And the king’s Speaker, Fazuur, had burst into the king’s private office. Not even the king’s Speaker entered the king’s private office without being announced.
“Fazuur,” said the king calmly, “if you would be so good as to wait a moment. Pendle will tell you.” Pendle was the footman on king’s-door duty that day.
Fazuur came to a shuddering halt, bowed stiffly and left the room again only very slightly slower than he’d arrived. Sylvi stood riveted, thinking about what she’d just seen—both her father and Lrrianay, and the way her father had put his hand out, and the precipitate arrival of Fazuur. He’d come through the door not like a man late for a meeting, even a man late for an important meeting, but like a man desperate to avert catastrophe.
Sylvi herself had been announced, but casually; Pendle had opened the door and said, “Your daughter, my king,” and waved her through without waiting for a response—which was usual; she would not be troubling her father during his (official) working hours without cause. She had seen him and Lrrianay “speaking” before, without Fazuur present, but she thought she had never seen them speaking so intently.
Her father was now looking at her with mild surprise: he hadn’t heard her announced. “What is it, love?” She jerked herself back to attention. “I—oh—it’s just a note from the head librarian about something Ahathin wants me to read.”
The king smiled. “Ahathin likes frightening the librarians, I think. Let me see. Well. You appear to be studying the beginning of the Alliance.” He made a quick hand-sign at Lrrianay, who bowed his head, holding it down for a second or two in the respectful-acknowledgement gesture.
“Ahathin says every human should study the roots of the Alliance. That if it were up to him every human would. The head librarian says it’s—it’s impertinent to want to understand everything, that what is important is to understand what comes of the things that have happened.” She made the Alliance gesture at Lrrianay, and drew her hand out to one side, which should mean “topic of conversation” or “studying.”
“They’re both right,” said the king.
Sylvi sighed inaudibly. That was exactly the sort of thing her father always said.
“But you can give this to the head librarian.” On the neat scrap of paper the librarian had sent he quickly drew the stylised replica of Balsin’s signature on the treaty of Alliance, which had been the official mark of the reigning monarch ever since. She’d never really thought about this before; she’d seen the mark, over and over again, all her life, and she knew what it was and where it came from. But she looked at it now as if she were seeing it as an older, wiser Sylvi, a Sylvi who had studied the Alliance and who understood what had happened as a result. And she thought of Fazuur, waiting in the anteroom….
She looked up and found both her father’s and Lrrianay’s eyes on her. She bowed to the pegasus king and he bowed back. She hesitated; she had what she had come for—she should go. But she was very curious about what she had just seen. “I thought, after the binding, aren’t you supposed to start talking in your head too, the way the pegasi do, not just hands and mouth?”
She made a brave attempt to sign some of this for Lrrianay—it was considered rude to have a human conversation in front of a pegasus without making the attempt at inclusion, even if there were no Speaker present—but while she knew the signs for the binding and for the pegasi’s silent-speech, she didn’t know how to put them together. This could be her own ignorance, but it was also every human’s experience of the muddle of sounds, words, gesture and sign that was the means by which human and pegasus attempted, and mostly failed, to communicate with each other. You could never quite say what you wanted to; your mind seemed to slip from you, like a sled on a snow-slope, and the language seemed to writhe away from you like a small wild animal you had inadvertently caught: let it go, or it might bite.
“The silent-speech is in the annals,” said Sylvi’s father. “In practise, no. Has Ahathin told you we don’t know for sure how much the pegasi use silent-speech among themselves? We’re guessing—our magicians are guessing. The pegasi may also be using some subtle form of sign and gesture we’re too dull to pick up.” Her father’s hands were moving as he spoke, and he paused and murmured something, and there was a murmur—an answering murmur—from Lrrianay.
“After your binding there’s a … a sense of someone else there, that you didn’t have before, like knowing there’s someone else in a dark room with you. Anything else … it’s rather like weather. Every now and then you have a clear blue day and you can see a long way. Mostly it’s overcast and stormy—and the rain runs in your eyes and you can’t see a thing. That makes our Speakers a kind of … waterproof, perhaps.” He smiled at her.
She took her cue, bowed to each king in turn and left. She’d never heard her father say anything sceptical about the Speakers before…. And the way Fazuur had bolted into the room, as if a taralian were after him …
But everything about the pegasi, and about dealing with them, was rather daunting. It was enough—it was more than enough—that they flew, that they were every human’s secret fantasy, alive and breathing. And then they were so beautiful—it was impossible to get away from the fact of their astonishing beauty in any thoughts or contact with them, any more than you could forget that they could fly, and then you couldn’t help feeling that they must be grand and noble and so on because they looked it.
After the binding itself there were some silly sentences you had to say to your pegasus: “Welcome, Excellent Friend, into this our Court, and the Court of our Fathers and Mothers, and welcome too into our heart this glorious day, that we may be the best of companions for many long years” and so on. “Who wrote this stuff?” she’d said to her father, outraged, after she’d read the script for the first time.
“No one knows,” said her father. “Perhaps it—er—sounded better then, whenever then was.”
