How could Ruyven desert his brother that way? Darren cannot be Heir to Falconsward without his brother at his side. There was less than a year between the brothers, and they had always clung together as if they were twin-born; but they had gone together to Nevarsin, and only Darren had returned; Ruyven, he told their father, had gone to the Tower. Ruyven had sent a message, which only their father had read; but then he had flung it into the midden and from that moment he had never spoken Ruyven’s name, and forbidden any other to speak it
“I have but two sons,” he said, his face like stone. “And one is in the monastery and the other at his mother’s knee.” The leronis Marelie had frowned as she remembered, and said to Romilly, “I did my best, child, but he would not hear of it; so you must do the best you can to master your gift, or it will master you. And I can help you but little in what time I have; and I am sure that if he knew I had spoken to you like this, he would not shelter me this night. But I dare not leave you without some protection when your laran wakens. You are alone with it, and it will not be easy to master it alone, but it is not impossible, for I know of a few who have done it, your brother among them.”
“You know my brother!” Romilly whispered.
“I know him, child-who, think you, sent me here to speak with you? You must not think he deserted you without cause,” Marelie added gently, as Romilly’s lips tightened, “He loves you well; he loves your father, too. But a cagebird cannot be a falcon, and a falcon cannot be a kyorebni. To return hither, to live his life without full use of his laran-that would be death for him, Romilly; can you understand? It would be like being made deaf and blind, without the company of his own kind.”
“But what can this laran be, that he would forsake us all for it?” Romilly had cried, and Marelie had only looked sad.
“You will know that when your own laran wakens, my child.”
And Romilly had cried out, “I hate laran! And I hate the Towers! They stole Ruyven from us!” and she had turned away, refusing to speak again to Marelie; and the leronis had sighed and said, “I cannot fault you for loyalty to your father, my child,” and gone away to the room assigned to her, and departed the next morning, without further speech with Romilly.
That had been two years ago, and Romilly had tried to put it from her mind; but in this last year she had begun to realize that she had the Gift of the MacArans in fullest measure-that strangeness in her mind which could enter into the mind of hawk, or hound, or horse, or any animal, and had begun to wish that she could have spoken with the leronis about it…
But that was not even to be thought about. I may have laran, she told herself again and again, but never would I abandon home and family for something of that sort!
So she had struggled to master it alone; and now she forced herself to be calm, to breathe quietly, and felt the calming effect of the breathing composing her mind as well and even soothing, a little, the raging fury of the hawk; the chained bird was motionless, and the waiting girl knew that she was Romilly again, not a chained thing struggling in a frenzy to be free of the biting jesses….
Slowly she picked that one bit of information out of the madness, of fear and frenzy. The jesses are too tight. They hurt her. She bent, trying to send out soothing waves of calm all around her, into the mind of the hawk-but she is too mad with hunger and terror to understand, or she would be quiet and know I mean her no harm. She bent and tugged at the slitted straps which were wound about the hawk’s legs. At the very back of her mind, carefully blanked out behind the soothing thoughts she was trying to send out to the hawk, Romilly’s own fear struggled against what she was doing-once she had seen a young hawker lose an eye by getting too close to a frightened bird’s beak-but she commanded the feat to be quiet and not interfere with what she had to do-if the hawk was in pain, the frenzy and fear would be worse, too.