In the next room, past the glass doors separating their chambers, Mallina already slept in her cot, her pale-red hair and lacy nightgown pale against the pillow. Lady Calinda had long gone to her bed, and old Gwennis drowsed in a chair beside the sleeping Mallina; and although Romilly was not glad of her sister’s illness, she was glad that the old nurse was busy about her sister; if she had seen Romilly in her current state – ruefully, Romilly surveyed her filthy and sweat-soaked clothes – there would have been an argument, a lecture, trouble.
She was exhausted, and thought longingly of clean clothes, a bath, her own soft bed. She had surely done all she could to save the hawk. Perhaps she should abandon the effort. It might feed from the block; but once it had done that, though it would not die, it could never be tamed enough to feed from the hawker’s hand or gauntlet, and must be released. Well, let it go then. And if, in its state of exhaustion and terror, it would not feed from the block, and died . . . well, hawks had died before this at Falconsward.
But never one with whom I had gone so deeply into rapport. …
And once again, as if she were still standing, exhausted and tense, in the hawk-house, she felt that furious frenzy building up again . . . even safely tied to the block, the hawk in her terrified threshing could break her wings . . . never to fly again, to sit dumb and broken on a perch, or to die … like me inside a house, wearing women’s clothes and stitching at foolish embroideries. …
And then she knew she would not let it happen that way.
Her father, she thought with detachment, would be very angry. This time he might even give her the beating he had threatened last time she disobeyed him. He had never, yet, laid a hand on her; her governess had spanked her a time or two when she was very small, but mostly she had been punished with confinement, with being forbidden to ride, with harsh words or loss of some promised treat or outing.
This time he will surely beat me, she thought, and the unfairness surged within her; I will be beaten because I cannot resign myself to let the poor thing die or thrash itself to death in terror….
Well, I shall be beaten then. No one ever died of a beating, I suppose. Romilly knew already that she was going to defy her father. She shrank from the thought of his rage, even more than from the imagined blows, but she knew she would never be able to face herself again if she sat quietly in her chamber and let the hawk die.
She should have released them both yesterday at dawn, as Davin said. Perhaps she deserved a beating for that disobedience; but having begun, it would be too cruel to stop now. At least, Romilly thought, she could understand why she was being beaten; the hawk would not understand the reasons for the long ordeal till it was finished. Her father himself had always told her that a good animal handler never began anything, with hawk or hound or horse, that he could not finish; it was not fair to a dumb creature who knew nothing of reason.
If, he had told them once, you break faith with a human being for some reason which seems good to you, you can at least explain to him or her. But if you break faith with a dumb creature, you have hurt that creature in a way which is unforgivable, because you can never make it understand. Never in her life had Romilly heard her father speak of faith in any religion, or speak of any God except in a curse; but that time, even as he spoke, she had sensed the depths of his belief and knew that he spoke from the very depths of his being. She was disobeying him, yes; but in a deeper sense she was doing what he had taught her to think right; and so, even if he should beat her for it, he would one day know that what she had done was both right and necessary.