Pegasus

CHAPTER 15

Usually there were other pegasi with them, or nearby; in all the big chambers they entered there were sculptors working, with their tiny knives and brushes and picks and whisks and rubbing cloths, and they were in some of the smaller rooms and alcoves too, and occasionally in the corridors. She was told she might watch them, if she wished, so long as she did not speak to them or touch them or their tools or otherwise disturb them. But once one spoke to her.

Welcome, small human child, daughter of the bond-friend of our king, and bond-friend of our king’s son.

Oh—I’m sorry—I’m not supposed to—

You did not disturb me, said the pegasus. I disturbed myself, that I might speak to you. So it is true—you can speak to us, and he laid his brush down and turned fully round to look at her. She had to stop herself from blinking or fidgeting under that steady regard, but there was nothing hostile in his look or his posture. His neck was gently arched, his body relaxed, tail lying flat, and when he laid his brush down, he folded his wings only loosely. He nodded his head in an acknowledgement not unlike the similar human one and then held it down longer in an almost-bow and said, I am honoured to meet you, little girl, king’s daughter.

She didn’t mean to, but thoughts and silent-speech still got confused, and she said so that he could hear her, I am not little.

His laugh started with the nose-wrinkle smile and ran in ripples all the way to his hindquarters. He was a dappled brown, and his dapples twinkled as he laughed. He was smaller than Ebon or Lrrianay, but not so small as Hibeehea. I beg pardon, he said. When I was younger, I went several times to your palace, and I have seen a few humans, and they were great clumsy creatures. You are not. You are smaller than I was expecting. Smaller and neater.

For an awful, heart-stopping moment she thought—He’s guessed about Ebon and me, he knows about the flying!—and she clutched that thought to her as she might clutch an escaping puppy, all legs and wriggle, that the sculptor should not hear it too. I am sorry, she said. I have always been . . . among humans I am too small. She thought—and pushed that thought forward, toward the dangerous speech boundary—of the years she had spent sitting on cushions so she could eat supper with her family, and the fact that she still used a child’s sword in the practise yard.

You are not too small here, he replied. Here you are just right.

She couldn’t help smiling. Thank you, she said, but her eyes drifted to the wall, where the pegasus had been working. Sometimes the walls were sculpted only, but here there were colours too: yellows, browns, umbers, dark reds and blues and greens. She thought she saw tree shapes, and if they were tree shapes, she thought she saw bird shapes among their branches.

It is the Forest of Areeanhaaee in autumn, said the pegasus. Where we hold our main harvest festival, and the birds sing so loudly you cannot hear the sound of hundreds of us running the great rune-sign that is laid out as a path among the trees.

There is so much I—we—humans don’t know, she said sadly. I do not know the Forest of Areeanhaaee, although Ebon has told me something of your festivals.

You know more now, said the pegasus. And you will take it home with you, and tell other humans, and you will tell it well, because you have been to the Caves and spoken to its sculptors. You will find the Forest and the festival on many other walls here, till it is more familiar to you than if you had been there—because that is what happens in the Caves. He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, and then unfolded one wing, and tapped the bead that hung round her neck with a tiny feathery finger. That is nicely done, he said.

Ebon made it for me, she said proudly, and looked round for him. He was standing with his father, but as if he felt her gaze on him he immediately looked toward her. He made a tiny, curiously stiff bow of acknowledgement to the sculptor she stood with, and looked away again. Surprised, she looked at the sculptor, who was smiling.

He works hard, said the pegasus. The extra burdens on him must make him weaker or stronger, and they have made him stronger. We are all bound by what fate chooses for us. I am proud of him. I am proud of you too, not-little Sylvi. And he turned away from her, and picked up his brush again.

They walked farther and farther into the labyrinth of the Caves, and while Lrrianay went always in the lead Sylvi was glad of the presence of the shaman, even when that shaman was Hibeehea—although she could not have said why she was glad, nor why she knew that Lrrianay depended on him too. Sylvi also knew by the third time they stopped to rest and eat that they would not leave at nightfall, that they would sleep in the Caves. But her fears of the morning seemed long ago, almost as long ago as the last time she had seen her father. By that third stop—leaning against a wall with a candle in a niche just over her head, a piece of bread in one hand and a handful of dried plooraia in the other—she had already watched the signing of the treaty and spoken to the sculptor; nor had her sense of ssshuuwuushuu left her. She was still aware of the weight of the mountain over her head—and it was by this that she knew that they were going farther in—but she also sensed Cuandoia looking out over his domain, and felt no apprehension.

