Will she stay with me now? Or fly away again? It no longer matters. We are together.
At last she cut a branch and trimmed it, fastening it to her saddle behind, as a perch for Preciosa if she chose to stay there, and mounted, setting Preciosa on the improvised perch. Preciosa stayed quiet for a moment, then flapped her wings and rose high, wheeling just at the height of the treetop, hovering near. Romilly drew a long breath. Preciosa would not leave her entirely.
Then she drew on the horse’s reins, for she heard voices; a rough man’s voice proclaiming, “I tell you, it was smoke I saw,” and another one protesting something. There were horse’s hooves, too, and somewhere a sharp barking.
Romilly was off her horse, sliding down, leading him into the thickest part of the trees at the edge of the road. She had no wish to meet with any travellers before she could get a look at them and see what they were up to and what they looked like.
Another voice spoke, rough and male, but this time in the cultivated accents of an educated man – a lowlander, Romilly thought; he spoke like Alderic. “If anyone else travels on this road, Orain, he is no doubt in our own case, and will be as glad as we are to see another human face.” The riders came into sight now, a tall man with flame-red hair, wearing ragged clothing but with a certain look of elegance – this one was no yokel like Rory. Somehow he reminded her of Lord Storn, or the elderly Lord Scathfell, though his dress was as rough as her own, his beard and hair untrimmed. The man at his side was tall too, almost gaunt, wearing a shirtcloak of antique fashion and boots that looked hand-botched together from untanned leather. On a block before him, on his saddle, a huge hooded bird, which did not look like any hawk Romilly had ever seen before, moved uneasily from foot to foot, and Romilly, still partly in rapport with Preciosa at treetop-height, felt a little shudder of anger and something like fear. She did not know what sort of bird it was, but she knew instinctively that she did not like to be around it.
Behind the two men in the lead, five or six others rode. Only the two in the vanguard had horses; the others rode an assortment of chervines, none of them very large or very good, their coats ill-cared-for and their horns ragged and rough; one or two of the stag-beasts had been crudely dehorned with a lack of skill that made Romilly wince. Her father would have turned away any hired man who kept his riding-animals in any such condition, and as for the dehorning, she could almost have done better herself! She liked the look of the two men who rode ahead, but she thought she had never seen such ruffians as the men behind them!
The gaunt, bearded man in the lead, riding at the side of the red-haired aristocrat (so she immediately styled him in her mind) got off his horse and said, “Here’s trace of fire; and horse-droppings, too; there’s been a rider here.”
“And with a horse, in the wild?” the red-haired man inquired with a lift of his eyebrows. He glanced around, but it was the gaunt, crudely dressed man whose eyes lighted on Romilly where she stood by the horse in the thickest part of the trees.
“Come out, boy. We mean ye’ no harm,” he said, beckoning, and the red-haired man slid from his horse and stood by the remains of her fire. He poked about the carefully covered coals-like everyone brought up in the Hellers, Romilly was over-cautious about fire in the woods-and finally extracted a few live sparks; threw in a twig or two.
“You have saved us the trouble of making fire,” he said in his quiet, educated voice, “Come and share it with us, no one will hurt you.”
And indeed Romilly felt no sense of menace from any of them. She led the horse from the concealed thicket and stood with her hand on the bridle.