Hawkmaiden (20 page)

“The Yeomanry near the castle,” he nodded.  “I’ve seen your folk around, on market days.  You keep to yourselves, don’t you?”

“We’ve always been . . . apart,” she said, struggling for the right word.  “The Wood and the Vale are different places.  They require different people.”

“Which means you see the vale folk as sod-footed farmers, and they see you as ignorant woodland rustics,” he chuckled.  “But you’ve probably intermarried for generations.”

“Well . . . yes,” Dara said, a little embarrassed than an outsider could so quickly and aptly sum up the complex relationship between the two peoples.  “But in all fairness, most of the villeins
are
sod-footed farmers.”

“And no doubt you have some ignorant rustics up in the woods, too,” he pointed out.  Dara was about to object when she thought of her brother Kobb, and kept quiet.  She was too impressed with how well Gareth had observed the relationship.

“You must be a pretty good wizard,” she finally conceded.  “You’ve been in Sevendor for how long?”

“Only a month,” he shrugged.  “But I’ve travelled enough to know how such things work.  It’s not magic, it’s just observation.  But learning magic forces you to observe such things.  If you don’t know how things fit together and influence each other, you can’t do magic.”

“It sounds complicated,” she said, picking up Frightful on her glove.  She examined the bird closely, but did not see anything amiss . . . except the accusing look in the bird’s eyes.  She fed her to soothe her a bit and then turned to go. 

“It is.  But it beats being a sod-footed farmer.  And it really did open up a wider world for me.  So, how far is it back to your hall?”

“Just a mile or so,” she shrugged.  Then she realized that the mage was waiting to escort her back.  “I can manage on my own,” she said, before he could ask.

“Considering you were out cold when I found you, I’m going to walk you back anyway,” Gareth said.  “My duties are kind of loosely defined right now, and I don’t have anything better to do.  The Magelord would be vexed if I let anything happen to one of his most important Yeomen’s daughters.”

“The Magelord considers father to be important?”

“I’ve heard him speak with admiration of your folk,” Gareth agreed, starting down the path toward the Westwood.  Dara was forced to follow, regardless of whether or not she wanted his company.  “He sees the Westwood as loyal.  Not everyone is considered so,” he added, diplomatically.

“You mean Yeoman Railan?” she asked, suddenly interested.

“It would not be prudent to spread such rumors,” the mage said with quiet dignity.  “To be honest, you probably know more about the situation than I do.  But the Westwood is fair in our master’s thoughts.  And bound to grow fairer, if it produces magically-talented girls like you.”

Dara didn’t know what to say to that as she walked with Gareth, so she turned the conversation to falconry, and discussed the difficult and demanding art with the man.  He took her all the way to the bridge, where the watchman hailed her and allowed her to pass.  She considered inviting the mage over the bridge, but he decided to head back to the village instead.

“I’d love to see your Hall, but it’s getting late and I do have a few things on my list to complete today,” he demurred.  “But I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around, Lenodara of Westwood.” He grinned, waved, and returned down the trail.

“Who was
that?
” Anira asked curiously, when Dara passed her on her way back to the Hall.  Her aunt was overseeing the hanging of laundry out in the yard, a task Dara was glad she was exempted from. 

“Just a . . . a wizard from the castle I met out in the fields,” Dara dismissed, casually.  “He saw Frightful and wanted to see her.”  She did not want to try to explain the unusual event that led to their meeting to her aunt, who would have her in bed under a sick watch if she discovered the fainting.

“He looks . . . nice,” Anira said, curiously.  It took Dara a moment to figure out what her aunt was suggesting, and when she did she blushed.

“He just wanted to see my falcon,” Dara said, defensively. 

“That’s what they all say!” snorted her aunt as she pulled another wet sheet out of the basket.

“He wasn’t—”

“Of course he was,” Anira said, shaking her head.  “Don’t get your feathers ruffled, Little Bird, it’s about time that the lads started noticing that you’re a girl.  That one’s no different, wizard or no.  Nothing to be ashamed of.  Or shocked about.  You aren’t as fair as Leska, perhaps, but you’ll turn a head or two someday, mark my words.”

Dara prepared to explain, in
no
uncertain terms, that Gareth had
no
such thoughts about her in his head and was
merely
intrigued with her falconry to her busybody aunt . . .