They slept in special chambers that the pegasi had hollowed out or closed off from the surrounding Caves for this use. These were small and plain, but Ebon taught her to recognise them by the small low doorways and the scatter of single flowers carved round the openings—and in each there was a strong draught of fresh air, like opening a window before you went to bed in your bedroom. (There were equally mysteriously well-ventilated little water-closets at irregular but frequent intervals along the corridors, awkward but not impossible for a small human to use, and with sweet-smelling rushes scattered on the bare floors; there seemed always to be one close to a bedchamber.)

At their first evening halt she was missing the prospect of hot food very badly—if it was evening, and if it was the first and not the fifth: the breadth and balance of sshuuwuushuu or no, Sylvi was so exhausted that she was occasionally putting a hand against a corridor wall to push herself upright. Some weary longing for sky and grass and trees had also crept into her consciousness, and she was cold and stiff and feeling her most homesick and alien, but she was careful to say (and think) nothing about it, and tried not to let her drooping spirits be too visible to her companions.

But she was tired enough that the moment they walked into one of the little rooms and there were a few of the familiar bags and panniers of her journey with the pegasi waiting for them, she sat down at once, as if her knees had given way. Ebon dropped down to lie beside her, and put a wing round her, and she felt more relaxed and a good deal warmer immediately. She leant back against his shoulder and sighed. You should stuff mattresses when you moult, she said. You’d make a fortune selling them to us.

What would we do with a fortune? said Ebon. Our old feathers go with the rest to fertilise our fields. But I’ll save you some if you like. They’ll keep you a lot warmer and softer than dumb old duck or goose.

Lrrianay and Hibeehea were still standing, and she tipped her head back to look up at them. Pegasi didn’t stand up as much as horses did, but they didn’t immediately sit or lie down when they were tired the way humans did either. She still had to listen carefully to understand pegasus speech, and it generally had to be addressed to her for her to understand it; two of them speaking quickly and emphatically to each other made a musical, if in this case somewhat edgy, noise in her head, but was entirely untranslatable. The one thing she thought she could pick out was that Lrrianay and Hibeehea’s body language declared they were not happy with each other.

She felt the ripples running along Ebon’s skin and realised he was laughing. What? she said.

It’s about how we’re going to sleep, Ebon said. You’re such a little bit of a thing anyway—

I wish everyone would stop calling me little, she muttered.

Little bit of a thing, repeated Ebon firmly, and you haven’t even got any hair to speak of, let alone feathers, and bony—

I am not bony! she said.

And the ground here is rock where it isn’t dirt, hard-trodden dirt, and you’re going to have kind of a rough night. Nights, because after your—after what’s happened today we’ll be here as long as we can.

I am not pathetic, she said, trying to sound not pathetic, trying to remember how she had spoken to Lrrianay and Hibeehea after she had watched the treaty being signed—remembering the sculptor saying, I am proud of you too. Trying not to quail at the prospect of more days without daylight. She said, I know there are two blankets because I rolled them up myself. They’re in that pannier right there. I’ll be fine.

So the obvious thing is that you sleep with me, continued Ebon as if she had not spoken. But Hibeehea is getting his tail in a bramble because it’s not proper.

We travel, you know? We don’t have houses and beds. When you’re little you sleep with your parents and when you’re a little bigger you sleep with each other. About the time you’re old enough and big enough not to need someone else’s back or wing to keep you warm all the time, if you do sleep with someone else it had better be an elderly relative or someone of your own gender. We don’t make love lying down the way you do—I don’t think we can—but it’s the same idea. Mwrrrala—um, pairing off, what do you say, wedding?—sometimes happens really young, and if you’re both the same gender it doesn’t matter, but we’re really strict that mixed gender hrmmmhr pairs don’t produce babies too young, and sleeping together is seen as encouraging, uh, intimacy. So people our age . . . Dad is saying you and I are not the same species and the rule doesn’t apply. Hibeehea is quoting a lot of dusty old chronicles at him about incorrect behaviour leading to moral ruin. None of which apply to bond-humans in the Caves, but that’s not stopping him. Shamans get like this—the chronicles are more real to them than we are. Sculptors can get like that too about what’s on the walls here....

