Ebon made the noise like a whinny with a hiccup again. I didn’t know pegasi laughed, she said. Well—out loud. Where humans can hear them.
Ebon shook his head so that his already-magnificent mane (pegasus manes didn’t usually come in fully till adulthood) whipped back and forth. The plaits were coming out fast, and it rained flowers. She bent to pick them up.
What a lot of old bores we are with you then, he said, but he said it with less than his usual vigour.
Maybe you don’t find our jokes funny, said Sylvi sadly.
There was a pause, and he answered soberly, I think we’re all too worried about getting along. It’s hard to know what to say to you. Especially since we mostly can’t.
You don’t, said Sylvi. Worry about what to say.
Well, I’m hopeless, said Ebon, recovering his spirits. Everybody says so. You can’t have been drilled any sillier in signing than I was in signing and manners after they decided I had to be your pegasus. Think of the breath stoppings and the heart burstings and the dumbfoundings if they’d had any idea we’d be able to talk to each other!
She’d laughed—she couldn’t help it—and too many people turned to look at her: at her and Ebon, standing a little apart from the rest of the crowd at that moment and only making half-hearted and erratic attempts at signing to each other. And yet she’d laughed. At what?
Silence fell, and the king, as if idly, as if his feet just happened to be taking him in the direction of his daughter, joined them, and with him came Lrrianay. Shortly after this the queen, equally idly, ended her conversation with some cousins, here from the other side of the country for the princess’ binding, and drifted over with Hirishy, whereupon the king wandered away again. No more silences fell, but Sylvi didn’t laugh out loud again either; nor were she and Ebon left to stand by themselves again.
She lay in bed now, staring out the window. Her nurse always pulled the curtains closed, last thing before she blew out the lamp and after she made sure Sylvi was in bed instead of hiding somewhere with a book on hawks or a bridle she’d decided needed a different colour browband. After a few minutes, as soon as Sylvi was sure the nurse was really gone, she got up and pulled the curtains open again.
She had always felt shut in behind walls and doors; she was notorious for going for long tramps over open countryside even in the worst weather. Her father’s dogs tended to jump up hopefully when they saw her, because she took them for longer rambles than her father had time to do. One of the best things that had ever happened to her was when her mother declared that she no longer always had to have a nurse or a groom or a courtier go with her—but she did have to have either a dog or a pony, and she had to tell her mother first exactly where she was going. She wondered if Ebon liked to go for long walks … well, not very likely, was it? He had wings. Who would walk who could fly?
But that wasn’t true. They did walk, he had told her. Flying is tiring, he said. Of course we walk. We walk more than we fly. He had told her too that, while their land centred on the Linwhialinwhia Caves, as Balsinland centred on the palace within its Wall, the pegasi did not live there. This made sense to Sylvi; to the extent that she understood ssshasssha at all, it made the Caves sound like a kind of very large library with pictures instead of books. And she preferred the outdoors herself.
The pegasi spent most of their time wandering through the high wild meadows that were their private country—as specified by the treaty—and foraging, and sleeping out of doors wherever the end of day found them; although they grew and tended certain crops for food, paper, dyes and paints, and weaving. These were planted around the shfeeah, which Sylvi tentatively translated as a kind of small village, where the craftspeople lived, and where other pegasi stayed for a time to help with the crops. The story-tellers and shamans roam with the rest of us, but the sculptors stay near the Caves.
Sylvi had some trouble with “sculptor,” although she heard the word clearly enough and she knew a little about the Caves: it was one of the things you learnt about the pegasi, with the Alliance and the gesture-language. The Caves had been there when the pegasi came, so long ago that even the pegasi only had myths about their origins; but, while extensive, they had been much smaller and far less beautiful. Thousands of years of pegasus sculptors, rubbing and smoothing and chipping and carving, using such small tools as their frail feather-hands could hold, and the Caves were—so beautiful you can’t really stay there long, you want to jump out of your skin and run for it. They’re perfect, you know, even though they’re not finished—will never be finished—it’s part of their perfection, that it goes on and on into the future and you’ll never see it, that us little short-lived mortals create perfection by not being there long, although we keep coming, us and our sons and daughters and their sons and daughters and so on…. Sorry. I’m sounding like a grown-up.
But the sculptors themselves don’t stay inside long—a few weeks or months—and then they come out and join us in the fields for a while, although they mostly don’t like to go far. “Remember how to not fly,” is the proverb: remember how to walk. They come out and join us in the fields. And teach their beginning apprentices sculpting on the pillars of the shfeeah. The Caves knock your Courts hollow, although this one’s pretty nice, he added, looking round consideringly. But it’s only barely just been built.
Sylvi, fascinated, forbore to say that the Outer Court was one of the oldest bits of the palace, over seven hundred years old.