“If no one knows who wrote it, and it wasn’t Balsin or Gandam or Fralialal, why can’t we change it?”
“Because, my love, you have to choose your battles, and that one isn’t worth engaging.”
She’d had her mouth open to ask who would care, but she shut it again. There would be people who cared. Great-aunt Moira would care. Senator Barnum would care. Sylvi sighed. It had been sheeting rain on her next-elder brother, Garren’s, twelfth birthday, and the drumming of the rain on the roof of the Inner Great Court was so heavy and loud no one could hear him speak. She had been very little then, and didn’t remember it very well, but she would be relieved if her glorious day was wet too. She was afraid she’d either laugh or forget her lines.
And besides, no pegasus was going to be her heart’s best companion, even with the binding, because how could you be best companions with someone you couldn’t talk to? Except through a magician? What was there to be a companion about? When pegasi came to court, or to a banquet, or some other organised human thing, you had to do things differently because they didn’t sit down and they didn’t eat human food. You couldn’t share your lessons with them because they didn’t read or write like humans. They had sigils and pictograms—they were supposed to have some record of the treaty of Alliance, besides Balsin’s opal, which Lrrianay still wore on important occasions—but mostly they told stories. And they also had the Caves. Sylvi didn’t understand the Caves very well, although Ahathin had tried to explain ssshasssha to her. The Caves sounded like a sort of large three-dimensional history in painting and sculpture. Which might be kind of interesting, but so far as she knew humans never went there.
Sylvi thought she could feel pretty bound to someone who was reading books and taking notes across a table from her, even if they were doing it in a different language (even if when they were released from their lessons they could go outdoors and fly), but she didn’t know how she’d feel about someone reciting a long story. What humans heard of the oral pegasus language was rather shushing and whuffly, and she suspect
ed that listening to a lot of it would put her to sleep, like the sound of the stream outside her window when she stayed with her Orthumber cousins. And she supposed they’d be telling it to a shaman—she wasn’t sure who taught pegasi children—royal humans were usually taught by magicians as soon as they outgrew their first tutors and governesses, so perhaps royal pegasi were taught by shamans. But the pegasus shamans rarely came over the border to human Balsinland, and never stayed long.
It might be an advantage that it was a different language, if they were telling their lessons out loud (if it didn’t put her to sleep); then she couldn’t be distracted listening to the story. But no one ever suggested putting human and pegasus children together for their lessons, and Sylvi wasn’t going to say anything that might make Senator Barnum notice her. She thought about it occasionally—it would be nice not always to be alone, or alone with grown-ups. She was the youngest of the palace children; even her parents’ aides’ children were older than she was. The only time she shared lessons was when she was visiting her cousins, and then they all managed to get out of most of them on the grounds that a visiting princess needed better entertainment than normal boring old lessons.
But there was no getting out of learning her lines for her binding. And so she learnt them. And she bore with being fitted for a new dress for the ceremony, which included the garment-maker having to put the hem up even shorter than he’d already put it up, because Sylvi was even shorter than he’d realised. That’s what measuring sticks are for, thought Sylvi resentfully, but she didn’t say it out loud; and the hem fell to her ankles instead of puddling around her feet on the day.
CHAPTER 3
On the day, her mother came to help her get dressed. Her next-elder and next-elder-after-that brothers had already been in to say “best birthday ever,” which you said anyway but you said it specially emphatically if it was someone’s binding day. Emphatic from Garren or Farley was a bit like being whapped by the master-at-arms with the flat of your wooden practise sword, but they didn’t stay long. When they’d shown an inclination to linger to tell Sylvi stories of all the terrible things that had happened on various binding days over the centuries, the queen had suggested that they might help the housefolk carry the long tables for the banquet into the Outer Court, thus leaving more of the housefolk free to get on with things that needed tact or skill.
Their pegasi had come with them. Poih, Garren’s pegasus, had given her a salute she’d never seen before, with the wings swept forward and the tips of the first few primaries interlinked, and the tiny alula-hands clasped. Even doing it discreetly took up a lot of room: pegasi wings were necessarily enormous. Sylvi was sure it was more than she deserved, and made her new long complicated binding-ritual bow back, because it was the fanciest one she knew.
Oyry, Farley’s pegasus, had just barely, or not quite, brushed the back of each of her hands with a wingtip, which was a salute she knew, and knew to be a great honour: not only did it just or not quite defy the ban on physical contact between pegasus and human, it was a reference to the longing humans had for wings and pegasi for strong human hands. Then he smiled a pegasus smile at her, which involved ears going in different directions and a wrinkled nose which did not expose the teeth. She’d been startled, and startled into wondering if perhaps she’d underestimated her brothers’ pegasi. It was a point of honour as a much-patronised little sister to underestimate her brothers. But it was so hard to guess anything about any pegasus, and she wondered uneasily what Oyry or Poih might know about her pegasus, who was, presumably, their little sister. And then they went after their human princes, leaving Sylvi alone with her mother and her mother’s pegasus, Hirishy.