Sylvi could feel herself blushing, but she sank down a little farther till Ebon’s wing was covering her face as well. And she was so worn out she fell asleep—even without her blankets to pad the hard ground—and didn’t move till the smell of hot food woke her. Hot food: they had made her soup. There were carrots and djee and dumplings floating in it. Oh—thank you, she said, again trying not to sound pathetic. Ebon stood up and shook himself before moving over to the great heap of llyri grass that Lrrianay and Hibeehea had already begun on. Little, he said. And bony.

But she was too busy eating to reply. The soup smelled of daylight—as did the grass—and suddenly a few more days in the Caves was wonderful—was nothing like enough.

Some time during the second day the Caves became . . . she didn’t know what to call it. Normal was the best she could do, but that wasn’t it; but common or ordinary was worse—was all wrong. It was reassuring and frightening all at once, the normality. It was a little like the evening she had met Niahi and had begun to hear the other pegasi speaking; it was an enormous thing, a glorious and sublime thing—but she feared it too, feared it drawing her away from her life, from her humanity—to where? She remembered her father’s unspoken words: They were weaving a net to pull you away from us. She looked at her hands often, in the company of the pegasi; but she looked at their wings more often.

But some time during the second day she found herself walking with a longer stride, breathing more deeply, looking around more freely. She saw the Forest of Areeanhaaee several times, and once she heard the birds singing, and once she heard the faint, ghostly thunder—because pegasi never thunder—of hundreds of galloping pegasi. She saw the first meeting of Doaor and Marwhiah, when the two tribes of pegasi met, who would decide to unite; she saw how the pegasi learnt to sow crops and to build pavilions and shfeeah, to knap flint and press fibre into paper—and many times she saw the finding of the Caves. She saw the greearha—the crowning—of many kings and queens, and their families and shamans and carrfwhee, their court. But most of all she saw trees, flowers, running water and quiet lakes; birds and deer and nahneeha, frogs and toads and newts, butterflies and fish and iorabaha.

She was in the pegasi’s Caves, and she had been invited; she was welcome. She did not think of where Lrrianay and Hibeehea took her; she followed, and she looked. The Caves themselves seemed to beckon to her, even to summon her, and everywhere she looked her eye was drawn farther: every leaf on a tree, every feather on a bird, every hair on a nahneeha, had a clear individuality.

Sculptors don’t sculpt, you know, Ebon said. They set things free.

As a welcome guest, she wanted to take in as much as she could; she found herself murmuring to the vivid walls, as if they had begun a conversation. When a sculptor bowed to her she bowed in return, gladly—perhaps almost as gracefully as a pegasus herself. And her second, third and fourth nights in the Caves she dreamt of flying, but they were joyous dreams, and when she woke again, wingless and human, curled up against Ebon’s side and warm beneath his feathers, the joy remained.

And on the fifth day, as they climbed the last gradual but steady incline to the door to the outside world, her feet dragged, and she was clumsy again, who had not tripped over a hummock in the floor for three days. It was difficult for her to take that final step across the threshold, even knowing that she would stand under the sky again, and hear the wind in the trees, and walk on grass. It was difficult, because she loved the Caves—and because the Caves too held sky and wind and trees and grass—and she did not know when she would see them again.

And after she left the Caves, although she still had several days remaining in the pegasi’s country, it was all about leaving, about saying good-bye.

The first person she saw as she came out of the Caves was Niahi.

There were other pegasi present, but as she took that last step across that threshold, with her arm lying along Ebon’s crest and her hand buried in his mane, Niahi took a hesitant step forward, and Sylvi’s eyes focussed on her. Oh, Niahi, said Sylvi, you’re right about the Caves. They’re amazing and wonderful—and scary—and very, very full. And then the tears came—she hadn’t known she was going to cry—but once she started she couldn’t stop. Oh, why am I crying? I don’t want to cry!

