in0 by Hawkmistress

Author:Hawkmistress
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-07-17T17:09:12.510992+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

All the long road to Caer Donn, it continued to trouble her. When she hunted meat for the

sentry-birds, she thought of her laran and feared to use the power for evil, so that sometimes she let game escape them and was roundly scolded by the men. She did use her awareness to seek

out dead things in hill and forest which she could use to feed the birds - they had no further use for their bodies, surely it could not be wrong to use a dead creature to feed a living one. She felt as if she wanted to close up her new skill where it would never be touched again, though she had to use it in handling the birds - surely it could not be wrong to show her fondness for them? Or was it, since she used it to keep them quiet for her own convenience?

There were times when she tried to handle them without calling on the MacAran Gift which she

now knew to be laran, and when they screamed and rebelled, Dom Carlo demanded, "What's gotten into you, youngster? Do the work you're paid to do, and keep those birds quiet!" She had to use her laran then, and again suffer the conflicts as to whether she did right or wrong.

She wished she could talk to Dom Carlo; he had laran and had perhaps suffered some of these same worries when he was her age and learning to use it. Was this what Ruyven had had to

overcome? No wonder he fled from a horse-training ranch and took refuge behind Tower walls!

She found herself envying Darren, who had none of the MacAran Gift and though he feared and

hated hawks and horses, at least he was not tempted to meddle with their minds in order to show his power over them! She could not talk to Caryl, he was only a child, and used his power with pleasure, as she had always used it since she found out she had special skill with horses and used it in training them. And whenever she tried to eat fresh-killed game, it seemed that she could feel the life and the blood of the dead animal pounding through her mind, and she would gag and

refuse to eat; she made her meals of porridge and fruit and bread, and was fiercely hungry in the bitter, aching cold of the mountain trails, but even when Dom Carlo commanded her to eat, she could not, and once when he stood over her until she reluctantly swallowed part of a haunch of the wild chervine they had killed for their meal, she felt such terrible revulsion that she went away and vomited it up again.

Orain saw her coming back from the thicket, white and shaking, and came over to where she

was, with fumbling hands, trying to cut up offal and remainder of the chervine for the

sentry-birds. It was hard to find gravel in this snowy country, and so she had to mix skin and slivers of bone with the meat, or they would have further trouble in digesting.

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