At that point, her hand encountered the open space of her window, and she grasped the sill with both hands, and hauled herself up and over the stone slab. She swung her legs inside and dropped down to the floor, crouching there for a moment. She took the pheasant out of her mouth and grinned, as her teacher and weapon growled in her mind 'I hate it when you do that. You look like a cat that's just caught someone's pet bird.'
'But it is not a pet bird, Need,' she replied pertly. 'It is my dinner.'
'So is the pet bird for the cat,' the sword said, 'But nobody ever asks the bird how it feels about the situation.' She sat down cross-legged on the bare stone of the floor, and began industriously plucking her catch. 'If it gets caught, it deserves to get eaten,' she told the sword.
'You stole that from the Hawkbrothers.' Need accused.
She shrugged.' So? That does not make it less true. And like all Hawkbrother sayings, it is double-edged. If it gets caught, it deserves to be eaten-to be appreciated, used entirely and with respect, and not robbed of something stupid, like a tail-feather, and discarded as useless.
I honor my kill, and I am grateful that I caught it. If it has a soul, I hope that soul finds a welcome reward.' Need had nothing to say in reply to that. Nyara smiled, knowing that 'no comment' was usually a compliment of sorts.
She put the best of the feathers aside; the large, well-formed ones she would use to fletch arrows, the rest would go to stuff her carefully-tanned rabbit hides. Need had been teaching her a great deal; she had come to this tower with nothing but a knife she had filched from Skif and the sword. Now she had clothing made from the hides of animals she had caught; a bed of furs from the same source, with pillows of fur stuffed with feathers on a thick pallet of cured grasses. And that was not all; over in the corner were the bow and arrows Need had taught her to make and was teaching her to use. Need had already taught her the skills of the sling she had used to take this pheasant.
The sword had also unbent enough to conjure-or steal by magic-a few other things for her, things she couldn't make herself. Not many, but they were important possessions; a firestarter, four pots, three waterskins and a bucket, one spoon, a second knife, and a coil of rope.
The latter was precious and irreplaceable; she had used it only to haul heavy game and her water up the side of her tower.
'Are you going to eat that raw?' Need demanded. She licked her lips thoughtfully; she was very hungry and had been considering doing just that. But the way the question had been phrased-and the fact that her teacher had asked the question at all-made her pause.
'Why?' she asked. 'Is there something wrong with that?' If the sword could have moved, it would have shrugged. 'Not intrinsically,' Need replied. 'But it gives the impression that you are more beast than human. that is not the impression we are trying to give.' Nyara did not trouble to ask just who would be there to observe her.
True, there was no one except herself and her mentor at the moment, but she sensed that Need did not intend either of them to be hidden away in the wilderness forever.
She doesn't want me to seem more beast than human. Need had been trying to reverse the physical changes Nyara's father had made to her; now she had an inkling of why. Need wanted to make her look Less like an animal. Perhaps she should have been offended when that thought occurred to her, and she was, in a way, but rather than making her angry with Need, it made her angry at her father. He was the one who had made so many changes to her body and mind that Need had been incoherent with rage for days upon discovering them. He was the 'father' that had made her into a warped slave, completely in thrall to him, often unable even to act in her own defense.
Need had done her best to reverse those changes; some she had, but they were all internal. There was no mistaking her origin; the slitted eyes alone shouted 'Changechild.' If the world saw a beast-the world would kill the beast. It was not fair, but very little in Nyara's life had ever been fair. At least this was understandable. Predictable.
Mornelithe Falconsbane had never been that, ever.
No one was here to see her now except Need, but when she finished plucking the pheasant, instead of tearing off a limb and devouring it raw as her stomach demanded, she gutted and cleaned it as neatly as any Tayledras hunter or hertasi cook, and set it aside.
She tried not to think about how loud her stomach was complaining as she uncovered the coals in her firepit and fed them twigs until she had a real flame. Once she had a fire, she spitted her catch, and made a token effort to sear it.
Once the outer skin had been crisped, she lost all patience; she seized the spit and the bird, and began gnawing.
Need made an odd little mental sound, and Nyara had the impression that she had winced, but the sword said nothing, and Nyara ignored her in favor of satisfying her hunger.
But when she had finished, sucking each bone clean and neatly licking her fingers dry, the blade sighed. 'Tell me how the hunt went,' she said.
And show me.'
'I saw the cock-pheasant break cover beside the stream,' she said, Picturing it clearly, as she had been taught. 'I knew that the flock would be somewhere behind him.. - .' The stalk had taken some time, but the end of the hunt came as swiftly as even Need could have wanted. She had lost only one of her carefully rounded shot, which splintered on a rock, and took one of the juvenile males with the second. She felt rather proud of herself, actually, for Need was no longer guiding her movements in hunting, or even offering advice. Although the blade could still follow her mentally if she chose, it was no longer necessary for her to be in physical contact with her bearer to remain in mental contact.
When Nyara had fled from the Tayledras as well as her father, she had no clear notion of where she was going or what she would do. She had only known that too many things were happening at once, and too many people wanted her. Their reasons ran from well-intentioned to darkly sinister, and she had no real way of telling which from which. So she ran, and only after she had slipped out of Darkwind's ken had she discovered herself in possession of Elspeth's sword. She honestly had no memory of taking it; the blade later confessed to having influenced her to bear it off, making her forget she had done so.
At first she had been angry and afraid, expecting pursuit; the blade was valuable enough that her father had wanted it very badly. But pursuit never came, and she realized that Elspeth was actually going to relinquish the blade to her. Such unexpected generosity left her puzzled.