Niahi trotted forward from what Sylvi dimly realised must be an official welcoming party. The queen followed her daughter, and the two of them stood near Sylvi as if protecting her from a cold wind, or even an attack from an enemy. Lrrianay joined them, and Sylvi was the hub of a little wheel of pegasi. She dug both her hands into Ebon’s mane and tried to stop crying, tried to stop her legs from trembling and her back—where no wings grew—from aching, aching, as if when she left the Caves she had again taken up a burden too heavy for her—or as if she were leaving her wings behind.

Hibeehea appeared between Lrrianay and Ebon, who made room for him, but Sylvi stumbled as Ebon moved, trying to press herself away from the pegasus shaman, whom she was suddenly afraid of as she had been at the beginning, poor human thing that she was, wailing like a baby, her nose running and her tears dripping off her chin.

No, child, youngling, you have nothing to fear of me.

And she couldn’t even keep her thoughts to herself.

With something she recognised as amusement, Hibeehea continued, Speech is a skill like any other. Do not your babies shout when they learn new words? Fall down when they are learning to walk? I believe human and pegasus children have these things in common. And our children often weep when they visit the Caves for the first time.

But I’m falling to pieces, she thought, but she knew he heard her.

You are not. Five days is a long time to be in the Caves for anyone but a sculptor or a shaman; no one is expected to remain in the Caves five days on their first visit. But we did not have time to be gradual. We wanted you to see.... Child, may I touch you?

She had entirely forgotten the human ban on touching pegasi; the silk of Ebon’s mane and the velvet of his shoulder were as familiar to her as his words in her head, and since she had been here in their country, especially since she had first heard Niahi, she had fallen in with the pegasus habit of touching each other as they spoke—of touching as part of communication.

Except the shamans. She learnt, without realising she had learnt it, to recognise the shamans partly by the fact that no one touched them, except formally, and with permission first formally granted. She had been presented to several other shamans after her dramatic first meeting with Hibeehea, but she had known, before she had been told, that they were shamans; she had thought it was the slightly aloof, rather regal austerity they all seemed to bear that gave them away; it took her a little while to realise that an important clue was that no one touched them. And they did not touch you. She thought now that she could still feel the spot where Hibeehea had touched her—so lightly and briefly—with the tips of his pinions, at the end of that first meeting, so long ago. She hadn’t thought about it at the time; only that she’d needed to prevent herself from flinching.

Ye-es, she said now, hiccupping through her tears even in her mind-speech. I—I would be honoured.

He unfolded his wings with a tiny, curiously silvery noise like the faintest distant sound of ringing bells, and reached his feather-hands toward her, and touched her temples. It was not a quick brush of blessing, this time. He touched her, and left his fingers pressing gently against her skin.

It was like . . . the warmth of summer with the endless skies of a cold winter day; the bursting greens of spring and the rich russet-gold of autumn. It brought her back into time, into her body; her feet were on the earth, her hands were tangled in Ebon’s mane, and Hibeehea’s feather-hands were touching her temples. Some thing, some energy, passed between them, real as his hands on her face, something . . . slow, liquid, viscous . . . something tawny or golden, like barley syrup or honey. Without meaning to, she let go of Ebon’s mane with one hand and held it out, cupped, as if the syrup-honey were a real liquid being poured.... She looked down, and something translucent pale gold was pooling in the palm of her hand. She raised her hand to lick it off . . . and saw a woman standing smiling at her, holding a small ewer whose lip glinted with the amber yellow that also lay in Sylvi’s hand.

As Sylvi’s tongue touched the little shining puddle, the woman said, “We’re not all bad. Don’t make that mistake.”

Sylvi said wonderingly, “You’re a magician.” The taste in her mouth was a little like barley syrup, a little like honey . . . but most like something else. Something sublime.

“I am.” The woman laughed. Her hair was grey and her hands gnarled, but she laughed like a young woman.“Your amazement is not flattering. Minial is a magician. Ahathin is a magician.”

“Yes. I—I sort of keep forgetting. Minial mostly knits. And she talks to you like you’re just another person. Ahathin does too. Athathin doesn’t—he doesn’t act like a magician.”

