“Gotten away?” she repeated faintly.
“I would say it’s a rare thing to get away, Lady Westriding. If you’d been smelled or spotted, they’d have had you.” He had fallen into his colloquial, avuncular manner.
“I was riding. On a horse.”
“Still, I find it amazing. Well, if your horse got you out of there quickly, you may have outrun ‘em. Or maybe the wind was just right and you simply weren’t noticed. Or maybe the smell of the horse confused them just long enough. You took your life between your teeth, Lady.” He gave her a concentrated, percipient look. “I’d suggest you not do it again. Certainly not during the lapse.”
“I … I had already decided that.” She cast her eyes down, embarrassed at Tony’s scowl of agreement. Could the man read her mind?
“They don’t like to be spied upon?” Tony asked.
“They won’t tolerate it. That’s why so little’s known about ‘em. That’s why so few people that wander off into the grasses ever come home. I can tell you, though. Hippae lay eggs sometime during the winter or early spring. I’ve seen the eggs in the backs of caverns in late spring and I know they weren’t there in the fall. When the sun gets enough warmth in it, the migerers move the eggs into the sun and shift ‘em around until the heat hatches ‘em. About the same time, some of the peepers and some of the hounds, those that are grown enough, come back to the caverns and change themselves into something new. The Hippae guard ‘em while they’re doing it. That’s why the lapse.”
“The bons don’t know,” Marjorie said, a statement rather than a question.
“Right, they don’t know. Don’t know, won’t be told, don’t want to hear. Taboo for ‘em.”
“I do have something you may not know,” she said, getting up to fetch the trip recorder and punching up the pattern she had walked over in the cavern. “I have been told that the thunderous noise we sometimes hear is Hippae, dancing. Well, this seems to be what the dancing produces.”
Brother Mainoa stared at it, at first in confusion, then in disbelief.
Marjorie smiled. Good. For all his knowing looks, he wasn’t omniscient, then.
It was Rillibee who said, almost casually, “It looks like the words in the Arbai books, doesn’t it, Brother?”
“The spherical peepers!” Marjorie exclaimed, remembering suddenly where she had seen the rotund peepers and heraldric hounds, carved on the housefronts of the Arbai city. The twining design did look like the words in the Arbai books—or like the vines carved on the housefronts. She mentioned this, occasioning a deep and thoughtful silence from everyone.
Though the conversation later turned to other things, including whether there was or was not unexplained death upon Grass (for Marjorie and Tony remained aware of their duty) the pattern on Marjorie’s recorder was in all their minds. Brother Mainoa, particularly, wanted very much to show it to a friend—so he said as he departed—and Marjorie let him borrow the recorder, believing he meant some friend among the Green Brothers.
It was only after he was gone that she began to wonder how it was that Brother Mainoa had seen the caverns of the Hippae and had escaped to tell them about it.
When Rigo left for the Hunt on the following day, the last Hunt to be held at Klive, Stella, who had been thinking much of Sylvan, demanded to go with him.
“You said you wouldn’t risk the children,” Marjorie reminded him. “Rigo, you promised.” She would not cry. She would not shout. She would merely remind him. Still, the tears hung unshed in her eyes.
He had forgotten he had wanted tears, and tears over the children would never have satisfied him in any case. “I wouldn’t have,” he explained in his most reasonable voice. “I would never have ordered any of you to ride. But she wants to. That’s a different matter.”
“She could die, Rigo.”
“Any of us could die,” he said calmly, gesturing to convey a hostile universe which plotted death against them all. “But Stella won’t.
According to Stavenger bon Damfels, she rode brilliantly.” He said the word as though it had been an accolade. “Stavenger urged me to bring her again.”