for them,” Maura said with authority, “We are all weary, and our hawkmistress needs rest.”

I should not let them pamper me. I do not want Ruyven, nor Orain, nor Carolin himself, to think that because I am a woman I must be favored. Orain will respect me if I am as competent as a man. …

Lord Ranald yawned. He said, “I too feel as if I had been dragged backward over a waterfall, after these days of hard riding. I shall be glad of the rest. And the birds need not be moved more.” He gestured to the soldiers to set up the camp.

CHAPTER SIX

Romilly knew the main army was approaching, not from what she heard - though, when she listened quietly, where she lay inside the tent she shared with Domna Maura, she could hear a soft distant sound in the very earth which she knew to be the noise of the great column of men on the march. But what really told her of Carolin’s approach was a growing awareness within her mind, a sense of oneness, an approaching that she knew….

Sunstar. Her mind was within and surrounded by the black stallion, it seemed that it was not on his but her back that the king rode, surrounded by his men, and for a moment her mind strayed to touch his too, to see Orain for a moment through his eyes, with love and warmth. Once she had seen them together, unguarded, wishing somehow that she had such a friend. Now she shared, for a moment, the quick unconscious touch between the king and his sworn man, something not sexual but deeper than that, a closeness which went back through their lives, mind and heart and somehow encompassed even a picture of their first meeting as young children, not yet in their fourth year … all three dimensions of time as somehow she was aware of Sunstar as a colt running hi the hills of his native country….

She jerked herself away from the extended contact and back into her own body, shocked and startled. She did not know what was happening, but she supposed it was some new dimension of her laran, opening of itself - what did she need, after all, of a Tower?

But the first person who came to her, when she was working around the birds, picking up little tags and fringes of the sight-awareness she had known yesterday when she flew them, was Jandria. After the two Swordswomen had greeted one another with a hug, Jandria said, “We had your message through the birds; it was Himself who told me.” Romilly remembered that this was always how she spoke of King Carolin when he was not actually present. “You are doing well, Romy. And I have permission from the Swordswomen here for you to go on sharing Lady Maura’s tent, if you will. I will go and speak to her; we were girls together.”

Romilly held her peace - she had long known that Jandria was of higher rank than she had ever realized, though she had left it behind her when she took the oath of the Sisterhood. She turned her attention to the birds, though she could hear, with a tiny pang she recognized as jealousy, the two women talking behind her somewhere.

And 1 have no friend, no lover, 1 am alone, done as any monk in his solitary cell in the ice caves of Nevarsin … and wondered what she was thinking about, for even now her mind was filled with the awareness of the great stallion racing in the sun, and Carolin with him, riding….

She made her reverence before she ever looked up at the king’s face and then was not really sure whether she had bowed to Carolin or to Sunstar, his black mane disordered with the hill-country wind. Carolin slid from his back and greeted her graciously.

“Swordswoman Romilly, I came myself to bring you my thanks for your message; you and your companions with the sentry-birds. We are to march tomorrow on Rakhal’s armies and you and the laranzu must do this, for I have pledged to my kinswoman Maura that she need not take part in any battle against her kinsman.” He smiled at her. “Come, child, you were not so tongue-tied when you rode with me to Nevarsin. You called me ‘Uncle’ then.”

Romilly blurted, “I did it in ignorance, sir. I meant no disrespect, I thought you were only Carlo of Blue Lake.”

“And so I am,” said Carolin gently, “Carlo was my childhood nickname, as my little cousin is called Caryl. And my mother gave me the country estate called Blue Lake when I was a boy of fifteen. And if I was not what you thought me, why, neither were you, for I thought you a stable boy, some MacAran’s bastard, and not a leronis, and now I find you.”

She remembered that he had seen her in boy’s clothes, and she sensed that he had known her a girl quite soon, and for his own reasons had kept silent. That silence had allowed Orain to befriend her, and for that she was grateful. She said, “Your Majesty-“

He waved that aside. “I stand on no ceremony with friends, Romilly, and I have not forgotten that if it had not been for you, I would have been the banshee’s breakfast. So; you will fly the sentry-birds to keep my advisers ahead of Rakhal’s - or Lyondri’s - movements into battle?”

She said, “I shall be honored, sir.”

“Good. Now I must speak with my kinswoman and relieve her fears,” he said. “Dame Jandria, too, I think, still has enough love for Lyondri.”

“For what he was,” said Jandria quietly, standing in the door of Maura’s tent, “not for what he is, Carlo. It goes against me to raise my own hand to him, but I will not lift a single hand to hold back his fate. If I had laran enough, I would be among your leroni today, to hold back what he has become. If he still holds enough of what he was to know what he is now, he would pray for clean death.”

