Pegasus

CHAPTER 2

Eight hundred years before, the pegasi marched (and flew) with their new allies to engage the forces assembled against them, but they were not much good at fighting. They are astonishingly nimble in the air and can splinter an enemy’s wing with a well-aimed kick, and a blow from a pegasus wing can break a norindour’s back; but they are too small and too lightweight for close work. And, as Balsin said after the first battle, while no one could doubt their courage, they aren’t devious enough. It was the human swords and spears, arrows and maces, with help from human magicians’ wiles, which won the war. The ladons and wyverns were killed or driven right away, and those who fled perhaps went in search of their larger and even more dangerous cousins, the dragons; if so it was a long search, for they were not seen again for generations. A few taralians and norindours fled into the wild lands beyond what Balsin declared were his kingdom’s boundaries, and there they were allowed to remain, so long as they caused no trouble beyond the theft of an occasional sheep; although the striped pelt of an unusually large taralian was a highly-regarded heirloom in a number of baronial families, and the sharply-bent wings of the norindour appeared on a number of family crests, as indicating courage and ferocity in all forms of struggle and combat.

While this was not in the original treaty, the humans’ superiority at warfare came slowly to be reflected in all relations between the two species, but the pegasi, mild and courteous, never gave any indication that they resented this. By Sylvi’s day, the ruler of the pegasi had for many generations been expected to do ritualised homage to the ruler of the humans on feast days, and to attend the royal court, with a suitable entourage of attendant pegasi, often enough to be seen as a regular presence. Some human rulers were greater sticklers about frequency than others, just as some pegasi rulers appeared to enjoy the visits, or appeared not to, more than others. But it was quickly noted that the more often the pegasi visited the human palace, and the more of them who did so, and the longer they stayed, the more the country ruled by the human monarch appeared to thrive.

Balsin himself had predicted something of the kind. Viktur wrote,

But Balsin’s coat of arms showed only the Sword and the palace and the Singing Yew.

Furthermore the human sovereign, and certain of the sovereign’s extended family, were each assigned an individual pegasus, as a kind of ceremonial companion, as if such blunt discrete pairings might ease or soften the lack of communication between the two peoples. Most of these couples saw, and expected to see, each other rarely: those humans who did not live within the Wall might not see their pegasi from one year to the next. For the sovereign’s immediate family it was different: those pegasi were often at the palace, and something like a relationship sometimes grew up between human and pegasus. There was genuine friendship between Sylvi’s father and his pegasus, who was the king of his people, and, it was said, they could almost understand each other, even without the services of the human king’s Speaker.

Some form of Speaker—of translator—had been obviously necessary from the beginning; the human magicians and pegasus shamans were the only ones who could speak across the species boundary at all. Even the sign-language, as it was developed, was unreliable and prone to misinterpretation, because of the enormous differences in anatomy between the two peoples. At first it had merely been that anyone on either side who seemed to have some talent for it learnt what they could, and the numbers of magicians and shamans were about equal. But the magicians seemed slowly to take the charge over, echoing—or perhaps going some way to causing—the tendency that in all things the humans should be superior and the pegasi should defer. The idea of the bound pairs had been Gandam’s; the idea of the Speakers, magicians specially trained to enable what communication there was between human and pegasus, was Dorogin’s. It had been Dorogin’s idea also that the sovereign, the sovereign’s consort and the sovereign’s children should each have an individual Speaker as each was bound to a pegasus.

The binding was done when both human and pegasus were children; when possible the human ruler’s children were assigned the pegasus ruler’s children. This was supposed to promote friendship between the two races, although the children did not always cooperate.

The royal human child and its pegasus were introduced to each other for the first time on the human child’s twelfth birthday. At this time several of the royal magicians would create a spell of binding between the two which was supposed to enable them some communication with each other. The spell of binding was specific, between that one human child and that one pegasus child; occasionally it worked, and there was a real connection between the two—emotional if mostly wordless—and more often it did not. Who beyond the immediate royal family was selected to be bound to a pegasus was an erratic process ; the children of anyone who had grown close to or performed a significant service to the sovereign might be added to the list as the children of third or fourth cousins who never came to the palace might drop off it. It was the greatest honour of the human sovereign’s court for someone’s child to be nominated for binding, but it was a slightly tricky honour, because it bound the child to the sovereign and court life as well.

When a royal marriage could be predicted sufficiently in advance, the future consort might be bound to a member of the pegasus royal family, but these forecasts had a habit of going wrong. What often happened was that some adult human became a member of a royal or noble family by marriage, and thereupon was assigned a pegasus; but while the binding spell was just as punctiliously made, there were no records that these late pairings ever learnt to empathise, or to communicate beyond the few words of gesture-language common to anyone who cared to learn them. One of Sylvi’s uncles, brother-in-law to the king, was famous for saying that he had more fellow feeling for his boots, which were comfortable, protected his feet and didn’t make him feel like a hulking clumsy oaf.

