Ebon had laughed his snorty laugh. You mean she looks like a pompous half-wit.
A beautiful pompous half-wit who can fly, Sylvi amended to herself.
No, she’s a sweetie really. It runs in the family: she looks just like her dad, and her daughter looks just like her. They’d all give you their last feather if you were cold.
She’d had to tell Garren. She’d almost made him promise not to mention their conversation to Poih, when she realised he couldn’t. And it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d ask your Speaker to say for you. Human people often looked different than you found out they were too: Lord Ranruth, for example, one of her father’s councillors, whom she’d been terrified of when she was little, because he was always wearing a scowl. The scowl was short-sightedness: as soon as you got close enough, his big round face broke into an enormous smile. If people and pegasi were different from the way they appeared, mightn’t their Alliance be different too?
Different how? Why was there no … no feel to it, this great important thing? Why did it seem no more than a silken representation on a banner, this thing that Balsin had called the foundation upon which their country was built? And that made magicians central to their lives? How could it hearten you when you couldn’t feel it?
She’d asked her father shortly after the awful morning that had resulted in Fthoom’s being given his charge, if Fthoom was likely to do it, well, honestly.
The king made a snorting, humming noise rather like a pegasus laugh. “No. But I’ve assigned him a huge number of helpers, which will, I hope, go some little way toward softening the blow of my stripping him from his position in my court and, at the same time, make it harder for him not to do what I asked him to do.” The king looked bleakly into the empty air for a moment and added, “The sad thing is that I’ve meant for years—for most of my working life as king—to set that task. Why aren’t there more stories about friendship between human and pegasus? Even your favourite, Erisika, isn’t quoted much beyond that they fought together as why she considered Dlaiali a friend. But there has never seemed to be the time and the people to do it.”
Sylvi had done a quick intensive study of how to avoid Fthoom. This was made easier by the fact he never went anywhere without an entourage, and by the fact that he had the sort of mind that believed that doing something the same way added to his consequence, so he always used the king’s library’s west portal, which was, of course, the grandest. The drawback was that the king’s library was also the country’s largest and grandest library, so he rarely went to any others, allotting any searching, fetching and carrying tasks to his staff. Before the day of her binding Sylvi had learnt to like finding books in the library—you often found other interesting ones on the way to the one you were looking for—but since the day after her binding she preferred to send messages, like her father, and have the material she wanted brought to her.
The queen one day told her that Fthoom had submitted an interim report saying that the work was going well—
“Which means he hasn’t found anything,” Sylvi interrupted. “He’s not going to find anything because he is determined not to find anything! He doesn’t want there to be any record of real communication—real friendship—between humans and pegasi!”
“No, he doesn’t, but if his committee finds such a record, it will be reported,” said the queen. “And don’t forget Cory and Lrrianay—your and Ebon’s relationship may be unprecedented, but friendship between bondmates is not.”
“Dad said he’s always wanted to appoint a commission to do what Fthoom is doing now, and it had never been the right time,” said Sylvi.
“So there,” said the queen. “We’re getting some use out of Fthoom after all.”
Sylvi tried to smile.
“It will be all right, love,” said the queen. “Remember that the longer it takes Fthoom to find nothing—because I’m afraid I agree he probably will find nothing; if there were anything, it would be a favourite bedtime story, not to mention the basis of dozens of plays and hundreds of ballads—the longer Fthoom takes to find nothing, the more used our people will have become to seeing you and Ebon together. The more normal and ordinary it will be.”
It ought to be very normal and ordinary by now, thought Sylvi a little wryly. She and Ebon were very popular guests at fairs and fêtes and festivals and, with Fthoom on everyone at the palace’s minds, she and Ebon were encouraged to accept as many (carefully screened) invitations as they could bear to. Since Ebon reported that his family felt the same way, they accepted a lot of invitations. Ebon was much better about these occasions than she was. I keep telling you—they aren’t my people. It’s easier for me.