You can see it too clearly, Ebon went on, where it begins and ends, your Court. It’s different in the Caves. The chambers and corridors all open out of each other and weave back and forth like the king’s plaits on coronation day. Very very occasionally, an old sculptor may ask for a decision to rub through a wall—the other sculptors have to agree, and the monarch and the decision-making shamans. It doesn’t happen often. And it becomes a permanent day on our calendar, the day that someone brushes the thin-made place on a wall and suddenly there’s a hole there, even if it took years to scratch open and it will be years more before the hole is big enough to climb through and see what’s on the other side. I was born on Damonay—the day three hundred and twenty-six years before that they had made a hole in Damonay chamber. Ambernia chamber, which is the one they let out of darkness, is all red stone and considered one of the most beautiful in all the Caves, so being born on Damonay is lucky.
Do humans ever go there? To your Caves?
Ebon looked at her, puzzled: head low, chin pulled in, one ear half back. Not that I know of. Humans don’t come to us. We come to you. The Caves aren’t a human sort of thing. He paused and—this was a frown, Sylvi thought: both ears half back, head raised again but held rather stiffly to one side. I … I don’t know. They … they wouldn’t fit around you, somehow. And it’s in the treaty that we’re supposed to come to you.
Sylvi was human enough, and princess enough, to know what that meant in human terms. Don’t you—mind? Mind always coming to us?
Ebon shrugged again—she was sure, now, that it was a pegasus shrug. What’s to mind? That we keep our quiet and our privacy? That we don’t have to worry about providing dead flesh for you to eat? And chairs? I would not be your father, the human king, to have the winning of that old war carried on my back, and on the backs of all the kings and queens after me, until the end of humans and pegasi—and the winning of any other wars. We are free, we pegasi, thanks to you. We are glad to honour you in this way if it pleases you—if it means you’ll go on carrying the burden for both of us. In what Sylvi was already learning was a typical Ebon manner, he added, Mind you, I wouldn’t want to be my dad either—he still has to listen to all the bickering when someone feels left out of some decision—and he has to listen to people like Gaaloo go on and on because usually there’s about six important words in what Gaaloo says that nobody else thinks of and since my dad’s king, he’d better hear them.
Sylvi sat up in bed. Something had moved very
quickly between the window and the stars; something not only swift but large. There—there it was again, higher than the first time—no, gone again; no, not gone; it had banked and turned and—
Ebon folded his wings at the last minute, to fit through the window, and landed, therefore, rather abruptly and rather hard; his knees buckled and he rolled right over, wrapped in his wings, but making surprisingly little noise for all of that. Sylvi was out of bed and kneeling beside him before he scrambled to his feet again. Ow, he said. There must be a better way. Can’t you sleep somewhere with bigger windows?
Are you all right?
He walked once around the room, lifting his legs gingerly. Yes. Don’t worry. We’re taught to fall and roll like that when we’re babies and first learning to fly. They taught me really emphatically because I’ve always been too big. There were a lot of these doomsayers when I was a baby proclaiming that I’d be too big to fly. Ha. But you don’t break anything if you roll. Are you ready to go?
Sylvi, still confused by his sudden entrance, was nonplussed. Go where?
Out, said Ebon mysteriously. Can you get down to the ground without waking anybody up?
Yes, of course, she said. She’d crept down the two stories of wall from her bedroom many times, clinging to the knobbly, weatherworn stone heads of her ancestors—with useful little ridges for her feet where their necks ended—and to the heavy vronidia vine, which seemed to grow just enough bigger every year to go on bearing her weight. There were some nights, when the wind was singing to her and the sky went on forever, she couldn’t stay indoors.
Come on then. He tucked his forelegs to leap over the balustrade like a pony over a fence, but as he jumped his wings sprang out and he soared up, not down, and then turned once or twice (showing off, she thought), before he sailed gracefully down to earth—landing so lightly he made no sound at all. Because of the no-flying-in-mixed-company convention, she didn’t see pegasi flying all that often, except from a distance, and had never had one land so near her. She put her leg over the balustrade, felt around with her foot for Great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Neville’s nose, and began climbing.
Ebon was dancing with impatience by the time she reached the ground. Come on, he said, and led the way quickly through the gardens; she had to trot to keep up with him, and he was very hard to see in the dark, especially as he led her away from the more open flower-beds and into the winding, yew- and cypress-lined paths that surrounded them. In their shadow he disappeared entirely, except for the sparkle of his eye when he turned his head to check that she was still following him, and the just-discernible shimmer of motion as he passed from one shadow to the next. She noticed that he had his wings unfolded from his sides, although they were no more than a quarter spread; there wasn’t space between the trees.
How did you find me?
Spent most of the party trying to work it out. Knew about the palace—I’ve even been here a few times—knew you humans live inside walls all the time. And sleep in special rooms. Asked my brothers as if I was asking just because everything is so bizarre—which it is, how do you sleep all wrapped up like a sickly baby?—where their humans lived—slept. They told me everyone has his own separate cell. Weird. But figured all your sleep cells would be together. Saw your dad and mum standing with their arms around each other at one window, staring at the sky. Okay, that’s where they are, but I wished they’d go away. Then I was lucky: I saw your nurse shut your curtains. She is your nurse, isn’t she?
Sylvi, entranced, said, Pegasi have nurses too?
Eah. Although the kids are all together and then there are several nurses. But I guess I know what a nurse looks like, even when she’s human. And I figured your brothers are too old for nurses. So that had to be your sleep room. I was ready to be really confused and bewildered and apologetic if it wasn’t. I used to wander in my sleep when I was little. I thought I might just manage to bring it off as some kind of reaction to the ritual. That … smoke was really peculiar, wasn’t it?