The usual ritual and binding spell were delayed, however, till the human child’s twelfth birthday because it was a strong spell and might be too great a burden for anyone younger. Very occasionally the human child nonetheless became sick or ill, or fainted, and had to be carried away, and missed the banquet afterward, although there was a folk-tale that these bindings were often the most successful. While there was no record of any pegasus being made ill by the human binding magic, pegasus children were never bound before they were better than half grown—and, crucially, capable of the long flight from the pegasus country to the human palace. The pegasi’s life span was slightly longer than human, but they came to their full growth slightly sooner. It sometimes happened that there was no suitable pegasus for an eligible twelve-year-old human; usually some slightly less suitable pegasus was found in these cases, because of the likelihood that if the binding was put off more than a year or two there was no hope of its becoming a strong one. And, perhaps because of the continuing weakness of shared language, this shared empathy was greatly desired for the good of the Alliance.

It was several generations before Dorogin’s idea of the individual Speakers became traditional, but for many generations now every important bound pair had had a magician assigned when they were bound, to aid their connection. The magician neither took part in the binding ceremony nor was officially presented, because the need for such a facilitator was considered shameful, a proof of continued failure of one of the pivotal aspects of the Alliance the human domain was built on. The guild of Speaker magicians was however the most revered of all the magicians’ guilds—and the most inscrutable. Among the Speakers themselves the posting to a royal pair was hotly sought after.

Sylvi was the fourth child of the king and the first girl, and while her parents had been glad to see her, with three older brothers, she was not considered important to the country’s welfare. She was pleased about this, as soon as she was old enough to begin to understand what it meant, because she was much more interested in horses and dogs and hawks and stealing sweetmeats when the cook’s back was turned than she was in being a princess. She had a vague notion that there were lots of available horses and dogs and hawks—and sweetmeats—partly on account of her being a princess, but she believed that the connection was not all that close (her cousins, who didn’t live at the palace, had lots of horses and dogs and hawks and sweetmeats too), and that being king chiefly meant that her father looked tired all the time and was always either talking to or reading something from someone who wanted something from him.

Her cousins’ fathers weren’t quite so always reading and talking. Her favourite uncle—the one who had more in common with his boots than his pegasus—was a farmer, and while, he said, he mostly told other people what to do, sometimes he harnessed up a pair of his own horses and ploughed one of his own fields.“So I’ll remember what I’m asking,” he said. He and his wife, one of the queen’s sisters, had each a bound pegasus, but they usually only saw them on trips to the palace: “Can you imagine a Speakers’ Guild magician living on a farm?” But both pegasi occasionally visited. “It’s a funny thing, the animals like ’em,” said her uncle, whose name was Rulf. “ They always insist on sleeping outside—we’ve got a perfectly good room at the end of the house with doors that open out under that big old oak tree. But they sleep outdoors. In bad weather they may sleep in the barn. And wherever they are, the animals drift that way. The cows and the horses are all at whatever end of their pasture to be nearer the pegasi, and the outside dogs are usually curled up with them, like the house dogs sleep on our bed.”

He told all that part of the story easily and often; but once, when he and his family were visiting the palace, and he and Sylvi had been riding through the park together by themselves, a flight of pegasi came over them. The palace horses were all very accustomed to this, and Sylvi’s pony only raised his head and looked—longingly, Sylvi always thought, as she longingly looked as well—and the king’s hounds accompanying her stopped chasing rabbit smells and sat down, and Sylvi was sure she heard a tiny whine as they too stared up. But Rulf ’s horse reared and bounced and neighed and it was a moment before Rulf managed to quiet him again.

“It’s a mixed blessing, though, seeing ’em flying, isn’t it?” he said to his niece. “First time Hon”—his eldest son—“saw ours coming in at home, the sunset was behind ’em, the sky purple and blue and red and gold, and their wings going on forever, the way they do, gold and red like the sky, and their necks arched and their legs all held up fancy as a dancer’s and their manes and tails finer than the lace your dad had for his coronation robe—Hon was just on a year old, and he burst into tears, cried and cried and cried, and wouldn’t stop. Never cried, Hon. Never afraid of anything. Never cried. Cried, seeing pegasi flying for the first time.” Rulf ’s horse gave a last forlorn little whicker.

At the palace the pegasi had their own private annex in their own private grove of trees—and with their own private and exclusive latrine ; pegasus dung was much prized by the royal gardeners. The annex was merely one long narrow room with three walls and a bit of framing on the fourth; trees served to screen the fact that the long fourth wall of the annex was almost entirely absent. The trees also served as a windbreak, although the annex was in the lee of the palace. Sylvi had never seen the annex—humans did not trespass there without a good reason—but she had said to her father, “Don’t they get cold?”