They went with an entourage—just like Fthoom, Sylvi thought without humour. Occasionally, for a very grand one, she wore a frock and rode in a carriage, but usually she and Ahathin and at least one of her attendant guards, plus up to a dozen assorted aides and escorts all travelled on horseback, and Sylvi would pull a princessy tunic over her riding clothes when they arrived. (She also learned to bring a dog-brush on the chance that a hound or two or three would be found to have followed them and could be tidied up to join their company.)
Ebon would meet them there—with at least one pegasus attendant of his own, sometimes two or three; and they would be wearing a few flowers or a few ribbons, or especially vivid examples of the little embroidered bags around their necks that the pegasi often wore. Sylvi’s pony grew very fond of Ebon and would neigh when he saw him, and Ebon would whuffle at him in a way Sylvi found very like the way she would make a conversation out of “Good dog, what a good dog, there’s a good dog, stand still so I can get the knots out, what have you been rolling in?”
Pegasi looked almost more like four-legged birds, standing next to horses. Their necks were longer and their bodies shorter in comparison, their ribs tremendously widesprung for lung space and their shoulders broad for wing muscles, but tapering away behind to almost nothing; their bellies tucked up like sighthounds’, although there were deep lines of muscle on their hindquarters. Their legs seemed as slender as grass stems, and the place where the head met the neck was so delicate a child’s hands could ring it; they moved as if they weighed nothing at all, as if they might float away, even without spreading their wings.
And no human could ever take their eyes off a pegasus’ wings.
Sylvi and Ebon’s entourage stayed watchfully nearby, but the two of them were the centre of attention. All the little children wanted to pet Ebon—Ebon put up with this with unimpaired good humour, while Sylvi tried not to let it show that she felt it was an impertinence, which she did. Not from the children, but from their parents—didn’t they know you weren’t supposed to touch the pegasi? No one ever offered to stroke any pegasus who had come with Ebon—but Ebon was not only the one out in front with the princess Sylviianel, he was also a terrible flirt. He would put his head down till he was eye to eye with a toddler who was smiling and waving at him, and then tap its cheek or its nose with one of his feather-hands. If one too small to walk on its own screamed in excitement and bounced up and down in its parent’s arms he would very likely stamp a foot (gently) and go “eeeeeeeee” back at it. He even gave pony rides to the littlest. The first few times this happened, all the human eyes within range nearly stood out on stalks—the rule about not riding pegasi apparently had filtered comprehensively through the entire population.
Just lift the kid up there and stop fussing, he’d said the first time. Only the tiniest, mind. Nobody big enough to break a feather if they get too thrilled and start kicking, that’s the rule.
After that their invitations came even more often. The most pressing, Sylvi noticed, seemed to be from towns where the mayors and sheriffs and head councillors—and fête organisers—had children or grandchildren old enough to sit up but too young to kick very hard.
But then something else happened. The older children—and far too many adults, who should have been
old enough to know better—began to ask her to ask Ebon questions. Maybe it was the petting and the pony rides. The first time it happened Sylvi was so nonplussed she simply did—the question was so harmless (“What is your favourite colour?”), and the young woman who asked it was obviously trying to make some kind of friendly contact with the pegasus who had been kind to her children—twins, about a year old, and they’d each had a pony ride. And the woman looked so tired—too tired to remember explicit royal prohibitions—and so grateful. And perhaps Ebon’s answer (“The colour of the sky at dawn over the mountain called Cuandoia when we’re in the lower meadows. It’s best in autumn when we’re harvesting the llyri grass for the winter”) sounded a little too mystical, “mystical” not being a word anyone who knew him would apply to Ebon. But the king’s ban against questions, Sylvi and her attendants bemusedly realised, had been translated into “no political questions”: no questions about kings and treaties and government. And magicians. But the people had decided that Ebon was some kind of oracle.