Hirishy was small even for a pegasus, and timid, without any of the usual pegasus grand manner; she was not the pegasus queen but only her half sister. Sylvi’s father hadn’t been expected to marry her mother; he was supposed to marry Fandora. Fandora was the eldest child of Baron Sarronay, whose family was one of the oldest, wealthiest and best-connected in Balsinland, and the Sarronays had more than a few royal consorts in their family tree already. The royal council, who determined how far the net of binding should be cast each generation, with an eye to history and the volatility of human affections, decided to bind pegasi to as many of the marriageable young female cousins as possible. But the royal pegasus family of that generation was not large enough for all the human cousins, and so two or three of the least-probable queen candidates had been given third cousins or half sisters. Eliona had been considered the least-probable candidate of all: she was known to be married to her regiment.
But there was a scandal too. Sylvi only knew because Farley told her: once King Corone IV had become engaged to Lady Eliona, Fthoom, who even then was the most powerful member of all the magicians’ guilds, had suggested that the future queen be bound to another, more suitable, pegasus—“Which there wasn’t one, of course, and he knew it,” said Farley with relish: Fthoom was not popular with any of Sylvi’s family. “And the king said no, of course not, no one has ever been re-bound, and he would not offer such an insult to our allies. And that’s when”—Farley’s voice sank to a near whisper—“that’s when Fthoom suggested our mother shouldn’t be queen!”
Sylvi listened to this with her mouth a little open. She’d been afraid of Fthoom her entire life and considered her father braver than a soldier facing a taralian with a broken stick for standing up to him. “He said that?”
“Oh, not in so many words—not even Fthoom would dare. But it was pretty clear what he meant. And Dad said that as a way of covering up the total failure of the guild of forecasters to predict who would be queen—because you know the forecasters sweated like anything over who got which pegasus—it was a pretty poor showing.”
Sylvi went cold with fear and then hot with admiration. She had seen Fthoom with her father often, and Fthoom was a big man and her father a small one, but there was never any doubt who was the king, despite the fact that Fthoom invariably came to the palace wearing the magician’s spiral and his grandest, most vivid magician’s robes, and her father was usually dressed in something soft and dark and floppy. “Farley, how do you know this?”
Farley said airily, “Oh, everyone knows that story. And the only people who won’t tell it are Mum and Dad. I bet even Ahathin would tell you.”
Sylvi had not dared ask Ahathin, but she had asked Danacor. Her eldest brother was hopelessly solemn and dutiful and responsible, but he didn’t like Fthoom any better than any of the rest of them did. “Oh, that old story,” he said. “Yes, it’s true enough, but—” He hesitated, and Sylvi held her breath, because Danacor, as the king’s heir, knew all the best stories, and occasionally was still young enough to tell them. “The real scandal is that Hirishy was bound to Mum in the first place. When it’s just sovereign-heir to sovereign-heir, like Thowara and me, it’s easy. But when it’s half a dozen girls, five of whom will be farmers or soldiers and the sixth will marry the king, you’re supposed to try to make some attempt to match personalities. By the time Mum was twelve she already had her first war-horse, you know? And they bound her to Hirishy?”
Sylvi was troubled by this story. She liked Hirishy—liked her, not the way she liked Thowara or Lrrianay, but almost as she might like another human. She had once been trying to say something to her, something about the way families behaved and how you loved them even when you wanted to kill them—it had been a day when her brothers had been especially exasperating—which was a lot more complicated than she was used to saying in her own language, let alone to a pegasus. She had no idea why she had been trying to do something so bizarre, and so doomed to failure. But there was something about the way Hirishy seemed to listen. It drew Sylvi on. She’d stumbled to the end of her signing and stopped, feeling a fool … and Hirishy had put her nose to Sylvi’s temple, like a kiss from her mother, and left her.
Sylvi had slowly put her hand to the place Hirishy’s nose had touched. That had been
almost as strange as what had gone before: you didn’t touch the pegasi, and they didn’t touch you. She thought it was probably a good rule; if it weren’t positively forbidden, the urge to stroke the shining glossy pegasi would probably be overwhelming. She was sure that a pegasus flank would make the sleekest silkhound feel as rough as straw; but the pegasi were a people, like humans, and must be treated with respect. (And you mustn’t ever, ever ride a pegasus, which was the first thing that every human child, royal or not, on meeting or even seeing its first pegasus, wanted to do.) Sylvi had been very young when she had realised you had to be more careful of the pegasi because the humans were dominant: because the pegasi came to the human king’s court, and the pegasus king stood behind the human king’s shoulder. But Hirishy had touched her.
She had in fact three times touched Hirishy. She didn’t remember the first time: her mother had told her about it. She had grabbed a handful of Hirishy’s forelock when Hirishy had bent a little too low over the baby lying on the queen’s bed, and rubbed her face against Hirishy’s velvet nose. “You were too little to understand about kissing, but kissing is still clearly what you were doing!” The queen, both laughing and horrified, rescued Hirishy—but not before Hirishy had kissed the princess back.