Mhari demanded, “Is it your own hawk – the one you trained?” and Janni said in a quiet voice, “You told me your father took her from you, and gave her to your brother.”
With an effort, Romilly controlled her voice. She said, “I think Darren found out that Preciosa was not my father’s to give.” She looked up through her tears to the tree branch where Preciosa sat, motionless as a painted hawk on a painted tree, and again the thread of rapport touched her mind. Here, among strange women in a strange country, with all she had ever known behind her and past the border of a strange river, as she looked at the hawk and felt the familiar touch on her mind, she knew that she was no longer alone.
CHAPTER TWO
Three days more they rode, and came into a warm country, green, rolling hills and the air soft, without the faintest breath of frost. To the end of her life Romilly remembered that first ride across the Plains of Valeron – for so Caryl told her they were called – green and fertile, with crops blooming in the field and trees without even snow-pods for their night-blossoms. Along the roadside, flowers bloomed, red and blue and silver-golden, and the red sun, warm and huge in these southern skies, cast purple shadows along the road. The very air seemed sweet, euphoric.
Caryl was ecstatic, pointing out landmarks as he rode beside Romilly. “I had not expected to be home before mid-summer after this! Oh, I am so glad to be coming home.”
“And your father sent you from this warm and welcoming country into the snows of Nevarsin? He must indeed be a good cristoforo.”
Caryl shook his head, and in that moment his face looked distant, closed-in, almost adult. He said quietly, “I serve the Lord of Light, as fits a Hastur best.”
Then why – Romilly almost burst out with the question, but she had learned not to speak any question of his father to the boy. But he picked up the question in her mind.
“The cristoforos at Nevarsin are learned men, and good men,” he said at last “Since the Hundred Kingdoms were made, there has been war and chaos in the lowlands, and such learning as can be gotten is small indeed; my father wished me to learn in peace, away from the wars and safe from the feuds that beset the Hastur-kinfolk. He does not share the worship of the Brotherhood, but respected their religion and the knowledge that they are men of peace.”
He fell silent, and Romilly, respecting that silence – what scenes of war and pillage had that child seen, far from the sheltering hills which kept men safe in their own fortressed homes? – rode on, thoughtfully. She had heard tales of war, far away in her own peaceful mountains. She called to mind the battles by which this green and peaceful country had been laid waste. It now seemed, to her hypersensitive consciousness, bestrewn with the black of blood under the crimson sun, all dark, the very ground crying out with the slaughter of innocents and the horrors of armies treading the crops into the soil from which they sprung. She shuddered, and abruptly the whole scene winked out and Romilly knew she had been sharing the child’s consciousness.
Indeed his father did well to send his son to safety among the cold and untroubled crags of the City of Snows; a time of rest, a time to heal the wounds of a child with laran, sensitive and aware of all the horrors of war. With sudden passionate homesickness, Romilly was grateful for her childhood of peace and for the stubbornness that had kept The MacAran his own man, taking no part in the factions that swept the land with their lust to conquer. What was his watchword? To their own God Zandru’s deepest forges with both their households.
Oh, Father, will I ever see you again?
She looked up at Caryl but he rode silent beside her, unseeing, and she knew he rode enclosed in his own pain, unable to see hers, or at least blinded with the effort to block it away from himself. Have I come to this, then, that 1 would turn to a child of twelve, a baby no older than my little brother, for comfort when I cannot suffer my own lot, which I chose for myself? She rode among strangers, and wondered for a moment if each of the women around her rode like this, each closed in with her own weary weight, each bearing her share of the burdens laid upon mankind. Is this why men call upon the Bearer of Burdens as if he were not only a great teacher of wisdom, but also a God – that we may have Gods to bear our burdens because otherwise they are too heavy for mankind to bear?