The king, when this was reported to him, himself looked nonplussed and bemused, and then started to laugh. “Why should I have thought it was a simple, straightforward proscription? No questions. How can that be misinterpreted? Very well. I am willing to leave this to your judgement, Sylvi. Keep Ahathin close to you; he’ll intercede if you need him to—if you’re the least bit uncertain, let him do so. And come tell me about it afterwards.”
“And—Sylvi—try to remember not to wander around with your fingers curled in Ebon’s mane, will you? I realise that the—er—pony rides have confused the issue, but I did say something about behaving no differently than any other bound pair. The tradition of no physical contact is as old as the Alliance, and the casualness of your behaviour is disrespectful.”
If he were really cross he would call her Sylviianel, but he was right and she knew it. It was mostly comfort, having her hand in Ebon’s mane, especially on fête days when everyone was looking at them—and it was so easy to put it back there after she’d lifted a little rider down. But there was showing off in it too. “Yes, my sir,” she said.
“Good,” he said.
The pegasi weren’t that uncommon, even outside the palace—even outside the Wall. It was true that they mostly stayed in their own lands, but—Sylvi knew this from her father, but Ebon had told her the same thing—they felt humans needed to see them, and so they made a point of flying over all parts of the country, even the ones farthest from either the palace or their own territory, and stopping to graze and drink at meadows and streams near towns and villages. They never quite grasped human land ownership, and on at least one memorable occasion during Corone IV’s mother’s reign, a small group of pegasi had settled down for a mouthful and a nap on a piece of ground so hotly disputed that no human had set foot on it for a decade. But they knew to stay out of standing crops, because they raised crops themselves.
Any fête or festival big or important enough to host a member of the royal or any baronial family would expect the bound pegasus to attend also; as the presence of the pegasi at the palace was known to promote the welfare of the country, the presence of a pegasus or two at a fête was believed to contribute to the success of the occasion, especially if it were an occasion like a spring or a harvest festival. And there were the open court days at the palace, and occasional parades, all of which would feature pegasi. But ordinary people seemed as stirred at the idea of being able really to talk to a pegasus as Sylvi herself was—which she could understand. Perhaps it was this that had transformed itself into a hope that the pegasi could answer private questions the interlocutors couldn’t answer themselves merely because such questions weren’t about kings and treaties and governments.
Some of the questions weren’t difficult. The little girl with the grey-and-black zurcat in her arms wants to know if it will have any spotted kittens. Spotted zurcats always had spotted kittens. If it’s pregnant it will, replied Ebon with perfect logic.
Sometimes she was surprised at the things the pegasi knew, and wondered why humans hadn’t worked harder to learn some of them. Ebon was very good on weather, for example, and certain aspects of farming. No, he doesn’t want to put veer in this year, it’s going to be a hard winter, it’ll be too cold to grow. Djee would be better—you humans use djee, don’t you?—it thinks a good snow layer is warm and comfy. Maybe the Speakers’ Guild wasn’t very interested in farming.
She’d learnt early on not to ask him the truly oracular ones. The big good-looking girl wearing the red scarf wants to know whether she should marry the blacksmith or the baker.
Tell her she should run away to sea and become a pirate.
The tall man with the scar on his cheek wants to know if the gods live on the moon.
I’ll look around the next time I’m there.
He’ll think you can fly to the moon!
He already thinks we can.
Which was probably true. But what did you do with questions like that? She’d come storming—or rather, she’d walked perfectly calmly, but inside she was storming—from a council meeting where Senator Barnum had wished to discuss her comportment—hers and Ebon’s—at their public appearances, and how they needed to appear sensible and mature. “Mature!” she’d burst out later to Ebon. Mature! And Dad and Ahathin just say that that fat tick Barnum is a citizen too and he’s not the only—the only pompous pudding-head we need to remember will be doing his best to find fault!
