She should have remembered that when a telepath’s mind was drawn unexpectedly to someone she had not seen for a time, it was not likely to be coincidence. It was the next day, when she had finished working with the black stallion, and finally led him back into the stable – after a year of work, he was perfectly trained, and docile as a child, and she had spoken to the housemother of the hostel about, perhaps, presenting him to the king’s own self – she saw Jandria at the door of his stall.
“Romy! I was sure I would find you here! He has come a long way from that first day when I saw you bridle him, and we were all sure he would kill you!”
Jandria was dressed as if she had just come from a long journey; dusty boots, dust-mask such as the Drylanders used for travel hanging unfastened at the side of her face. Romilly ran to embrace her.
“Janni! I didn’t know you were back?”
“I have not been here long, little sister,” Jandria said, returning her hug with enthusiasm. Romilly smoothed back her flying hair with grubby hands, and said, “Let me unsaddle him, and then we will have some time to talk before supper. Isn’t he wonderful? I have named him Sunstar – that is how he thinks of himself, he told me.”
Jandria said, “He is beautiful indeed. But you should not give the horses such elaborate names, nor treat them with such care – they are to go to soldiers and they should have simple names, easy to remember. And above all you should not grow so fond of them, since they are to be taken from you very soon – they are for the army, though some of them will be ridden by the women of the Sisterhood if they go with Carolin’s men when they break camp. You have seen the camp? You know the time is at hand when all these horses are to go to the army. You should not involve yourself so deeply with them.”
“I can’t help growing fond of them,” Romilly said, “It is how I train them; I win their love and trust and they do my will.”
Jandria sighed. “We must have that laran of yours, and yet I hate to use you like this, child,” she said, stroking Romilly’s soft hair. “Orain told me, when first he brought you to us, that you have knowledge of sentry-birds. I am to take you to Carolin’s camp, so you can show a new handler how to treat them. Go and dress yourself for riding, my dear.”
“Dress for riding? What do you think I have been doing all morning?” Romilly demanded.
“But not outside the hostel,” Jandria said severely, and suddenly Romilly saw herself through Janni’s eyes, her hair tangled and with bits of straw in it, her loose tunic unfastened because it was hot and sweaty, showing the curve of her breasts. She had put on a patched and too-tight pair of old breeches she had found in the box of castoffs which the Sisterhood kept for working about the house. She flushed and giggled.
“Let me go and change, then, I’ll only be a minute or so.”
She washed herself quickly at the pump, ran into the room she shared now with Clea and Betta, and combed her tousled hair. Then she got swiftly into her own breeches and a clean under-tunic. Over her head she slipped the crimson tunic of the Sisterhood and belted it with her dagger. Now she looked, she knew, not like a woman in men’s clothes, nor yet like a boy, or a street urchin, but like a member of the Sisterhood; a professional Swordswoman, a soldier for Carolin’s armies. She could not quite believe it was herself in that formal costume. Yet this was what she was.
Jandria smiled with approval when she came back; Janni too wore the formal Swordswoman tunic of crimson, a sword in her belt, a dagger at her throat, her small ensign gleaming in her left ear. Side by side, the two swordswomen left the gates of the hostel and rode toward the city wall of Serrais.