She had hoped that some time that day it would seem natural to speak to Ruyven of her departure from Falconsward. She had intended, then-how long ago it seemed!-to seek the Tower where he had taken refuge. Somehow she had expected that he would welcome her there. But this quiet, monkish stranger seemed to bear no relation whatever to the brother who had been so close to her in childhood. She could not imagine confiding in him. She felt closer now to Jandria, or even to Orain, stranger that he had now become!
She looked back briefly at Sunstar, pacing along at a stately gait with Dom Carlo – no, she must remember, King Carolin – in the saddle. A brief mental touch renewed the old communication, and she felt herself smile.
I am closer to that horse than to anything human; closer than I have ever been to anything human.
When they had done for the day, Jandria came for her.
“At the edge of the camp, there is a tent where the Swordswomen who follow Carolin are to sleep,” she said. “Come with me, Romilly, and I will show you.”
“I should sleep here with the birds,” Romilly said with a shrug, “No hawkmaster goes out of earshot of his trained birds – I will roll myself in my cloak, I need no tent.”
“But you cannot sleep among the men,” said Jandria, “it is not even to be thought of.”
“The king’s hawkmaster is my own brother born,” said Romilly, impatient now, “Are you saying that he is likely to be any damage to my virtue? Surely the presence of my older brother is protection enough!”
Jandria said with a touch of sharpness, “You know the rules for Swordswomen outside their hostels! We cannot tell everyone in the army that he is your brother, and if it becomes known that an oath-bound Swordswoman has slept alone in the tent with a man-”
“Their minds must be like the sewers of Thendara,” said Romilly angrily. “I am to leave my birds because of the dirty minds of some soldiers I do not even know?”
“I am sorry, I did not make the rules and I cannot unmake them,” said Jandria, “but you are sworn to obey them.”
Fuming with wrath, Romilly went along with Jandria to supper and to bed in the tent allotted to the dozen women of the Sisterhood who were assigned to Carolin’s army. She found Clea there, along with a strange woman from another hostel; the two were to train Carolin’s men in close-quarters unarmed combat. The others were not well known to Romilly; they were among the women who had been quartered in the hostel but did not really belong to it. They were horse-handlers, quartermasters and supply clerks, and one, a short, sturdy, dark woman who spoke with the familiar mountain accent of the Hellers, was a blacksmith, with arms like whipcord, and great swelling muscles across back and shoulders that made her look almost like a man.
I cannot believe that one’s virtue would be in danger if she slept naked among a hundred strange soldiers – she looks as if she could protect herself, as the Hali’imyn here say, against all the smiths in Zandru’s forges!
And then she thought, resentfully, that she had been more free when she travelled in men’s clothes through the Hellers with Orain and Carlo – Carolin – and their little band of exiles. She had worked along with the men, had walked alone in the city, drunk in taverns. Now her movements were restrained to what the rules of the Sisterhood thought suitable to avoid trouble or gossip. Even as a free Swordswoman, she was not free.
Still grumbling a little, she made ready for bed. It struck her again; even these free women, how petty their lives seemed! Jandria she loved, and she could speak freely with Jandria without stopping to censor her thoughts; but even Jandria was trammeled by the question of, what would the men in the army think, if the Swordswomen were not bound by their rules to be as proper and ladylike as any marriageable maiden in the Hellers? Clea, too, she respected and genuinely liked, but still she had few friends in the Sisterhood. Yet when I came among them, I thought I had found, at last, freedom to be myself and still let it be known that I was a woman, not the pretense of male disguise.