While she was first flying the little hawks – with a guilty thought that she was being disloyal to her beloved Preciosa – she reached out for contact, the strong bond between hawk and flyer. But the tiny birds gave only a faint sense of confusion, exhilaration; there was no close emotion, no sense of rapport and union – the smaller hawks were too lowly-organized to have the capacity for laran. She knew the cagebirds had no such abilities – she had once or twice tried to communicate with them – in fact, “the mind of a cage-bird” was a byword for a stupid woman! Flying the small hawks was dull; she could watch them fly, and they were beautiful indeed, but there was none of the excitement, the sense of rapport and completion, she felt with Preciosa. She flew them dutifully every day for exercise, but it was always with relief that she hooded them again with the beautifully-worked hoods and cast off Preciosa into the sky, climbing the sky with her hi an ecstasy of flight and soaring freedom.
She rode mostly with Darren, now, and Rael; Alderic had been put to the coridom’s work and was always busy about the place with accounts, arranging the stud-books, supervising the many men about court and stables. She seldom saw him, except now and again for a decorous word as he sat by the fire in the evening, or played a game of castles or cards with Darren or her father, or sometimes whittled wooden toys to amuse Rael in the long evenings.
Her days, too, were filled; her father had said she need do no more lessons, and the plan for her to study ciphering with the old steward had of course been put aside, since she was to be married so soon, so Calinda filled her days with stitching, and taught her how to oversee the kitchen-women and the sewing-women and even the dairies . . . not that there would be so much need for her to do any of these things, but, Calinda said, she must know how to do these things so that she could know whether her servants did them well or not; Lord Scathfell was a widower and she would be the first lady in authority at Scathfell; she must not let them think that Falconsward was a poorly run household, so that the daughter of Falconsward could not fitly supervise her women. Romilly thought she would rather muck out barns and milk dairy-animals and make the butter herself than have to oversee other women doing it; while as for the sewing-women, she was grimly certain that the youngest and least skilled of them would be better than she, so how could she ever presume to supervise or oversee, far less chide or correct? Luciella, too, hunted up one of Mallina’s old dolls, and dressed it in Rael’s cast-off babyclothes and taught both Mallina and Romilly how to bathe a young baby, how to hold it and support its floppy little head, how to change its napkins and what to do to keep it from having rashes and skin disorders; Romilly could not imagine why, if there were skilled nurses and midwives there, and Darissa with two – no, three children by now – she should have to know how to do all this herself, even before she had any children, but Luciella insisted that it was part of a young wife’s proper knowledge. Romilly had no particular objection to having children – Rael as a baby had been adorable – but when she thought of having children, she thought first of Darissa, soft and flabby and fat and sick, and then of the inevitable process by which those children would be gotten. She was farmbred and healthy, and had often thought, with secret pleasure, of the time when she would have a lover, a husband, but when she sought to put Dom Garris’s face into that place, which (to do her credit) she virtuously tried to do, she only felt sick, and now even when she thought of any man, the very idea made her feel queasy and faint. No, but she could not, she would run away, she would join the Sisterhood of the Sword and wear weapons and fight as a mercenary soldier for one of the kings contending for this land, she would cut her hair and pierce her ears – and when she got to this point she realized how foolish she was, for if she ran away they would only follow her and drag her back. And then she would make wild plans, a final appeal to her father, to her stepmother, to Lord Scathfell himself – when they put the bracelets on her she would scream “No” and tear them off, when they tried to lead her to the bedding she would fall on Dom Garris with a knife. . . . Surely then he would put her away, he would not want her … she would tell him how much she loathed him, and he would refuse to have her….