Her father smiled. “Feathers are very warm. You sleep in a feather-bed : imagine you could wrap it around you like giving yourself a hug.”

The king rarely had time to ride out with his dogs and his hawks, and he rarely ate sweetmeats. He had told his daughter (she had asked) that he didn’t much care for them, though he remembered he’d liked them when he was younger. Sylvi was glad she’d never be king and lose her taste for sweetmeats. The king admitted that he would ride out oftener with his dogs, his hawks and his daughter, if he were able to, but he was not. Here he looked at the pile of paper on his desk, and sighed; as if the sigh were a signal, a dog or three materialised from in or behind or under some piece of furniture, and laid their heads on his knees.

The queen had given Sylvi her first riding lessons, had put the first elderly and benign hawk on her fist, had consulted with Diamon, the master-at-arms, about her first practise sword and her first little bow. The queen, before she was queen, had been colonel of her own regiment of Lightbearers; she had spent several years killing taralians, plus a few norindours and the occasional rare ladon, in the west in and around Orthumber and Stormdown, and had been known as something of a firebrand. She still took charge of a practise class occasionally when the master-at-arms was short-handed. The queen’s classes were always very popular because she had a habit of organising her students into a serviceable unit and taking them out to do some work: this might be anything from rescuing half a village stranded by a mud-slide to hunting taralian or ornbear, and even when it was hard, dirty and boring—or hard, dirty, boring and dangerous—the students came back smiling and gratified.

Sylvi had been present one evening when Burn, one of the master-at-arms’ agents, asked to speak to the queen. That day the queen had taken her class quite a distance into the countryside in response to a report from a village of several sightings of a taralian; they’d found the taralian, dispatched it, and ridden home again, although they’d been gone twelve hours and everyone but the queen was reeling in the saddle (said the horsegirl who’d been sent with the message that the queen would be late for supper) by the time they dismounted in the horseyard. The queen was in the middle of explaining that she had wanted to be sure everyone was safe and sound, including the horses, and that no bruised soles or incipient saddle sores were overlooked because the humans were too tired to focus their eyes. “Children,” she said fondly. “They’re a sharp group, though; it would be worth trying to keep them together, and perhaps move them on a bit, especially since it looks like—”

At that moment Burn had been announced. After asking if he might speak to the queen alone and being told that she was tired and wanted her supper and that she was sure he could say whatever it was to the king as well as herself, he hemmed and blithered, and it became plain that what he was not happy about was the queen’s choice of a practical exercise. After a few minutes of failing to find a tactful way of saying what he wanted to say, he finally declared that it was perhaps unwise to put a group of second-years into the peril of taralian hunting, which was a more suitable activity for seasoned soldiers....

The queen said, “Burn, I forgive your shocking impertinence because I appreciate that you are concerned about your youngsters, but do you really suppose that a seasoned soldier such as myself cannot see the strengths and weaknesses of the troop she leads in the first half hour of their company? Not to mention that I’ve crossed swords with most of them in the practise yards. Ask one of them when I announced that we were going to look for that taralian. I suggest you go and ask right now.”

Burn, looking rather grey, left hastily. “Fool,” said the queen grimly, as soon as the door had closed behind him.“Is he the best Diamon can find? It will not do our young soldiers any favours to report to a clucking hen. How does Burn suppose seasoned soldiers happen? Magic?”

“My dear,” said the king, “he is a good administrator, which, as you know, Diamon is not. We need administrators almost as much as we need commanders who know the strengths and weaknesses of their troop within the first half hour spent in their company.”

The queen sighed. “Cory, forgive me. I just ... we are having too many taralian sightings. And more of them farther inside the boundaries.”

“And the occasional norindour. I daresay that the increased numbers of boars and ornbears are not significant beyond the dangerous nuisance they present. I don’t like it either. And I don’t like the paperwork that goes with it.”

“Take Burn away from the army and add him to your army of private secretaries. And take a troop out chasing taralians. It’ll cheer you up.”

The king shook his head. “I’m an administrator myself, not a soldier. It’s why I know Burn is a good one.”

“You have made yourself an administrator,” said the queen.

“I have tried to make myself what the country most needs,” said the king. “But it is lucky for both the country and myself that it needs a king who is a good administrator. You are the soldier, my darling, and I have it in my mind to send you out to investigate the rumour of a roc in Contary.”

“A roc?” said the queen. “In Contary?”

And then Sylvi, to her enormous shame and frustration, sneezed, and her parents noticed she was there. “Oh, gods and dev—I mean, Sylvi, my love, you do understand that this conversation is to remain strictly within these four walls?” said the queen.

“Yes,” said Sylvi. “A roc? I didn’t think there were any rocs any more.”

“Officially there aren’t,” said the king. “In practise there’s a sighting once or twice a decade. This is the second one in two years, which is not reassuring.”