“How should a magician behave? Ahathin is a very good magician.”

“Is he? Who are—oh”—because at that moment she realised that some of the dark dappled shadows in the trees behind the woman was a pegasus, coming to join them. He was a dark iron grey—not quite so dark as Ebon’s blackness—and as he stepped out of the trees and the sunlight struck him, he briefly glinted silver, and she found herself bemusedly thinking of the Sword: so too did it flash suddenly, as if it were alive, like a pegasus or a human was alive. She looked at him wonderingly. Pegasi were nothing like swords.

I am Redfora, said the woman. This is Oraan.

She knew at once and without thinking answered silently, as the woman had spoken: You’re bound.

We are, said the pegasus.

But—magicians aren’t bound.

Occasionally they are. I too am the daughter of a king. And Oraan is the son of another.

But—Sylvi had only just realised they were using mind-speech—And you can speak to each other!

Yes.

Why have I—why don’t we know about you? Who is your father? Are you queen after him? I need to know about you—Fthoom—Ebon and I—

But they were gone, and she was standing outside the Caves with Hibeehea’s hands on her temples, and she had stopped crying. Hibeehea was looking into her face as she blinked and looked back at him.

He said, Are you with us again here, little one?

Redfora and Oraan, she thought. Yes. A woman gave me— She looked down; she was still holding her hand out, elbow bent and palm up, but there was nothing in it now. Hibeehea dropped his hands and stepped back.

I am further in your debt, she said, and bowed.

We are more in yours, said Hibeehea. Who is the woman you saw?

Do you know a human king’s daughter named Redfora, bound to a pegasus named Oraan, son of his king?

There was a pause, and gestures she didn’t recognise flickered over both Hibeehea and Lrrianay. If they were human, she thought, they would look at each other. She thought there was a quick burst of silent-speech between them. She couldn’t hear any words, but she felt Ebon, as she was still leaning against him, startle.

It was Lrrianay who answered her. They are a tale out of legend. She was great-granddaughter to Balsin, your first king—so the story goes. She was the eldest child of her father, but while that should have made her queen, her brother said she was not fit, because she had trained as a magician. Lrrianay paused. And because she could speak to her pegasus. That is almost as much of the story as there is. No one knows what the people thought, nor what the king thought, nor if the brother was honest—nor why she trained as a magician, for your monarch’s family does not take such apprenticeship, I believe.

The only other part of the story is that the question was never put to trial, because while her father was still king, she—and Oraan—disappeared.

Lrrianay stopped. After a moment Sylvi said, Disappeared?

That is all the story says. That, and that either her father or her brother declared that her name should be erased from all records of the realm.

Sylvi found herself wrapped fiercely in a large black wing as Ebon said, Well, we aren’t going to disappear.

Let go, said Sylvi. I’m going to break feathers just by breathing, you’re holding me so tight. Of course we’re not going to disappear. And I’m not a magician. I’m not the oldest, either, and Danacor is very honest—and there’s Farley and Garren after him too. She thought of the sharp silver flash as Oraan stepped into the sunlight. I wonder if anyone asked the Sword what it thought about Redfora?

I hope they ran away, said Niahi. I hope they ran away because everyone was being so stupid. I hope they ran away to somewhere really nice.

So do I, said Hibeehea. So do I.

They flew with the rising sun almost at their backs, now, back toward the border with the human land, but they did not hurry, and it took them four more days. Sylvi noticed that on the second day they flew more north than west and toward evening there was a silver dazzle in her eyes as well as the red-gold sun-dazzle.

Dreaming Sea, said Ebon.

But that’s—that’s a legend, said Sylvi. Like—Redfora and Oraan.

I think everybody has a Dreaming Sea, said Ebon. You may have a different one. This is ours. And it’s a legend too. The water’s still wet, though.

Hibeehea stood as if waiting for them as Sylvi’s troupe landed, galloped, halted and let her gently down. She wiggled out of her ropes and blanket, looking at him looking at her. She waited till Ebon had been helped out of his harness, so she didn’t have to approach Hibeehea alone.

