He wished King Carolin no ill. Romilly hoped that Orain had passed along his message to Dom Carlo and that he, somehow, had gotten word to the king, that Carolin had not come to the city.
Once or twice during the tenday that followed, she went again with Orain to the tavern, or to another, though never again did he drink more than a mug or two of the local wine, and seemed not even a little befuddled by it. Dom Carlo she had not seen again; she supposed he was about whatever business for King Carolin had brought him to this city. For all she knew to the contrary, he had left Nevarsin and gone to warn Carolin not to come here – there was one who would recognize him. She did not think the child would betray Carolin – he had said the king had been kind to him – but his loyalties, naturally, would be to his own father. She did not question Orain. It was none of her business, and she was content to have it that way.
Shyly, she began to wonder; if her father had chosen to marry her to one like Orain, would she have refused him? She thought not. But that was conflict too.
For then would I have stayed at home and been married, and never known this wonderful freedom of city and tavern, woods and fields, never have worked free and had money in my pockets, never really known that I had never been free, never flown a sentry-bird.
She was growing fond of the huge ugly birds; now they came to her hand for their food as readily as any sparrow-hawk or child’s cagebird. Either her arm grew stronger or she was more used to it, for now she could hold them for a considerable time and not mind the weight. Their docility and the sweetness she felt when she went into rapport with them, made her think with regret of Preciosa; would see ever see the hawk again?
She seldom saw the other men; she slept apart from them, and encountered them only morning and night, when they all came together for meals in the monastery guest-house. She was quite content that it should be so; she was still a little afraid of Alaric, and the others seemed strange and alien too. It seemed sometimes that the only person to whom she spoke these days, aside from the man who delivered the bird-food and fodder for horses and chervines, was young Caryl, who came whenever he could escape for a few minutes from his lessons, to look at the birds, hold them, croon lovingly to them. With Caryl she was always a little troubled, lest he should forget and thoughtlessly address her again as vai domna – it was a heavy weight of secrets for a child to bear. Once Orain came to the chapel to hear the singing; he took a seat far back and in the shadows, and she was sure that the little boy, in the lighted choir, could not see the face of a solitary man in the darkest part of the chapel, but she remembered that the child knew Carolin and would certainly recognize one of the king’s men; she was so agitated that she rose quietly and went out, afraid that the telepathic child would sense her agitation and know its cause.
Midwinter-night was approaching; stalls of spicebread trimmed with copper foil, and gaily painted toys, began to appear in the marketplace, and sweet-sellers filled their displays with stars cut from spicebread or nut-paste. Romilly, homesick at the smell of baking spicebread – Luciella always baked it herself, saying that the servants should not be given extra work at this season – almost regretted leaving her home; but then she remembered that in any case she would not have spent this holiday at her home, but at Scathfell as the wife of Dom Garris – and by now, no doubt, she would have been like Darissa, swollen and ugly with her first child! No, she was better here; but she wished she could send a gift to Rael, or that he could see these bright displays with her.