After a time Romilly fell into a doze, in which Carolin and the usurper Rakhal wandered in dreams with the faces of great mountain cats, slinking through the woods and tearing at one another, and the shrill cry of hawks, as if she were soaring far above and watching the battle. She flew over a white Tower, and Ruyven was waving to her from the summit, and then he somehow took wing and was flying beside her, telling her gravely that Father would not approve of it. He said solemnly, “The Bearer of Burdens said that it is forbidden for man to fly and that is why I have no wings.” and saying it, he fell like a stone; Romilly started awake, to feel Orain lightly shaking her.
“Come, lad, it’s late, they’re closing the doors – we must go back to the monastery!”
His breath was heavy with wine, his speech slurred; she wondered if he was able to walk. However, she laid his cloak over his shoulders, and they went out into the crisp, frosty darkness. It was very late; most of the houses were dark. Somewhere, a dog barked in a frenzy, but there was no other sound, and little light in the street; only the pale and frosty light of blue Kyrrdis, low on the rooftops of the city. Orain’s steps were unsteady; he walked with one hand on the nearest house-wall, steadying himself, but when the narrow streets opened into a stair, he tripped on the cobbles and went flailing down full-length on the stone, howling with drunken surprise. Romilly helped him up, saying in amusement, “You had better hold on to my arm.” Had he made certain his companion would stay sober, so that he would have someone to guide him back to the monastery? Romilly was fairly good at finding a path she had once travelled; she managed to direct their steps upward into the shadow of the monastery.
“Do you know if Carolin is truly in the city, Orain?” she asked at last in a low voice, but he peered with drunken suspicion into her face and demanded, “Why d’ye’ ask?” and she shrugged and let it go. When he was sober she would talk to him about that; but at least the wine he had drunk would not unseal his mouth and he would not babble of his mission or plans. As they climbed the last steep street, which led into the courtyard of the monastery guest-house, he held tightly to her arm, sometimes putting a drunken arm around her shoulders; but Romilly edged away – if he held her too close he might, as Rory had done, discover that she was a woman beneath the heavy clothes she wore.
I like Orain, I would rather respect him, and if he knew I were a woman he would be like all the others. …
As they climbed he leaned on her arm more and more heavily. Once he turned aside from her, and, unbuttoning his trousers, relieved himself against a house wall; Romilly was, not for the first time, grateful for her farm upbringing which had made this something she could accept unblushing – if she had been a housebred woman like Luciella or her younger sister, she would have been outraged a dozen times a day. But then, if she had been a housebred woman, she would probably never have thought to protest the marriage her father had arranged, and she would certainly never have been able to travel with so many men without somehow revealing herself.
At the monastery gates Orain tugged at the bell-pull which announced their presence to the porter at the guest-house. It was very late; for a moment Romilly wondered if they would be admitted at all, but finally the Brother Porter appeared at the gates and, grumbling, let them inside. He frowned and sniffed disapprovingly at the reek of wine which hung around them, but he did let them in, and shook his head when Orain offered him a silver bit.
“I am not allowed, friend. I thank you for the kind thought. Here, your door is this way,” he said, and added audibly to Romilly, “Can you get him inside?”