"Where did you get to?" Veatriz demanded as he burst through the door. "You'd better get ready, we'll be late."
He was already lifting the lid of the clothes press, nosing about for a clean tunic. "You're coming?"
"Well, yes. Had you forgotten?"
He looked at her. She'd changed already, into a plain, straight green gown and low-heeled red shoes. "What? No, sorry." He scowled. "I got trapped at the breakfast talking to this appalling woman, she's jangled my brains so badly I can't think. Yes, of course you're coming too. Where the hell is my suede jerkin?"
She sighed. "You won't want that," she said, "not for hawking. Besides, you'll boil. You want a light linen tunic and a silk damask cotehardie."
"Oh. Have I got…?"
"Yes. In the trunk."
He nodded, slammed the press shut and started digging in the trunk like a rooting pig. "Shoes," he said.
"Boots. You're riding, remember? Wear the ones you had on yesterday."
"They're horrible."
"They were a present from Valens."
"He won't notice if I-"
"He's just the sort who would," she snapped. "When are you going to realize, we've got to be polite to these people?"
He stood up and looked at her. There was a great deal he wanted to say, more than he'd wanted to say for a very long time. He looked away and pulled off his shirt.
"Come on," she said. "Think how it'll look if we keep the whole party waiting."
In the event, they were neither late nor early, and nobody seemed to have noticed that they'd arrived. The main courtyard was filled with horses and grooms (marry for love, not cavalry, the woman had said), falconers and austringers and the hawks themselves on their wrists, bizarre in their tasseled hoods. Orsea realized that he knew hardly anybody there.
"Who's that smiling at us?" he hissed in his wife's ear.
"Pelleus Crux," she whispered back. "Something to do with…"
He didn't hear the rest of what she said, because a hawk bated next to him, its wing slapping his face as it shot off the falconer's wrist and stopped abruptly, restrained by the jesses.
"I'm sorry," said a familiar voice. "I'm new at this, and I guess I must have…"
Orsea peered round the falcon and saw an unmistakable face; brown. "Hello," he said.
Ziani Vaatzes grinned sheepishly at him. "Would you do me a great favor," he said, "and get this stupid bird off me?"
Veatriz giggled. "Go on," she said. "The poor thing's scared out of its wits."
"The same," Ziani replied gravely, thrusting his wrist in Orsea's direction, "is probably true of the bird. Not," he added, "that I care, so long as somebody else takes it."
Orsea smiled, and nudged his finger under the hawk's claws. It stepped up onto it, and he said, "Untie the jesses, I can't take it otherwise."
"The what?"
"The leather strings round its legs. They're tied to your arm."
"Are they? So they are." Ziani fumbled for a moment, and the jesses dropped. Orsea grabbed them quickly with his left hand and tucked them into his right fist. "I'm very sorry," Ziani was saying. "Some fool came and shoved this thing at me. I got the impression it's meant to be a great honor, but-"
"It is," Orsea said. "What you've got here is a peregrine. Nice one, too."
"Peregrine," Ziani repeated. "Hang on, I know this. The peregrine is for a count-"
"Earl, actually," Orsea said. "A count would have a saker. But you're close." He frowned. "Have you been reading King Fashion?"
Ziani nodded. "Not that it's done me much good," he said. "It's hard memorizing stuff when you haven't got a clue what any of it means." He pulled a face, as though concentrating. "You're a duke, so you ought to have a falcon of the rock, whatever that's supposed to be."
Orsea laughed. "Actually, nobody knows, it's been the subject of learned debate for centuries. Most people reckon it means either a gyrfalcon or a gyrfalcon tiercel, but there's another school of thought that reckons it means a goshawk, even though they're short-winged hawks and not really falcons at all." He clicked his tongue. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm told that falconry is the second most boring subject in the world, if you don't happen to be up on it. I can't remember what the first most boring is. Hunting, probably."
Ziani shook his head. "Engineering," he said. "Trust me, I've seen the glazed look in people's eyes when I've been talking at them too long."
"Well, I won't contradict you," Orsea said sagely. "Though I reckon fencing's got to be pretty close to the top of the list, and Mannerist poetry, and estate management. All the stuff I actually know something about," he added with a grin, "which says something or other about an aristocratic education." Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Veatriz; she had that fixed smile that meant her attention was elsewhere; the men were talking, her job was to keep still and look respectably decorative. Of course, he told himself, he didn't think like that; perish the thought. On the other hand, he could have a fairly animated conversation with a relative stranger, but only ever talked to her in questions-where's my shirt, what time are we supposed to be there, did you remember to bring the keys? Well, he thought, marriage. When you know someone as well as you know your wife, there's not a great deal that needs saying out loud (he didn't believe that, but it sounded comfortably plausible). "Anyhow," he said, a little too loudly, as if he'd just caught himself nodding off to sleep, "I'll look after this beauty for you, if you don't want…"
"Please," Ziani said, with a shudder that was only mildly exaggerated for effect. "I'd only hurt it, or lose it or something."
"You don't like the idea of being an honorary earl, then?"
"Me? Not likely. I remember looking at that list in King Fashion, and there doesn't seem to be a species of bird of prey appropriate for a factory supervisor."
Orsea pursed his lips. "No," he said. "Unless a supervisor counts as a clerk, in which case you're entitled to a male sparrow-hawk. You wouldn't want one, though, they're useless."
"Orsea." Veatriz tugged very gently at his sleeve. "They've arrived."
"What? Oh." Orsea looked round, and saw a party of five, already mounted, on particularly fine matching dapple-gray palfreys. Valens was in front, looking pale and uncomfortable in gray velvet. Next to him, the savage woman-the Duchess, Orsea corrected himself-also in gray; next to her, the two uncles, overdressed in fringed, slashed buckskin over scarlet satin; bringing up the rear, the head austringer. All five carried hawks on their wrists. The Duchess looked solemn to the point of sourness, Valens looked apprehensive, and Orsea had the feeling that neither of the uncles was completely sober. Jarnac should have been here, he caught himself thinking; then he remembered that Jarnac (the frivolous, irresponsible buffoon who lived only for hunting and hawking) was still in Eremia, fighting what little was left of the war for the survival of his people. The question is, Orsea asked himself, what the hell am I doing here? To that, of course, there was no sensible answer.
Time to mount; he looked round, suddenly realizing that he no longer owned a horse; but there was a groom standing next to him (hadn't been there a second before, he could have sworn) holding the bridle of a tall chestnut gelding; for him, apparently. He handed the hawk to Veatriz, heaved himself into the saddle, kept still while the groom fussed over the stirrup leathers and the girth, then leaned forward and took the hawk back. It settled comfortably on his wrist, as though there was a socket there for it to snap into. Anybody looking at him would be forgiven for thinking he was somebody important: a duke, say.
Veatriz was mounted too; they'd given her a small, rounded bay jennet and a pretty little merlin, with a green velvet hood. He looked past her to see what they'd brought for Ziani, and was amused to see him heaped up (no other word for it) on the back of a huge, chunky black cob, with legs like tree trunks. He looked very sad, and was clearly trying not to think of how far off the ground he was. At once, Orsea thought back to the disastrous hunt that Jarnac Ducas had organized, not long before the siege of Civitas Eremiae; Ziani Vaatzes had contrived to get himself in the way of a wounded and very angry boar, and it had taken some pretty spectacular heroics from Miel Ducas to save his hide… But Orsea didn't want to remember Miel Ducas just then.