It is at my request we are here, Hibeehea said, and turned, in obvious expectation that they would follow, and led the way through the long grass and the last ragged row of trees. The water whispered against the shingle, and Sylvi stared out across it till the water met the horizon, and imagined the folk standing on the opposite shore somewhere, staring back toward them. Were they human or pegasi or something else? She had been to the rocky seacoast of her own country only rarely, but she remembered the astonishing expanse of water, the sense of standing on the edge of another world, a water world; this was different yet. At home she knew the names of the other ports, the countries on the far side of the ocean; this was a Dreaming Sea. . . .

Watching the silky, late-afternoon-sunlit ripples moving toward them, listening to the tiny gasping noises they made as they broke on the shore, she said, Our stories about the Dreaming Sea say that if you sail on it, you can sail for ever and ever and will never get out of sight of the shore you set out from, and never catch sight of any other shore. But I don’t know where it is. I don’t think it can be this one; Viktur mentions it in his journal as something they left behind. And he quotes Balsin saying as a kind of joke that he’d decided to climb the mountains that lead to the wild lands and see what was beyond them because he was afraid Argen would order him to take ship and cross the Dreaming Sea, to be rid of him. It was the most she’d ever said in Hibeehea’s hearing, and she thought, I never heard that the Dreaming Sea makes you brave.

It is called the Dreaming Sea because it is said that if you sleep beside it you will dream true, said Hibeehea.

Eah, said Ebon. If you’re desperate enough, you swim in it first and then lie down on the shore sopping wet, and near enough that the water touches you. Not recommended during the winter. And I’d’ve thought your dreams would still only be about how uncomfortable you are.

I wanted you to see it, said Hibeehea, ignoring Ebon, because whether you have trained as a human magician or not, you are half a shaman with no training whatsoever—that you saw the signing of the treaty in the Caves, and that it was Redfora who brought you back when I called you proves this. Part of our shamanic training involves drinking the water of the Dreaming Sea—and we sleep beside it, but contrary to Ebon’s folklore, we choose a comfortable spot. I do not suggest you drink from it, Sylviianel, for the dreams it brings can be very powerful, and you have seen and done enough this three weeks. But I do suggest that you take a little of it away with you. I think the day may come when you have great need of a true dream.

Hibeehea was wearing another little pouch around his neck on a string, and he dropped his head and rubbed the string over his ears with a foreleg, then knelt by the water. He loosened the mouth of the pouch with his teeth, laid it down, nudged it over with his nose, and a small stoppered bottle rolled out.

After over a fortnight in their country Sylvi was still not accustomed to the way the pegasi did things—the way they had to do things—because their hands had no gripping strength. At the palace the pegasi were rarely seen doing anything but being splendidly elegant—and, she thought now, that was partly because they were rarely seen to do anything except stand at the shoulder of their bound human or a little behind the bound pegasus they attended, as Lrrianay’s courtiers did. It was some of why they seemed so enigmatic—and some of why the humans seemed so much in command. But she wondered now if some of that tradition came from some human, long ago, perhaps even Balsin himself, wishing to preserve his allies’ dignity against human foolishness. It would be easy, in human terms, to think less of a shaman seen kneeling, using his teeth and his nose.... She had to stop herself, as she had often had to stop herself these last three weeks, from trying to help, which she knew instinctively would be utterly and grotesquely rude. She had forgotten, that once with Ebon and Hili—but that was because it had been Ebon. To offer aid to a shaman, to the king’s shaman . . .

Hibeehea stood up, graceful as ever; she hadn’t noticed till now that his long forelock had been twisted back round his ear and plaited into the mane at his poll, and tied there with ribbons. He was standing quite close to her, and she could see that the plait was made up of many tiny plaits; had his son or daughter done it? His—what was the word—hrmmmhr? Did shamans wed or have children? Or perhaps an acolyte did such things for a master? She couldn’t imagine him doing it himself.

There is still so much I don’t know about just ordinary things, she thought. Who plaits you if you’re plaited?

The little bottle lay where he had left it. Take the bottle, said Hibeehea, and choose your water.