Maura’s eyes were wet with tears. She said, “Carlo, I swore I would never raise hand or laran against my Hastur kin. I am Elhalyn, and they are blood of my blood. But like Jandria, I will not hinder you from what you must do, either.” She went to the perch where Temperance sat and bent her head before the bird, and Romilly knew it was because she was crying.

This war that sets brother against sister and father against son … what matters it which rogue sits on the throne or which greater rogue seeks to wrest it from him … ? she was not sure whether it was Ruyven’s thought she heard, or whether her father spoke in her memory, for it seemed that time had no more existence….

Carolin said, looking at them sadly, “Still, I swore to protect my people, even if I must protect them from the Hastur kin who are unmindful of that oath. I wish you could know how little I want Rakhal’s throne, or how gladly would I cede it to him if only he would treat my people as a king must, respecting them and protecting them… .” But at seemed he spoke to himself, and afterward Romilly was not sure whether he had spoken aloud or if she had imagined it all. Her laran, it seemed, was playing strange tricks on her, it seemed as if her mind was too small to enclose everything that wanted to crowd into it, and she felt somehow stretched, violated, crammed with strangenesses, as if her head were bursting with it. She said to Carolin, “May I greet my good friend, your horse, my lord?”

“Indeed, I think he is missing you,” Carolin said, and she went to Sunstar, where Carolin had flung his reins around a rail when he dismounted, and flung her arms around the horse.

You are a king’s mount but still are you mine, she said, not in words, and felt Sunstar in her mind, reaching out, mine, love, together, sunlight/sunstar/always together in the world. …

She discovered that she was clinging to the rail alone; Sunstar was gone and Ruyven was touching her hesitantly. “What ails you, Romy? Are you sick?”

She said brusquely, “No,” and went to the birds. Again, somehow, it seemed, she had lost track of time. Could this be some new property of her laran that she did not understand? Maybe she should ask Maura about it. She was a leronis and would certainly be willing to help. But she could hear Maura in her mind now, weeping for Rakhal who had once sought her hand, so that afterward Maura had become leronis and a pledged virgin … mourned for Rakhal as Jandria mourned for Lyondri … and she for Orain’s old comradeship … no, that was gone, what was wrong with her mind these days?

There was no need of the sentry-birds this day, and Romilly, still weak and confused after yesterday’s fierce efforts and the evil dreams of the night, was glad of it. Yet as she rode, in the favored place near Carolin and his advisers, she was not really conscious of herself or of her own horse, so much was she riding with Sunstar at the head of the troops. Orain was riding near them, and she heard him talking easily and as equals with Lady Maura and Lord Ranald.

“You have the Serrais laran, Ranald, it would be no trouble to you, I dare say, to learn to handle the birds; it is near enough the MacAran Gift, which I saw in Mistress Romilly all those weeks when we travelled together.” From her distance Romilly could sense the memory of how Orain had watched her, with tenderness not unmixed with something else, something akin to love. She knew now why Orain avoided her, because he could not see Romilly now without me painful memory of the boy Rumal who he had thought he knew, and he felt like a fool, layers of awareness overlapping and blurring.

Ranald said, “I am willing to try. And perhaps Mistress Romilly would be willing to school me. Though like all she is arrogant and harsh of tongue-” and Maura’s merry laughter, saying that he was not used to women who did not regard him, a Ridenow lord, as a special creation for their delight.

“Oh, come, Maura, I am not all that much of a womanizer, but if women were made by the Goddess Evanda for the delight of men, why should I refuse the Lady of Light her due by failing to worship Her in her creation, the loveliness of women?” he laughed. “No doubt She will punish you, one day, Orain, that you deny her due.” And Orain’s good-natured laughter, and Romilly knew that she was listening to a conversation not meant for her ears. She tried to shove it away but she did not know how, except by turning her attention elsewhere, and then she was riding again with Sunstar and too aware of Carolin. It was not a comfortable day, and when that evening Ranald came and asked if he could assist her to dismount, and said that he wished to learn the ways of the birds, so that he could fly one while Lady Maura was oath-bound not to do so, she was short with him.

“It is not so simple as all that. But you may try to approach them; however, do not complain to me if you should lose a fingernail or even an eye!”

She did not like the way he looked at her. It reminded her all too much of Dom Garris, or even Rory, as if he had physically fingered her young breasts with rude hands; she was painfully aware of his look - I have never felt this way before - and of the open desire in it. But he had done nothing, said nothing, how could she make any objection to it? She drew her cloak about her as if she was cold, and gestured him toward the birds.