He stumbled away from them, suddenly quiet. All around them conversations ceased, silence fell. Faces became blank and empty. Eyes became fixed. Dimity looked around her at all the others ready to ride to the hounds, and shivered. Her father’s eyes slid across her like a cold wind, not seeing her at all. Even Emmy and Amy had become remote and untouchable. Only Sylvan, staring at her from his place among his companions, seemed to see her, see her and grieve over her as he had so many times.
Now the riders arranged themselves on the first surface in a subtle order, longtime riders at the west side of the circle, younger riders at the east. The servants had skimmed away at the sound of the horn, so many white blossoms blowing across the gray grass. Dimity was left standing almost by herself at the east edge of the turf, looking across it to the path where the wall of the estancia was pierced by a massive gate. “Watch the Kennel Gate,” she admonished herself unnecessarily. “Watch the Kennel Gate.”
Everyone watched the Kennel Gate as it opened slowly and the hounds came through, couple on couple of them, ears dangling, tongues lolling between strong ivory teeth, tails straight behind them. They moved down the Hounds’ Way, a broad path of low, patterned velvetgrass which circled the first surface and ran westward through the Hunt Gate in the opposite wall and out into the wider gardens. As each pair of hounds approached the first surface, one hound went left, the other right, two files of them circling the hunters, watching the hunters, examining them with red, steaming hot-coal eyes before the files met one another to stalk on toward the Hunt Gate, paired as before.
Dimity felt the heat of their eyes like a blow. She looked down at her hands, gripping one another, white at the knuckles, and tried to think of nothing at all.
As the last couple joined one another and the hunters moved to follow, Sylvan left his place and ran to whisper in her ear, “You can just stay here, Dim. No one will even look back. No one will know until later. Just stay here.”
Dimity shook her head. Her face was very white, her eyes huge and dark and full of a fear she was only for the first time admitting to herself, but she would not let herself stay. Shaking his head, Sylvan ran to regain his place. Slowly, reluctantly, her feet took her after him as the hunters followed the hounds through the Hunt Gate. From beyond the wall came the sound of hooves upon the sod. The mounts were waiting.
From the balcony outside her bedroom window, Rowena, the Obermum bon Damfels, let her troubled gaze settle on the back of her youngest daughter’s head. Above the high, white circle of her hunting tie, Dimity’s neck looked thin and defenseless. She’s a little budling, Rowena thought, remembering pictures of nodding blossoms in the fairy books she had read as a child. “Snowdrops,” she recited to herself. “Fringed tulips. Bluebells. And peonies.” She had once had a whole book about the glamorous and terrible fairies who lived in flowers. She wondered where the book was now. Gone, probably. One of those “foreign” things Stavenger was forever inveighing against As though a few fairy tales could hurt anything.
“Dimity looks so tiny,” said the maidservant, Salla. “So tiny. So young. Trailing along there behind them all….” Salla had cared for all the children when they were babies. Dimity, being youngest, had stayed a baby longer than the others.
“She’s as old as Amethyste was when she rode for the first time. She’s older than Emmy was.” Try though she might, Rowena could not keep her voice from sounding defensive “She’s not that young.”
“But her eyes, mistress,” Salla murmured. “Like a little girl. She doesn’t understand about this Hunt business. None of it. None of it at all.”
“Of course she understands.” Rowena had to assert this, had to believe it- That’s what all the training was for; to be sure that the young riders understood- It was all perfectly manageable, provided one had proper training first. “She understands,” Rowena repeated stubbornly, placing herself before the mirror, fiddling with the arrangement of her thick, dark hair. Her own gray eyes stared back at her accusingly, and she pinched her lips into an unlovely line.