Lord Ranald yawned. He said, “I too feel as if I had been dragged backward over a waterfall, after these days of hard riding. I shall be glad of the rest. And the birds need not be moved more.” He gestured to the soldiers to set up the camp.
CHAPTER SIX
Romilly knew the main army was approaching, not from what she heard – though, when she listened quietly, where she lay inside the tent she shared with Domna Maura, she could hear a soft distant sound in the very earth which she knew to be the noise of the great column of men on the march. But what really told her of Carolin’s approach was a growing awareness within her mind, a sense of oneness, an approaching that she knew….
Sunstar. Her mind was within and surrounded by the black stallion, it seemed that it was not on his but her back that the king rode, surrounded by his men, and for a moment her mind strayed to touch his too, to see Orain for a moment through his eyes, with love and warmth. Once she had seen them together, unguarded, wishing somehow that she had such a friend. Now she shared, for a moment, the quick unconscious touch between the king and his sworn man, something not sexual but deeper than that, a closeness which went back through their lives, mind and heart and somehow encompassed even a picture of their first meeting as young children, not yet in their fourth year … all three dimensions of time as somehow she was aware of Sunstar as a colt running hi the hills of his native country….
She jerked herself away from the extended contact and back into her own body, shocked and startled. She did not know what was happening, but she supposed it was some new dimension of her laran, opening of itself – what did she need, after all, of a Tower?
But the first person who came to her, when she was working around the birds, picking up little tags and fringes of the sight-awareness she had known yesterday when she flew them, was Jandria. After the two Swordswomen had greeted one another with a hug, Jandria said, “We had your message through the birds; it was Himself who told me.” Romilly remembered that this was always how she spoke of King Carolin when he was not actually present. “You are doing well, Romy. And I have permission from the Swordswomen here for you to go on sharing Lady Maura’s tent, if you will. I will go and speak to her; we were girls together.”
Romilly held her peace – she had long known that Jandria was of higher rank than she had ever realized, though she had left it behind her when she took the oath of the Sisterhood. She turned her attention to the birds, though she could hear, with a tiny pang she recognized as jealousy, the two women talking behind her somewhere.
And 1 have no friend, no lover, 1 am alone, done as any monk in his solitary cell in the ice caves of Nevarsin … and wondered what she was thinking about, for even now her mind was filled with the awareness of the great stallion racing in the sun, and Carolin with him, riding….
She made her reverence before she ever looked up at the king’s face and then was not really sure whether she had bowed to Carolin or to Sunstar, his black mane disordered with the hill-country wind. Carolin slid from his back and greeted her graciously.
“Swordswoman Romilly, I came myself to bring you my thanks for your message; you and your companions with the sentry-birds. We are to march tomorrow on Rakhal’s armies and you and the laranzu must do this, for I have pledged to my kinswoman Maura that she need not take part in any battle against her kinsman.” He smiled at her. “Come, child, you were not so tongue-tied when you rode with me to Nevarsin. You called me ‘Uncle’ then.”
Romilly blurted, “I did it in ignorance, sir. I meant no disrespect, I thought you were only Carlo of Blue Lake.”