And now at the end of her morning, when the other horses had been led away, she brought out Sunstar from his place. He worked so closely with her now that a bare word summoned him, and a part of her flooded out in love, she was the horse, she felt the saddle slipped over her own back as she caressed the leather straps of it, she was in a strange doubled consciousness.
She did not know whether she climbed into the saddle or accepted the grateful weight on her own back. Part of her was sunk joyously into her own body awareness, but that was all swallowed up in the larger consciousness of striding free, racing with the wind … so balanced, so fused into the horse that for a long time she was hardly aware of which was herself, which Sunstar. Yet for all the blurring she felt she had never been so precisely and wholly herself, flooded with a kind of reality she had never known. The heat of the sun, sweat streaming down her flanks, her exquisite leaning to balance from above the weight she felt from below, from within. Time seemed divided into infinitesimal fragments, to each of which she gave its true weight, with no thought of past or future, all gathered up into the absolute present.
And, then, regretfully, she came back and separated herself from Sunstar, sliding down at the paddock rail, falling against him and flinging her arms around his glossy neck in an absolute ecstasy of love, wholly giving, wholly aware. It needed no words. She was his; he was hers; even if they never again knew this ecstasy of consummation, this delicious flooding delight, if she never mounted him again nor he raced with her toward an endless plain of oblivious pleasure, they would always, in some part of their being, be fused together; this moment was eternal and would go on happening forever.
And then, with faint regret – but only faint, for in her exalted state she knew that all things had their proper moment and this one could not be prolonged too far – she let herself slide down another level of awareness and she was Romilly again, giving the horse’s silken shoulders a final pat of love and leading him, separate now but never far, to his own paddock. She could hardly feel her feet beneath her as she walked back toward the hostel, but she felt distinct annoyance at Clea’s friendly voice.
“How beautiful he is – is that is the black stallion they told me about? Is he too fierce, will they have to turn him out to stud again?” Then alerted by something in Romilly’s face, she asked, “You – you’ve been riding him?”
“He is gentle as a child,” said Romilly absently. “He loves me, but a child could ride him now.” Absurdly, she wished she could give this beautiful creature over to Caryl, who would surely love him as she did, for he had more than a trace of her own kind of laran. Since she could not keep this imperial creature herself, it would be finest if he could go to that sensitive boy. Who was, she reminded herself with a sharp coming-down-to-earth, the son of Lyondri Hastur and her sworn enemy. “What did you want, Clea?”
“I was coming to speak to you about your unarmed-combat lesson,” the other woman said, “but on the way I met with Jandria, who says that you have been sent for again to the king’s camp; you are to work with sentry-birds, I hear. You are to take all your things; you will not be coming back here, I understand.”
Not coming back? Then she must say farewell to Sunstar even sooner than she had believed. But in her aware state she knew it really did not matter. They would always be part of one another. For now she was to be mistress of hawks to Carolin’s armies – she did not stop to think how she knew that – and she, like Sunstar, must carry her appointed share of the world’s weight. She said, “Thank you, Clea. And thank you for everything, all you have taught me.”