Hawkmistress! A DARKOVER NOVEL by Marion Zimmer Bradley

. . . and if not, she is free … a free wild thing, belonging to the winds of the sky and to herself. …

“Can you get me a glove?” she asked, “I can, if I must, handle Prudence with my bare hands, because she is small and gentle, but the others are heavier and have not such a delicate touch.”

“That creature, delicate?” Ruyven said, laughing, then the smile slid off as he saw how serious she was. “Prudence, you call her? Yes, I will send my helper for a glove for you, and then you must tell me their names and how you tell them apart.”

The morning passed quickly, but they spoke only of the birds; not touching at all on their shared past, or on Falconsward. At midday a bell was rung, and Ruyven, saying that it was dinnertime in the army mess, told her to come along.

“There are others of the Sisterhood in the camp,” he said, “They sleep in their hostel in the city – but I dare say you know more about them than I. You can eat at their table, if you will – and I suppose it would be better, since they do not mix with the regular soldiers except when they must, and you cannot explain to the whole army that you are my sister.”

She joined the long lines of the army mess, taking her bread and stew to the separate table with the seven or eight women of the Sisterhood who were employed with the army – mostly as couriers, or as trainers of horses or instructors in unarmed combat – one, in fact, as an instructor in swordplay. Some of the women she had met in the hostel and none of them seemed even slightly surprised to see her there. Jandria did not appear. Romilly supposed that she had been kept with Lord Orain and the higher officers, who evidently had their mess apart.

“What are you doing?” one asked her, and she replied briefly that she had been sent for to work with sentry-birds.

“I thought that was work for lerosin,” one of the women remarked, “But then you have red hair, are you too laran-gifted?”

“I have a knack for working with animals,” Romilly said, “I do not know if it is laran or something else.” She did not want to be treated with the distant awe with which they regarded the leroni. When she had finished her meal she rejoined Ruyven at the bird-handlers’ quarters, and by the end of the day he was handling the birds as freely as she did herself.

Dusk was falling, and they were settling the birds on then’ perches, to be carried in under the tent-roof, when Ruyven looked up.

“King Carolin’s right-hand man,” he said briefly, “We see Carolin’s self but seldom; word comes always through Lord Orain. You know him, I understand.”

“I travelled with him for months; but they thought me a boy,” Romilly said, without explaining. Orain came to them and said to Ruyven, ignoring Romilly, “How soon will the birds be ready for use?”

“A tenday, perhaps.”

“And Derek has not yet arrived,” said Orain, scowling. “Do you think you could persuade the leronis …”

Ruyven said curtly, “The battlefield is no place for the Lady Maura. Add to that, Lyondri is of her kin; she said she would handle the birds but she made me promise to her that she would not be asked to fight against him. I blame her not; this war that sets brother against brother, father against son, is no place for a woman.”

Orain said, with his dry smile, “Nor for a man; yet the world will go as it will, and not as you or I would have it. This war was not of my making, nor of Carolin’s. Nevertheless, I respect the sentiments of the Lady Maura, so we must have another to fly the sentry-birds. Romilly-” he looked down at her, and for a moment there was a trace of the old warmth in his voice, “Will you fly them for Carolin, then, my girl?”

So when he wants something from me, he can be halfway civil, even to a woman? Anger made her voice cold. She said, “As for that, vai dom, you must ask my superiors in the Sisterhood; I am apprentice, and my will does not rule what I may do.”

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