Choose your water? Sylvi thought—only to herself, she hoped—what an odd way to put it. But she bent and picked up the bottle (grasping it only with the tips of her fingers as if to minimize the length of her fingers, the strength of her hand), and knew at once what he meant; this was not where she should fill her bottle. She took a hesitant step along the shoreline, away from the rest of the pegasi.

Yes, said Hibeehea. Go where you are taken. Ebon, you may go with her. And Hibeehea turned and left them.

It was not so very far after all. They came to a place where the trees grew to the edge of the water and one bent old fellow bowed so low that his leaves trailed across the water.

He looks like a pegasus with a very long mane come to drink, said Sylvi.

Eh? said Ebon. He probably has a name. You could ask Hibeehea. This is where your water is, is it? as she knelt and flicked the stopper out of the bottle, wondering how a pegasus would do it, and not wanting to ask. It’s a little like something that happens when you’re accepted as an apprentice to a sculptor, Ebon said. Idly he pawed at the pebbles at the waterline. The sculptor who has said he’ll sponsor you—or she—takes you to one of the big chambers with several other sculptors who’ve agreed to be part of your choosing. There are a lot of small stones lying around—that have been scattered around. You have to choose one. Which one you choose decides what happens next. There’s an old mwhumhum, a, er, scare-story that everyone who is trying to be accepted hears, that if you choose the wrong stone you don’t get apprenticed after all, but I’ve never heard of it happening. What does happen sometimes is that you aren’t apprenticed to your sponsor after all.

Were you?

No. Silence.

What went wrong? she asked bluntly, standing up.

Ebon raised his head, but he looked away from her.

Ebon?

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, he said, except that mostly I tell you everything, and the Dreaming Sea does this kind of thing to you, like makes you tell stuff you weren’t planning on telling. He stopped.

My dad said that about just being here—I mean in your country.

Ebon cocked an ear and moved one foreleg back: thoughtfulness. Did he? Maybe we can bring him here some day.... Maybe, now, they’ll let us bring— He stopped again.

Mum, thought Sylvi. Not just Dad. Danny. Ahathin. I’d like to bring Ahathin here. Maybe he could figure out what went wrong. Maybe he could bend our magicians’ magic so that . . . Redfora . . . I don’t suppose I can ask her to help us.

Sylvi rubbed his mane, and said, Tell me.

Ebon sighed. There was some question about me being apprenticed at all, because of our binding. The sovereign’s family doesn’t usually get apprenticeships to shamans or sculptors because we have to spend too much time at your palace. Apprentices to shamans or sculptors may disappear for years while they learn their trade. I’m two years older than you, you know, and Niahi is a half year younger. I never even thought about it, when I was little, as soon as I found out about binding: Niahi was going to be your pegasus, and I was going to be a sculptor. They could find a third cousin who never came to the palace to bind me to. Then I found out I was going to have to be your pegasus after all—but I was still going to be a sculptor! He gave one of the musical half-humming, half-snorting huffhuffhuffing noises that was his out-loud laughter. I was going to be a sculptor like later on I was going to bring you here for your birthday. It was just going to happen.

I did one or two things pretty well—that you have to demonstrate to be considered for apprenticeship—unexpectedly well for a king’s to-be-bound son. Gedhee agreed to be my sponsor, saying that it still depended on the choosing. If I chose one of his stones, he’d accept me—he has a cousin who’s bound to one of your cousins, and she’s still a sculptor.

Deerian. I can’t remember her pegasus’ name.

Fwanfwah. Yes. But Deerian doesn’t require her pegasus’ presence much.

She almost never comes to the palace.

Eah. And I’d be bound to the princess. So there was this question about whether I could be apprenticed to a sculptor. I wondered if the story about choosing the wrong stone and not being apprenticed after all was about a bound pegasus, but nobody knew, and Dad told me I’d chosen my path so walk it and shut up. Well, you know what I mean. Then there were almost no sculptors willing to come to my choosing. Gedhee said, Never mind, I’ll take you, we’ll work it out. What if I choose the wrong stone? I said. Well, you’d better not, Gedhee said.

