Romilly opened her eyes; there was a soft lantern-glow in the tent, but through it she was still freezing among the glaciers, and her wings were broken .. . she could feel the sharp jagged edges near her heart where they had shattered in the cold and splintered away….
Maura gripped her hands with her own warm ones, and Romilly, confused, came back to her own body’s awareness. She felt the unfamiliar, intrusive touch . . . somehow Maura was within her body, touching it with mental fingers, checking heart and breathing . . . she made a gesture of refusal, and Maura said gently, “Lie still, let me monitor you. Have you had many attacks of this kind of threshold sickness?”
Romilly pushed her away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about; I had a bad dream, that is all. I must have been tired. I’ve never done that before with the birds, and it was exhausting. I suppose the leroni are accustomed to it.”
“I wish you would let me monitor you and be sure.”
“No, no. I’m all right.” Romilly turned her back to the other woman and lay still, and after a moment Maura sighed and put out the lantern, and Romilly picked up a fragment of her thought, stubborn, but I should not intrude, she is no child, perhaps her brother . . . before she slept again, without dreams this time.
In the morning she still had a headache, and the smell of the carrion for bird-food made her as queasy – she told herself impatiently – as if she were four months pregnant! Well, whatever ailed her, it was not that, for she was as virgin as any pledged leronis. Perhaps it was her woman’s cycles coming on her – she had lost track, with the army coming and her intense work with Sunstar. Or perhaps she had eaten something that did not agree with her; certainly she had no mind for breakfast. After caring for the birds, she got into her saddle without enthusiasm; for the first time in her life she thought it might be rather pleasant to sit inside a house and sew or weave or even embroider.
“But you have eaten nothing, Romilly,” Ruyven protested.
She shook her head. “I think I caught a chill yesterday, sitting so still after sunset in my saddle,” she said. “I don’t want anything.”
He surveyed her, she thought, as if she were Rael’s age, and said, “Don’t you know what it means when you cannot eat? Has Lady Maura monitored you?”
It was not worth arguing about. She said sharply, “I will eat some bread in my saddle as we ride,” and took the hunk of bread, smeared with honey, that he handed her. She ate a few bites and surreptitiously discarded it.
Ranald was riding with the blank look Romilly knew enough, now, to associate with a telepath whose mind was elsewhere. At last he came out of it and said, “I should know how far it is to the main branch of the armies; Carolin will join with us sometime today, though they are some way behind us. Romilly, will you take your bird and see if you can spy out Carolin’s armies, and see how far they are behind us?”
She felt some alarm after her last experience with the flight with birds. Yet when she flung the bird in the air and followed it with her linked mind, she found that there was none of the disquieting disorientation; to her intense relief, it was only like flying Preciosa; she could see with a strange doubled sight, but that was all. The bird’s sight, keener than her own a hundred times, told her that Carolin’s armies lay half a day’s ride behind where she rode with their little advance party, and she could sense, but with no sense of intrusion, that Ranald had picked up then: position and relayed it to Carolin himself.
“We will camp here and wait for them,” Maura said with authority, “We are all weary, and our hawkmistress needs rest.”
I should not let them pamper me. I do not want Ruyven, nor Orain, nor Carolin himself, to think that because I am a woman I must be favored. Orain will respect me if I am as competent as a man. …