“Doesn’t,” said Salla as stubbornly, quickly turning away to avoid the slap Rowena might have given her if she could have done it without moving. “She’s like you, mistress. Not made for it.”
Rowena tired of looking at herself and chose to change her ground. “Her father says she must!”
Salla did not contradict this. There would have been no point. “She’s not made for it. No more than you were. And he doesn’t make you.”
Oh, but he did, Rowena thought, remembering pain. Made me do so many things I didn’t want to. Let me quit riding, yes, but only when I was pregnant with the seven children he made me have when I only wanted one or two. Made me ride right up until the time I got old, with lines around my eyes. Made me bring the children up to the Hunt, when I didn’t want to. Made them all like him, all the way he is—except Sylvan. No matter what Stavenger does, Sylvan stays Sylvan. Not that Syl lets on what he really thinks. Sylvan just roars about everything. Clever Syl, to hide his true beliefs among all that bluster. And Dimity stays Dimity as well, of course—but poor Dim —Dim couldn’t hide anything. Would she be able to hide her feelings this morning?
Rowena went back to the balcony and craned her neck to look over the top of the wall. She could see the movements of the waiting mounts, tossing heads, switching tails. She could hear the clicking of hooves, thehruffingsound of a breath suddenly expelled. It was too quiet. Always too quiet when the riders mounted. She had always felt there should be talk, people calling to one another, greeting one another. There should be … something. Something besides this silence.
Outside the Hunt Gate the hounds circled and the mounts waited, shifting impatiently from foot to foot, tails lashing, necks arching as they pawed the ground, all quietly as in a dream where things move but make no sound. The air was warm with their steamy breath, full of the haylike smell of them, the sweaty stench. Stavenger’s mount came forward first, as was proper, and then others, one by one, coming for the Huntsman and for the whippers-in, and then for the riders of the field, the oldest riders first. Dimity stood behind Emeraude and Amethyste, shivering slightly as first one, then the other vaulted up onto the backs of waiting mounts. Soon she was the only one left unmounted. Then, just as she decided that there was no mount for her, that she could slip back through the gate, the mount was there before her, within reach of her hand.
It stared at her as it extended a front leg and crouched slightly so that she could put one foot on the brindled leg, grasp the reins, and leap upward, all as she had done time after time on the simulator, no different except for the smell and the heaving breath which spread the vast ribs between her legs, wider than the machine had ever done. Her toes hunted desperately for the notches between the third and fourth rib that should be there, finding them at last far forward of where she thought they should be. She slipped the pointed toes of her boots in, locking herself on. Then it was only a matter of hanging onto the reins and keeping her spurs dug in and her legs tight while the great creature beneath her turned high on its rear legs to follow the others away, west. She had worn her padded breeches for hours on the simulator, so they were properly broken in. She had had nothing to drink since early the previous evening and nothing to eat since noon yesterday. She wished fleetingly that Sylvan could ride beside her, but he was far ahead. Emeraude and Amethyste were lost in the welter. She could see Stavenger’s red coat, the line of his back as straight as a stem of polegrass. There was no turning back now. It was almost a relief to know that she couldn’t do anything but what she was doing. Nothing else at all, not until the Hunt returned. At last there was sound, a drumming of feet which filled all the space there was to hold it, a resonant thunder coming up from the ground beneath them.