Then she remembered he had called her
pretty
– the first time a boy had
ever
done that – and she blushed even more furiously.  To her horror, she realized that her aunt was correct, and that Dara was wrong.  Gareth wasn’t properly a boy, either.  If he’d his mastership papers, or whatever it was wizards used, then he was nearly a man in his own right.  That made Dara even more confused and flustered.  She had reached her thirteenth birthday only a few weeks before, and the idea of such attention was deeply disconcerting.

“I’m going to my room,” Dara said, darkly, her feelings confused. 
To hide for the rest of eternity,
she added to herself.  Frightful squawked with annoyance as she jerked suddenly toward the hall doorway, reflecting her own mood.

She was still a child, after all – why would a man be interested in
her?
  She was a mere girl, and a scrawny one at that, from a people of “ignorant rustics.”  Sure, Gareth was no dashing warrior himself – his arms and legs had been thin and spindly, and he had a kind of odd face, but he was polite and friendly and he had a nice smile, and . . .

. . . and he had called her a “pretty redhead”.

Compared to the confusion and anxiousness of realizing a boy was interested in her, “trans-species bilocation” seemed a pretty simple and easy to understand thing to Dara.

Chapter Ten

Market Day

After her disconcerting experience with bilocation in the fields, Dara kept close to home for a few days, quietly working over the same routines with Frightful and the lure she always had. 

Only now there was something additional in their relationship.  Dara was wary of the bird – not of her sharp talons or beak, but of her mind.  The more she worked with the bird, the more Dara was aware of the capacity to slip her mind behind Frightful’s eyes. 

Finally, tired of being scared of her own bird, Dara dared to try to will the bilocation to happen.  The first time Dara managed to consciously make the transition was in her room.  She stared at Frightful, who was preening on her block.  Remembering how she managed it the first time, Dara allowed her mind to wander, unfocused as she
stared at Frightful, who was grooming her feathers.  She felt the connecting rapport between them, but instead of pushing it away, she welcomed it.  Before she realized what was happening it was Dara who was doing the preening. 

It was frightening, at first. 

The sense of dislocation and the change of perspective and perception was daunting.  Falcons see things differently than humans, hear things in different ways.  Frightful’s eyes saw things very differently than Dara’s, and in those seconds the way the room around her warped and twisted as she chased mites in her feathers was strange and thrilling. They noticed the smallest movements while ignoring large objects. 

The sensation lasted for a few brief seconds, but during that time Dara experienced Frightful’s emotional perspective as well: bored, vain, a little hungry, and feeling a little pressure on her tiny tummy, as a casting prepared itself for ejection.  Only when Frightful suddenly looked up at Dara – and Dara got the unique and chilling sensation of seeing herself through her falcon’s eyes – did the moment of intense intimacy end.  She was startled at how her falcon regarded her.  She looked strange and inhuman, her hair and eyes featuring prominently to the bird.  It would take time to acclimatize herself to filtering what she saw through Frightful’s perceptions, she realized as she withdrew from the rapport.

Sweat poured from her brow and her chest heaved like a bellows as she recovered from the shocking experience.  She could feel her pulse in all of her limbs as her mind settled back down.

As frightening as the experience had been, she did not hesitate to repeat it, after she had recovered.  From then on, she increased her magical rapport with her falcon a little each day until she could manage to “be” inside Frightful’s mind for several minutes at a time.  She never did much more than observe the world from her bird’s perspective, allowing Frightful to get used to the sensation.  For Dara could tell that Frightful was aware of her intrusion, even if the falcon had little idea of its nature. 

Dara was reluctant to share the news of her unusual gift with anyone else, though she desperately wanted to discuss it at least with Uncle Keram.  He, at least, would be empathetic about her discomfort . . . without the slightest idea of what she was experiencing.

But she was also wary that revealing the talent would result in even more complications to her life.  Already she felt like a slave to her falcon, and the knowledge that she might be magically Talented had been both exciting and fearful.  Admitting that her talent had manifested through beastmastery felt like inviting yet more trouble into her life.  She lost some of her anxiety as she continued to practice and strengthen her rapport with Frightful.  Getting used to seeing things from her perspective, sorting out which feelings were Dara’s and which were Frightful’s, and understanding the nature of the strange sensations involved with flight slowly gave her a growing confidence in their bond.  Mentioning it casually over dinner, in front of the Flame, would invite a level of oversight she was not willing to suffer.

