Dimity felt the heat of their eyes like a blow. She looked down at her hands, gripping one another, white at the knuckles, and tried to think of nothing at all.
As the last couple joined one another and the hunters moved to follow, Sylvan left his place and ran to whisper in her ear, “You can just stay here, Dim. No one will even look back. No one will know until later. Just stay here.”
Dimity shook her head. Her face was very white, her eyes huge and dark and full of a fear she was only for the first time admitting to herself, but she would not let herself stay. Shaking his head, Sylvan ran to regain his place. Slowly, reluctantly, her feet took her after him as the hunters followed the hounds through the Hunt Gate. From beyond the wall came the sound of hooves upon the sod. The mounts were waiting.
From the balcony outside her bedroom window, Rowena, the Obermum bon Damfels, let her troubled gaze settle on the back of her youngest daughter’s head. Above the high, white circle of her hunting tie, Dimity’s neck looked thin and defenseless. She’s a little budling, Rowena thought, remembering pictures of nodding blossoms in the fairy books she had read as a child. “Snowdrops,” she recited to herself. “Fringed tulips. Bluebells. And peonies.” She had once had a whole book about the glamorous and terrible fairies who lived in flowers. She wondered where the book was now. Gone, probably. One of those “foreign” things Stavenger was forever inveighing against. As though a few fairy tales could hurt anything.
“Dimity looks so tiny,” said the maidservant, Salla. “So tiny. So young. Trailing along there behind them all….” Salla had cared for all the children when they were babies. Dimity, being youngest, had stayed a baby longer than the others.
“She’s as old as Amethyste was when she rode for the first time. She’s older than Emmy was.” Try though she might, Rowena could not keep her voice from sounding defensive. “She’s not that young.”
“But her eyes, mistress,” Salla murmured. “Like a little girl. She doesn’t understand about this Hunt business. None of it. None of it at all.”
“Of course she understands.” Rowena had to assert this, had to believe it. That’s what all the training was for; to be sure that the young riders understood. It was all perfectly manageable, provided one had proper training first. “She understands,” Rowena repeated stubbornly, placing herself before the mirror, fiddling with the arrangement of her thick, dark hair. Her own gray eyes stared back at her accusingly, and she pinched her lips into an unlovely line.
“Doesn’t,” said Salla as stubbornly, quickly turning away to avoid the slap Rowena might have given her if she could have done it without moving. “She’s like you, mistress. Not made for it.”
Rowena tired of looking at herself and chose to change her ground. “Her father says she must!”
Salla did not contradict this. There would have been no point. “She’s not made for it. No more than you were. And he doesn’t make you.”
Oh, but he did, Rowena thought, remembering pain. Made me do so many things I didn’t want to. Let me quit riding, yes, but only when I was pregnant with the seven children he made me have when I only wanted one or two. Made me ride right up until the time I got old, with lines around my eyes. Made me bring the children up to the Hunt, when I didn’t want to. Made them all like him, all the way he is—except Sylvan. No matter what Stavenger does, Sylvan stays Sylvan. Not that Syl lets on what he really thinks. Sylvan just roars about everything. Clever Syl, to hide his true beliefs among all that bluster. And Dimity stays Dimity as well, of course—but poor Dim—Dim couldn’t hide anything. Would she be able to hide her feelings this morning?
Rowena went back to the balcony and craned her neck to look over the top of the wall. She could see the movements of the waiting mounts, tossing heads, switching tails. She could hear the clicking of hooves, the hruffing sound of a breath suddenly expelled. It was too quiet. Always too quiet when the riders mounted. She had always felt there should be talk, people calling to one another, greeting one another. There should be … something. Something besides this silence.
Outside the Hunt Gate the hounds circled and the mounts waited, shifting impatiently from foot to foot, tails lashing, necks arching as they pawed the ground, all quietly as in a dream where things move but make no sound. The air was warm with their steamy breath, full of the hay like smell of them, the sweaty stench. Stavenger’s mount came forward first, as was proper, and then others, one by one, coming for the Huntsman and for the whippers-in, and then for the riders of the field, the oldest riders first. Dimity stood behind Emeraude and Amethyste, shivering slightly as first one, then the other vaulted up onto the backs of waiting mounts. Soon she was the only one left unmounted. Then, just as she decided that there was no mount for her, that she could slip back through the gate, the mount was there before her, within reach of her hand.
It stared at her as it extended a front leg and crouched slightly so that she could put one foot on the brindled leg, grasp the reins, and leap upward, all as she had done time after time on the simulator, no different except for the smell and the heaving breath which spread the vast ribs between her legs, wider than the machine had ever done. Her toes hunted desperately for the notches between the third and fourth rib that should be there, finding them at last far forward of where she thought they should be. She slipped the pointed toes of her boots
