She and I are one; she has joined her life to mine. Romilly was dimly aware that this must be something like marriage, indissoluble, a tie which went deep into the other’s body and spirit. She had no such tie for instance with her present horse, though he had carried her faithfully and she wished him well and thought often of his welfare.
The horse is my friend. Preciosa is something else, something like a lover.
And that made her think, shyly and almost for the first time, what it might be like to have a lover, to have a bond with someone as close to her as the hawk, tied in mind and heart and even in body, but someone with whom she could communicate, not as the MacArans did with their horses and hounds and hawks, across the vast gulf that lay between man and horse, women and hawk, child and dog, but with the close bonding of species. Dom Garris had wanted her, but his lecherous glances had roused nothing in her but revulsion; revulsion doubled when it was Rory, who would as soon have cut her throat for her horse and cloak and a few coppers, but had wished to bed her as well.
Orain had wanted her – at least while he still believed her to be a boy. And . . . deliberately facing something she had not even clearly understood at the time . . . she had wanted him. Although, when it was happening, she had not realized what her own strange feelings meant. Even so, she would rather have had Orain as a friend than a lover; she had been willing to accept him as a lover, when she thought he knew her a woman and wanted her, in order to keep him as a friend. But had she never seriously thought of any man in that way? Certainly none of the boys she had grown up knowing, her brothers’ friends – she could no more envision them as lovers than as husbands, and a husband was the last thing she would have wanted.
I think I could have married one like Alderic. He spoke to me as a human being, not only as his friend Darren’s silly little sister. Nor was he the kind of man who would feel he must control me every moment, fearing I would fly away like an untamed hawk if he let go of the jesses for a moment.
Not that I wanted him as a husband, so much. But perhaps I could make up my mind to marry if the husband had first been my friend.
All during that day and the next, whenever she took her eyes from the trail, she could see, at the furthest range of her vision, that Preciosa still hovered there, and feel the precarious thread of communication from the hawk, strange divided sight, seeing the trail under her feet, aware of her own body in the saddle, and yet some indefinable part of her flying free with the hawk, far above the land and hillside slopes. Jandria had told her that they were travelling now in what was called he Kilghard Hills.
They were not like her home mountains – bleak and hare with great rock cliffs and poor soil of which every arable scrap must be carefully reclaimed and put under cultivation for food; and even less were they like the broad and fertile Plains of Valeron which they had crossed enroute to Hali. These were hills, high and steep and with great deserted tracts of wild country set with virgin forest and sometimes overgrown in thick brush-tangles so that they must cut their way through or, sometimes, retrace their steps tediously and go round. But there was no lack of hunting. Sometimes, before sunset, drowsing in her saddle, Romilly would feel something of her fly free with the hawk, stoop down and feel, sharing with Preciosa, the startle of the victim, the quick killing stroke and the burst of fresh blood in her own veins. . . . Yet every time it came freshly to her as a new experience, uniquely satisfying.
Once, she thought it was the sixth day of their journey, she was flying in mind with the hawk when her horse stepped into a mudrabbit-burrow and stumbled, fell; lay thrashing and screaming, and Romilly, thrown clear of the stirrups, lay gasping, bruised and jarred to the bone. By the time she was conscious enough to sit up, Jandria had dismounted and was helping her to rise.