“Oh, I think Jandria will not make trouble about that,” Orain said, smiling. “The Sisterhood will lend you to us, I have no doubt at all.”
Romilly bowed without answering. But she thought, not if I have anything to say about it.
They rode back to the hostel in the light of the setting sun, the sky clear and cloudless; Romilly had never ceased to miss the evening rain or sleet in the hills. It still seemed to her that the country here was dry, parched, inhospitable. Jandria tried to talk a little of the army, of the countryside, to point out to Romilly the Great House of Serrais, perched on the low hillside, where the Hastur-kind had established their seat, as at Thendara and Hali and Aldaran and Carcosa in the hills; but Romilly was silent, hardly speaking, lost in thought.
Ruyven is no longer the brother I knew; we can be friendly now but the old closeness is gone forever. I had hoped he would understand me, the conflicts that drove me from Falconsward – they are like his own. Once he could see me simply as Romilly, not as his little sister. Now – now all he sees is that I have become a Swordswoman, hawkmistress …no more than that.
Even when I lost Falconsward, father, mother, home- I thought that when I again met with Ruyven we would be as we were when we were children. Now Ruyven too is forever gone from me.
I have nothing now; a hawk and my skills with the sword and with the beasts. They reached the hostel, where supper was long over, but one of the women found them something in the kitchens. They went to their beds in silence; Jandria, too, was wrapped in thoughts which, Romilly thought, must be as bitter as her own.
Damn this warfare! Yes, that is what Ruyven said, and Orain too. It may be that father was right . . . what does it matter which great rogue sits on the throne or which greater rogue seeks to wrest it from him?
Every day, Romilly worked first with the other horses, who were simpler to handle because they were less intelligent; they seemed to have less initiative. Sunstar she saved as a reward for herself at the end of a long morning of working with the other horses, directing her assistants in exercising them and personally supervising their gaits and the speed with which they had been broken to saddle and riding gear. She knew that she was only one of the army horsetrainers in Serrais who had been engaged by Carolin to produce the cavalry for his armies – she saw some of the others, sometimes, come out from the city of Serrais and working on the plains. But she would have been a fool not to know that her horses were trained fastest and best.
Now, at the near end of a long morning, she walked around her little domain, with a pat and a touch on the nose, blissful moment of emotional rapport with each of her horses. She loved every one, she felt the bittersweet knowledge that soon she would have to part with them; but every one of them would carry some of herself wherever Carolin’s armies might ride. Touch after touch, a hug around a sleek neck or a stroking of a velvety nose, and each moment of rapport building her awareness higher, higher yet, till she was dizzied with it, with the sense of racing in the sun, the awareness of running at full stretch on four legs, not two, the mastery of the burden of the rider with its own delight, and somewhere at the back of her mind Romilly felt as if each of these beasts bearing its rider knew something of the inward lightness of the Bearer of Burdens who, said in the writings of the sainted Valentine, bore alone the weight of the world. She was each horse in turn, knowing its rebellions, its discipline and submission, the sense of working in perfect unity with what was allotted to it.
Blurrily, she thought, perhaps only horses know what true faith may be as they share with the Bearer of Burdens . . . and yet I, only human, have been chosen to share and to know this. … it was easier to be carried away in union and rapport with the horses than with hawks or even the more brilliant sentry-birds, because, she thought, horses had a keener intelligence. The birds, sensitive as they were, blissful as it was to share the ecstasy of flight, still had only limited awareness, mostly focused in their keener eyesight. The sensual awareness was greater in the horses because they were more organized, more intelligent, a human style of awareness and yet not quite human.