Yes. It was. But don’t your shamans puff smoke over you for rituals? You have rituals too, don’t you?
Yes. Lots and lots. She could hear exactly her own aversion in his words, although she doubted that shyness was any part of Ebon’s dislike. But the smoke is never like that. It never makes you feel …
Frightened, she thought. Frightened and all alone.
A low laugh. “No, I don’t think so,” said a young male voice.
Ebon and Sylvi froze.
“Well, I’m sure I heard something,” said another voice—a young female voice. “And it sounded large.”
“Our rabbits are enormous,” said the first voice. “Our specially bred Wall guardian rabbits are feared all over the country for their ferocity.”
“Very funny,” said the second voice. “I still want to go back indoors.”
That was Farley, thought Sylvi. I wonder who the girl is?
Come on, said Ebon. They’re gone.
The king’s palace lay in the largest piece of flat ground in the country; the rest of the landscape was a patchwork of plains, hills and mountains, and abundant lakes and rivers. Banesorrow Lake lay within the Wall, and the foothills of the Kish Mountains began near its eastern gate. The shape of the palace plain was irregular, extending several leagues to the southern tip but only a league and a half to the north and barely half a league to the east. But in a perfect circle, magician-measured, at half a league all round the palace at its centre, lay a Wall. The Wall had been erected after the final battle that had given Balsin his country and his kingship, although it had taken the reigns of three kings and three queens and the best efforts of six generations of magicians to finish it. It was twenty feet high and broad enough for a pair of guards to walk on abreast, which they did, because the full circumference was patrolled, guardtower to guardtower, of which there were twelve, one on each side of the six gates.
There were many buildings, homes, offices and administrative buildings, warehouses, markets, shops and smithies that had sprung up within the Wall, although all of those people had, to be and to stay there, a royal warrant to do so. But the palace’s Inner and Outer Courts were reflected in the capital city having the Inner and Outer City, on either side of the Wall, although the doors of the six gates had not been closed in defence in hundreds of years. They were closed on the nights of two holidays, that of the Signing of the Treaty—which had been followed so closely by one of the worst battles of the war that the treaty itself had been lost for a day and a half—and that of the End of the War; which also provided the opportunity to ensure that they were in full working order. Both inside and outside the Wall, the city extended in erratic clusters and doglegs, with gaps for small farms and big gardens and the occasional municipal park. Ebon was leading her to the biggest of these parks within the Wall, on the far side of which lay the lake.
She panted up to him and said crossly, being already sure that he’d led her so briskly to keep her fully occupied not blundering into anything in the dark and therefore less likely to ask awkward questions, All right, are you ready to tell me what we are doing?
He had stopped, and was looking up at the stars—it was a very bright night, with a half-moon brilliant as a torch—and switching his tail gently. His wings were three-quarters open but down, the tips of them trailing softly against the grass. I thought I’d take you flying, he said.
Sylvi was tired. It had been a long day, and while she was still too keyed up to sleep, her mind rattled and buzzed and could not focus, and her intellect veered away from trying to comprehend what Ebon had said. Flying? I can’t fly. I’m human. And in her determination not to understand him she felt angry with him for teasing her.
I know that, he said. Stupid. You can sit on my back. I was trying to decide how. My wings have to be free to flap, you know.
Sylvi burst into tears. At once she felt a warm velvety muzzle against one cheek and a litt
le feathery hand against the other. I’m sorry, said Ebon. You’re crying, aren’t you? You’re sad? I’ve made you sad. I’m sorry. I thought you’d want to. I’ve been thinking about it all day, since I saw how small you are. There’s a story that all humans want to fly, that you dream about it. Like we dream about having large strong hands with wrists. But maybe it’s—you can want something and not want it—I felt that way about being your pegasus. It’s okay if you don’t want to fly. I—I won’t think you’re like Hirishy.
This made Sylvi laugh, which, in the middle of crying, made her choke, and it was a minute before she could breathe or think anything at all. I want to fly more than anything else in the world, she said. But there’s no point in wanting something you can’t have, is there? We’re taught that pegasi are not for riding before we’re old enough to know what riding or flying or pegasi are. It’s like—it would be like trying to steal the Sword or something.
Grown-up rules, said Ebon. Human grown-up rules. You people have too many rules. So, can you get up, or do we need to find a bench for you to stand on? You can’t kick my wing on the way. If I lose any feathers I won’t be able to carry the extra weight. I think maybe if you lie along my back, you can maybe hook your feet under the back edges of my wings.
But Sylvi stood, shivering with fear and longing, and stared at him. I—can’t. It’s—it’s rude. It’s horribly rude.
Ebon was silent a moment. You mean to me, I guess. I think this is another of those things like what you asked me earlier—don’t we mind that we have to come to you and stand around in your Court and take places you give us in your rituals. This is a human thing, this making it matter who stands where. We think that it is mixed up in why you won the war. We do not mind standing where you want us to. If you had not won the war we would not stand anywhere at all.