“It may not be true,” said the queen.“I would go so far as to say it is in the greatest degree unlikely to be true.”

“Someone can mistake a roc?” said Sylvi, who had studied rocs and the tactics of battle with something the size of one of Rulf ’s barns, and as clever—and devious—as a human. “They’re—er—kind of large.”

“You’d be surprised,” said the queen.“You’re a little young to be facing up to your responsibilities as a princess, but you might as well begin to prepare yourself for being surprised at what people do. I give you even odds that this roc is a blanket, laid out to be aired before it’s put away for the summer, which the wind stole. And if I’m going to Contary anyway, perhaps I could swing round past Pristin. We haven’t heard from Shelden all this year, have we?”

“You could take me with you,” said Sylvi, knowing the answer would be no. “My godsmother Criss lives in Pristin.”

“Criss is coming to your binding,” said the queen. “You can see her then. You have to get a little bigger before you start riding messenger for the king.”

“You are the queen,” said the king, “not the king’s messenger.”

“To Shelden I’m a rustic bumpkin,” said the queen.“He never misses an opportunity to ask me how my family back in Orthumber are.”

“Danny was riding with you when he was eleven,” said Sylvi. Danacor was Sylvi’s oldest brother, and the king’s heir. “He told me so.”

“I said bigger, not older,” said the queen. “Your day will come.”

Sylvi had mixed feelings about her binding. She looked forward to her birthday because her parents always made something exciting happen on that day, and the food was always amazing. But this birthday she was going to have to go through with the magicians’ ritual, and be bound to her pegasus, and the food would be at a banquet, and maybe she’d be one of the ones who fainted. She’d never been comfortable with magicians’ work. Some of the smaller charms could be comforting, and a few years ago when she’d had a very bad season of nightmares, Ahathin had made a charm for her that had finally let her sleep without waking screaming a few hours later. And everyone, herself included, knew how to make the basic ill-deflect charm, although you needed some charm string from a magician first. But quite ordinary rituals made her feel peculiar.

She thought the pegasi very beautiful, and their faces looked very wise, and being bound to one might be rather exciting—but they were also perhaps too beautiful and too wise (if you could understand them), and having one around that was supposed to be hers would not make her feel Alliance-embodying empathy, but smaller, grubbier, and more awkward. And she didn’t like most magicians—except Ahathin—any better than she liked their queasy magic, and there were always too many magicians around when it was anything to do with the pegasi.

She’d been drilled and drilled in the sign-language since she had been a baby, and could still remember trying to make her fingers behave at the same time she was trying to say her first words. The language of sign and gesture that all humans who had regular contact with pegasi and pegasi who had regular contact with humans were expected to learn was complicated, and the complexity seemed only to add a greater variety of ways for communication to go wrong, beginning with the immutable fact that the pegasus execution of any sign was critically different from the human. Pegasi had mobile ears and long flexible necks and tails, but their hands were small, and had no wrists; and furthermore the number of their fingers was variable, which was the cause of another crucial difference between humans and pegasi. Viktur had described it: “Their mode of enumeration seemed to us at first most strange. Where we, having each of us ten fingers, do count most easily by tens, they cannot, for the number of their fingers on each hand does vary, being four, five or six; wherefore, having each of them four legs, they do count by fours.”

All of this damped any enthusiasm you might initially have had (thought Sylvi) and perhaps that’s what made concentrating on learning sign so difficult. It was worse than maths. (She was rather good at maths, but her brothers complained about it, so she thought she ought to. She could even count in fours, but no one seemed to expect her to, so she stopped trying.) It wasn’t that she was bad at languages; she’d learnt enough Chaugh to be polite to the Chaugh ambassador’s horrible daughter, who was both taller and older than Sylvi—although the taller didn’t take much, thought Sylvi sadly—and who never ignored a chance to remind Sylvi of both these facts.“Oh, how funny that skirt looks on you,” she’d said at their last meeting.“But then you’re still very young and your legs are so short.”

“Imagine her on the point of your sword,” the queen advised her daughter. “I have got through a number of state banquets that way.”

Sylvi had seen her father once, about a year ago, alone with the pegasus king, Lrrianay, signing awkwardly but determinedly and at some length, accompanied by a ragged murmur of words, punctuated by a few pegasi whuffles, choffs and hums, both of them utterly intent on each other and no Speaker in sight. They came to the end of whatever they were saying. Her father’s hands had dropped as if they were too heavy to hold up any longer, and he was wearing a look half thoughtful and half exhausted. As she watched, he put a hand out to the back of a chair as if to steady himself—very much the way Sylvi put out a hand for a chair or a table or a tall dog’s back when there was magicians’ magic in the air. Lrrianay had turned his head to preen a feather or two back into place, which Sylvi had long suspected was a pegasus thinking-about-something gesture.

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 suspected 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.