Ebon had unfolded and refolded a wing—whoosh snap—and shook his head violently two or three times, which was the nearest a pegasus ever came to angry: Yes. I’ve already had the pitch from Dad, and Gaaloo. I promise not to trample any small children or to sneeze in anyone’s food. If they think we’re so dangerous to concord and prosperity, why do they want us to go?
After a little silence Sylvi said, You know why. Ebon made a half whuffle, half hum, that she knew from the rituals; it meant “our fate is our fate.” But he added, That’s always been a dumb line. It just means shut up and don’t make trouble. Sometimes you have to make trouble. He paused. But this isn’t one of those times. Okay. He sighed a vast gusty sigh—the vast gusty sigh that only a pegasus can sigh—and Sylvi rubbed his mane. And he tried to repress himself—not always successfully—and Sylvi tried to be careful what she repeated back to their human audience.
They saw magicians in the crowds sometimes—never among the people immediately around them wanting answers to their questions—but rather more often at the outskirts of those people than seemed to Sylvi at all reasonable. These were not the village witches, the little wizards, whom they often saw, and who could be expected to come to their local fêtes, but the big magicians, the members of the guilds, who didn’t come to little country fêtes. Except that they did. Sylvi tried to tell herself that before Ebon she hadn’t gone to many country fêtes herself, and maybe guild magicians came to more of them than she realised. But she didn’t believe it.
She rarely recognised any of them, but the magicians’ robes were easy to spot—and the way ordinary people tended to leave space around them. What were they watching for? What were they seeing?
What were they reporting back to Fthoom?
She thought of asking Ahathin about the number of guild magicians she saw, about why there were so many … but couldn’t think how to do so without betraying the intensity of her dislike and distrust of magic and magicians. What had still been half a joke on her twelfth birthday was, since the morning after her twelfth birthday, no joke at all. She often thought, bleakly, that all the things she most wanted to ask Ahathin because he was a magician, she could not, because he was a magician.
Ahathin himself she was glad to have beside her. Ahathin’s presence—and, she had to admit, Glarfin’s or Colm’s or Lucretia’s—made her feel braver; as her Speaker, Ahathin could whisper in her ear, even when he was saying things like “you need not answer that question” or “tell him that i
s a question for a judge.” And most of the questions were innocuous enough—she also learnt to wait, fractionally, for any stir or startle from her entourage. She asked the questions about the pegasi themselves, like how many of them there were (Yikes. I haven’t a clue. Lots. Not as many as you humans, though), or where they lived (See the mountains that start behind the far Wall of the king’s palace? If you fly—er—if you walked, uh, up and down, over those mountains, Rhiandomeer begins on the other side) and if their king lived in a huge grand beautiful palace too (Yuck! No way. Who wants to be trapped in the same old stiff up-and-down walled-in thing all the time, where the sun can only come through the same holes?).
Sylvi had some trouble translating that one. Okay, it’s not trampling children, she’d said crossly to Ebon, but can’t you think of a little nicer way of putting it? Your shfeeahs stay in the same place, don’t they?
Sort of, said Ebon. But most of the walls come off or roll up or something. They’re not made of stones as big as our bodies.
And he answered all the weather-and-crops questions. He was not good about livestock questions: If I knew what would make your wethers grow faster, I wouldn’t tell you. Their lives are short enough before they go to the—the what-you-call-’em—the killer. Let them have their few months in peace. He also knew some odd herbal remedies for things that she didn’t dare pass on because neither of them had any idea whether they’d work for humans or not—although she told her mother, whose best friend was a healer (“the best friend a soldier can have,” said the queen). The queen shook her head. “We’ll have to ask your father.”
“Careful,” said the king.
“Cory—” began the queen. “Dad!” said Sylvi at the same time.
“Sylvi first, I think,” said the king. “Persuade me this is a worthwhile exception—another worthwhile exception—to the rule. You’ll be sixteen soon enough, when everything will change, and you’ll have more—”