Instead she continued to quietly work with Frightful in the little meadow all spring until the bird returned from flight unerringly at the sound of the call.  Their lessons went beyond normal falconry, now.  Dara had learned how to slip behind Frightful’s eyes and “encourage” her a little, after a few weeks of practice, something a regular falconer couldn’t do.  But she also found that by increasing her will just a little while “riding” Frightful’s mind encouraged her to be a more obedient falcon.  Perhaps, she reasoned, Frightful was unable to distinguish between her own desires and what her handler wanted.  If so, Dara eagerly used the mistake to her advantage.  Within four weeks of her first flight, Frightful took her first prey.

Dara slipped away to the meadow in the afternoon, narrowly escaping working hides in the tanning shed.  All of the animal hides the Westwood hunters took in the fall had been soaking in tannins all winter, and while cured, they were as stiff as wood and needed to be beaten, folded, and worked until they were pliable enough to be used in leatherwork.  It was rough, demanding, brutal work that left your hands chafed and raw, the worst kind of unskilled labor.  It also smelled revolting, the acids stinging your nose while they slowly burned your skin.  When Dara saw that her brother Kobb had been assigned to lead the party she decided it was a
great
day to work her bird.  Kobb wouldn’t hesitate to draft her for the task out of simple spite.

That day Frightful was responding obediently to the hunting routine.  Dara would toss her into the air, allow her to circle overhead for a few passes, then wave the lure and make the hunting call.  Frightful would respond by diving until she took the lure out of Dara’s hands and settled a few feet nearby.  After pecking out the sliver of raw meat on the feathered lure, the pair repeated the exercise.

On the fourth pass, however, as the falcon dove toward the lure she veered at the last moment and missed it entirely.  Dara rolled her eyes and was about to insult the falcon when she saw what had distracted Frightful.  Instead of the lure, she had pounced on a baby rabbit that had emerged from its lair at the wrong moment.

It took Dara a few seconds to realize what was going on – Frightful had made her first kill!  She watched with fascinated horror as the falcon used its beak to break the little brown rabbit’s neck with a twist, then begin to tear the flesh hungrily apart with its talons.  She watched with pride and elation until she realized what a mistake she was making.

Her Uncle Keram had been clear about this from the beginning: you
could not
allow a falcon to feed on its own kills and remain a dedicated hunter.  If the bird did not see food as coming exclusively from its handler, the falconer would lose his hold on the bird.  With a startled squeak Dara ran across the meadow and pulled the baby rabbit’s corpse from Frightful’s eager rendings, earning a scratch on her hand and a baleful look from the startled bird.

Dara started to reach out through the rapport – only to experience the rare pleasure of her bird reveling in the guts of the baby rabbit, bragging with a victorious call.  Dara could feel the blood, the viscera, the still-warm body of the animal as her bird devoured it.  It was such a primal excitement that it almost overwhelmed the girl – she withdrew from the rapport almost immediately.  It was time to be a falconer, not a beastmaster, for a moment.  Dara snatched the limp form of the rabbit from the bird.

As Frightful glared at her for stealing her kill, Dara quickly handed her the lure, augmented with a double portion to reward her for the kill.  Dara praised Frightful, petting her head with a finger and cooing to her as she tore hungrily into the meat on the lure.  Dara felt like throwing up, watching the glee with which she attacked and ate the treat, the memory of the feel of baby rabbit in her mouth still haunting her.  Her rapport with the falcon was intimidating.  Frightful was still in an aggressive mood, Dara realized, probably from the thrill of her first kill.  As sick as she felt, she could not keep her from celebrating such an important development.  Only when she had stripped all the meat from the lure did Dara hood her and then take her carefully back to the Hall to report to Uncle Keram.

Her uncle congratulated her on the success and asked a dozen questions, before telling her how proud he was of her accomplishment.

“It’s not every falconer who can train a bird to hunt that quickly.  A baby coney is hardly a prize to brag about, but she’ll do better as she grows.  Keep at it – see if she can take a full-grown hare by midsummer,” he suggested.  “
That
would be something to boast of in a yearling!”

So Dara redoubled her efforts.  It was helpful that Frightful was beginning to show her final adult plumage, and her bodyweight was increasing rapidly.  It was also helpful that the forest was alive with creatures this time of year as the cold retreated and the green leaves advanced.  Within a week Frightful had taken two sparrows, a chipmunk, and a pigeon almost large enough to eat.  And all without the benefit of Dara’s magical interference.

