Darkness descended so swiftly that Romilly wondered if she had been asleep in her saddle; it seemed to her that one moment she looked on sunset and the next, on violet moonlight, with Liriel floating in the sky. As she came aware, she realized Ruyven was looking at her anxiously.
“You’re back?”
“For some time,” he said, surprised. “Here, the soldiers have food ready for you,” He gestured, and she slid from her horse, aching in every muscle, her head throbbing. She did not see Maura at all. Ranald Ridenow came and said, “Lean on me, if you wish, Swordswoman,” but she straightened herself proudly.
“Thank you, I can walk,” she said, and Ruyven came and motioned her to sit beside them on the grass. She protested “The birds-”
“Have been seen to; Maura did it when she saw the state you were in,” he said. “Eat.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said, shrugging it off, and rose swiftly to her feet. “I had better see to Prudence-”
“I tell you, Maura has the birds and they are perfectly all right,” Ruyven said impatiently, and thrust a block of sticky dried fruit into her hand. “Eat this.”
She took a bite of it and put it aside with a grimace. She knew that if she swallowed it she would be sick. From somewhere her little tent had been put up, the one she shared with Maura, and she shoved into it, aware from somewhere of Ranald Ridenow’s face, white and staring, troubled. Why should he care? She flung herself down on her pallet in. the tent and fell over the edge of a dark cliff of sleep.
She knew she had not really wakened, because she could somehow see through the walls of the tent to where her sleeping body lay, all thin like gauze so that she could see through it to beating heart and pulsing veins. She waved a hand and the heart speeded up its beat slightly and the veins began to go in swirling circles. Then she flew away and left it behind her, rising over plains and hills, flying far away on long, strong wings toward the Hellers. Ice cliffs rose before her, and beyond them she could see the walls of a city, and a woman standing on a high battlement, beckoning to her.
Welcome home, dear sister, come here to us, come home…
But she turned her back on them too, and flew onward, higher and higher, mountain peaks dropping away far below, as she flew past the violet disk … no, it was a round ball, a sphere, a little world of its own, she had never thought of the moon as a world. Then a green one lay beneath her, and the peacock crescent of Kyrrdis, dark, lighted only at the rim by the red sun, which somehow was still shining at midnight. She flew on and on, until she left the blazing sun behind and it was only a star among other stars, and she was looking down from somewhere on the world with four moons like a jeweled necklace, and someone said in her mind, Hali is the constellation of Taurus, and Hali the ancient Terran word for necklace in the Arabic tongue, but the words and the worlds were all meaningless to her; she dropped down, down slowly, and the great ship lay smashed against the lower peaks of the Kilghard Hills, and a Ghost wind blew across the peaks . .. and a little prim voice in her mind remarked, racial memory has never been proven, for there are parts of the brain still inaccessible to science . . . and then she began to fly along the rim of the Hellers. But the glaciers were breathing their icy breath at her, and her wings were beginning to freeze, the dreadful cold was squeezing her heart, slowing the wing-strokes, and then one wing, hard like ice, broke and splintered, with a dreadful shock of pain in her head and heart, and the other wing, white and frozen and stiff, would no longer beat, and she sank and sank, screaming….
“Romilly! Romilly!” Lady Maura was softly slapping her cheeks. “Wake up! Wake up!”