On the day there were three.... Usually there are at least five sculptors, sometimes more. You’re allowed to bring one person with you, who, uh, stands for you. Like declaring you’re serious—as if there were any possibility you weren’t, but you know how rituals are. So there was Dad and me and only three sculptors. Gedhee and Brax. And Shoorininuin. Ebon paused again. Shoor doesn’t take apprentices. . . . So there’s only three of ’em and one of ’em is Shoorininuin and I . . . it doesn’t really work like this with the stones, it’s not one stone for one sculptor, or at least I don’t think it is—there’s magic to it, of course. But I was completely blown by seeing Shoor there and I looked at all the stones, because there were lots of them—nobody had told me there were going to be so many that I was going to break either my feet or my knees just trying to walk across them. And I thought, if I pick up the wrong stone it’ll be Shoor and he’ll say forget it. What was Shoorininuin doing there, for rain and hail’s sake?

And I blundered across the floor, stumbling over the wretched stones. I don’t feel magic much, but I could feel it that day. Most of it seemed to be saying, No, no, no, not me, mate, don’t pick me up. It was like walking into a cloud of ssillwha with all of them buzzing at you, Go away! Go away! And I thought, Oh, great, it’s not that I’m going to pick up the wrong stone, it’s that the right stone isn’t going to let me pick it up. Maybe there is no right stone. And then there was one that at least wasn’t telling me no, so I staggered over to it and picked it up before it changed its mind.

And then the other two sculptors sighed and Shoorininuin— Shoor —said, Well, Ebon, you’re mine. I accept you. Welcome.

Ebon fell silent, still looking out over the Dreaming Sea. Sylvi was thinking of Ebon walking into one of the huge chambers of the Caves, he and his father, hundreds—thousands—of pebbles and small stones strewn over the floor—and three sculptors watching. She couldn’t imagine Ebon stumbling.

She thought of a conversation they’d had long ago. So that’s why they listened when your master spoke up for your idea about sculpting a bit of the palace grounds somewhere in the Caves.

He stirred, bowing his head as if his neck were stiff, rousing his feathers and laying them flat again. Yes. Yes.

I— She stopped, and tried again. I can’t even imagine what you’re going to do.

He extended one wing, stretching the tiny alula-hand as if he were grasping a brush or a knife and about to start work on a wall standing in front of him. Can’t you? I can.

He looked at her at last. Syl . . . what are we?

She could think of nothing to say.

Ebon put his nose in her hair and tugged gently. Life is funny, isn’t it?

I’m—sorry, said Sylvi helplessly.

Sorry? said Ebon. Oh, don’t be so—human.

Well, I am human. I—this is probably human too—I wish I’d met him. Shoorininuin.

You did, said Ebon. The sculptor who spoke to you. That was Shoor. He wanted to meet you.

Sylvi caught her breath. She had envied Ebon his certainty, his focus on becoming a sculptor, while she muddled along being her father’s fourth child, having projects assigned to her, village witchcraft, bridge-building, because she had no ideas of her own. She was still muddling, she felt; it was nothing she had done, nothing she had chosen, that had enabled her to talk to Ebon, and hear him when he spoke to her. She had not chosen to hear Niahi the other night; she had not chosen to walk eight hundred years back in time to watch the signing of the treaty that allied her people to the pegasi. It was perhaps not surprising that Ebon’s master had wished to speak to her; she was what she was, however helpless she felt within that which had chosen her. We are all bound by what fate chooses for us, the sculptor had said. But he had also said, I am proud of him. I am proud of you too.

There was another little pause. We’d better go back, Ebon said finally, before someone comes after us ’cause they think we’ve decided to try and swim across the Sea. We could start our own country there, where pegasi and humans just talk to each other.

How big is your Sea, do you know? said Sylvi, grateful for a change of subject. Has anyone ever crossed it?

If they have, they haven’t told us about it, said Ebon. The legend is that it’s another world wide. That if you managed to cross it, you’d be somewhere else than this world. That the only way from our world to get to the far shore of the Sea is to cross the Sea—and you can’t do that either. Although there’s another legend that says the Caves extend under the Sea and come out on the other side. And that you could walk it—if you lived long enough. He paused. There’s another legend still that says that before your King Thingummy showed up with his troops—

Balsin.

And started killing taralians, our King Fralialal was thinking of taking who remained of us and trying to cross the Sea—underneath, by the Caves.