Hawkmistress! A DARKOVER NOVEL by Marion Zimmer Bradley

One night she woke when the purple face of Liriel stood over her in the sky, seeming to look down and chide her, and thought, I am surely mad, where am I going, what am I going to do? I cannot go on like this forever. But when she woke she had forgotten it again. Now and again, too, she heard, not with her ears but within her mind, voices that seemed to call, Romilly, where are you? She wondered faintly who Romilly was, and why they were calling her.

She came to the end of the woods, the next day, and out into open plains and rolling hills. Waving grasses were covered with seeds … all this country must once have been settled and planted to grain, but all around the horizon which stretched wide from west to east, from the wall of the forest behind her to the mountains which rose greyish-pink in the distance, there was no human dwelling. She picked a handful of the seeds, rubbed their coats from them, and chewed them as she walked.

High in the sky, a hawk soared, a single hawk, and as she watched, it dropped down, down, down, falling toward her with folded wings, it alighted on her shoulder. It seemed to speak in her mind, but she did not know what it was saying, yet it seemed that once she had known this hawk, that it had a name, that once she had flown beside it in the sky … no, that was not possible, yet the hawk seemed so sure that they knew one another. She reached out to touch it, then stopped, there was some reason she should not touch it with her finger . . . she wished she could remember why. But she looked into the hawk’s eyes, and wished she knew where she had seen the hawk before this.

She woke again that night, and again she was aware that she was certainly quite mad, that she could not wander forever like this. But she had no idea where she was, and there was no one to ask. She knew who she was, now, she was Romilly, and the hawk, the hawk which had perched on the low limb of a nearby tree, the hawk was Preciosa, but why had she sought her out here? Did she not know that she, Romilly, set the touch of her mind on bird or horse only to train it to follow humankind meekly to its own death?

It took her five days to cross the plain; she counted them, without thinking, as the face of Liriel grew toward full. When last the moon was full, she had followed Sunstar – she slammed the memory shut; it was too painful. There were plenty of the grainlike seeds to eat, and water to drink. Once the hawk brought a bird down from the sky and lighted on her shoulder, screaming in frustration; she looked at the dead bird, torn by the hawk’s beak, and shuddered. It was the hawk’s nature, but the sight of the Wood made her feel sick, and at last she flung it to the ground and walked on.

That night she came beneath the edges of another patch of forest. She found a tree heavy with last year’s nuts, and by now she had sense enough to fill her pockets with them. She was still not certain where she was going, but she had begun to turn northward when there was a choice. She moved noiselessly now through the woods, driven restlessly onward … she did not know why.

Overhead, toward evening, she heard the cry of waterfowl, flying toward the south. She looked up, soaring with them in their dizzy flight, seeing from afar where a tall white tower rose, and the glimmer of a lake. Where was she?

The moons were so bright that night, four of them shining down on her, Uriel and Kyrrdis round and full, and the . other two shining pale and gibbous, that she could not sleep. It seemed to her that when last she had seen four moons in the sky, something had happened … no, she could not remember, but her body ached with desire and hunger unslaked, and she did not know why. After a time, lying in the soft moss, she began to range outward, feeling hungers like her own all round her….

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