That didn’t mean Dara was not continuing to use her growing mastery of bilocation, but she had yet to develop the confidence to direct Frightful’s hunting.  It was hard enough, she reflected, to ride Frightful’s tiny mind while she was in flight.

There was a difference, the girl noted, in being inside Frightful when she was at rest on the block and when she was soaring overhead.  The serenity of flight came with a kind of eternal searching, a businesslike attitude that was very different than Frightful’s personality when standing on her block.  When Frightful was in the air she was
working
.  When she was on the block she was just living.  The difference was as pronounced as the attitude of a dog herding sheep versus a dog napping by the fire. 

But when Frightful was aloft, and Dara was secure in riding her mind, despite the falcon’s focus on prey, Dara enjoyed the feel of flight in a way she didn’t think even Frightful was aware of.  The elation she felt when the bird beat her wings to gain altitude, for example, or the sweet sensation of speed as she dove out of the sky, wings folded, toward the tiniest dot on the ground below, filled her with awe and delight.  The serenity of banking on one wing and turning gracefully in the air was a magic all its own.  And the sense of perspective she got with her new aerial point of view made her privy to a world she never knew existed: the world of the air.

Far from being empty sky, as her human self observed, from Frightful’s perspective the air was alive with birds and insects and other flying things, all dancing around the winds like wildflowers in a breeze.  The higher you went, she quickly learned, the fewer birds there were, but she could always sense precisely where they were through Frightful’s keen perceptions.  Her own mother had returned to the cliff-face after the harsh winter to raise another clutch of eggs, and Dara became acutely aware of Frightful’s reluctance to return to the spot.  Falcons were territorial, she knew, and Uncle Keram had cautioned her repeatedly about invading a wild bird’s space. 

There was a great allure to being able to rest her back against a tree after tossing the falcon into the air and just let her fly, with Dara quietly making subtle suggestions about where to go and what to do.  Under her direction the bird ranged farther away from the woodland meadow, and Dara went with her in spirit.

She spent a morning quietly inspecting Sevendor Castle, through Frightful’s eyes, after she had the falcon perch on the rooftop.  She got to watch the Magelord and his wife return from Chepstan Fair, the glorious entertainment held in a neighboring barony each spring, their castellan Sir Cei looking both troubled and elated . . . what had the big Wilderlands knight done to warrant such anxiety?  Dara couldn’t think of a thing in the world that should trouble the man.

Another afternoon she had her bird skip from one new rooftop in Sevendor Village to another.  Dara barely recognized the place through Frightful.  She hadn’t been there since before the Snow That Never Melted, and she could not believe her eyes – Frightful’s eyes – at the changes that had occurred.  The construction and repairs were the most impressive thing.  Gone were most of the simple round pole houses the villeins of the village had lived in – now long homes of planks and stone bearing newly-thatched roofs filled the street. 

And there was an
actual
street, as opposed to a mere track between two rows of houses.  At least a hundred feet of the center of the village had been cobbled using the white stone that lay under half of the town.  There were buildings and people that she didn’t recognize, a lot of them, and more buildings going up all the time.  At least twenty new houses already stood, and there were twice that many sites where men dug or sawed or hammered.  There were still plenty of tents and shelters out on the Commons, but the Bovali refugees were being quickly resettled as housing became available, she could see. 

She also sent her familiar (as she had begun thinking of her falcon, thanks to Gareth’s advice) to the top of distant Matten’s Helm.  The small mountain dominated the center of the vale, dividing Brestal Vale from Sevendor Vale proper, and loomed over the entire valley like a benevolent spirit.  It was as close to the centerpoint of Sevendor as mattered, and from it she could see into all of the Vale, through her falcon.  Dara had never been that far away from home, in person, but she could see the hill from the entrance to the Westwood . . . and from the air.  In fact, you could see it from just about everywhere in Sevendor.

She spent the day exploring the empty mountaintop and its environs in Frightful’s guise before hunger and a headache forced her to encourage Frightful to return home.  Sending Frightful so far away was risky, she knew, especially at this age.  But then most falconers did not have the option of using magic to affect their charges.  It only took the faintest tug on Frightful’s mind through their rapport to convince her to turn back to her owner’s hand.