Pegasus

CHAPTER 6

She was so sodden with sleep the next morning that her new attendant could not rouse her. It was only when her mother came and shouted in her ear, “Your father wants to see you immediately after breakfast!” that she dragged herself unwillingly to the surface. She had been dreaming about flying. She had discovered, climbing up the wall to her bedroom window the night before, that both holding on and diving off had used (or misused) more skin and muscles than she had realised at the time, and between trying to find a comfortable way to lie and an inability to stop reexperiencing the magic journey over and over in her head, it had been nearly dawn before memory slid gradually into dream, and she was a pegasus too, and it was her own wings that carried her aloft with Ebon.

Her father wanted to see her after breakfast. Fthoom. She was suddenly thoroughly awake, and the joy drained out of her, leaving only a leaden grey tiredness shot through with a sick-making gleam of fear.

“Where—?”

“In his private receiving room.”

Not the public court then. Fewer people ... but Fthoom would seem even bigger in a small room.

Her mother looked at her, frowning, put her hand under her chin and tipped her head up. “Did someone give you unwatered wine last night? If you were a few years older, I would say you looked hung over.”

Sylvi managed to smile. “I—I had a lot of trouble falling asleep. I just kept—going on thinking about things.”

The queen sat on the edge of her bed. She had stopped frowning, but she looked a little quizzical. “Yes. You’re twelve years old now, and nearly a grown-up in all the wrong ways. You still can’t make your own decisions—you can’t even stay up late without permission—but you’ll have to come to all the official banquets, although you will be allowed to leave early. As I think about it, maybe I could develop a gentle little wasting illness whose only symptom is that I have to go to bed early on official banquet nights.” She smiled at her daughter, and her daughter smiled back. The queen had an old wound in one hip that made it difficult for her to sit for long periods—mysteriously, however, it did not trouble her in the saddle—but she refused to use it to get out of state events. Maybe when I’m older, she’d said when Sylvi had once asked.

“You’ll now be expected to come to most council meetings,” the queen went on, “at which you will have no say and no vote. But your father or Ahathin will decide on a speciality for you—farming or the guilds, or rivers and waterways, or roads—or the army: gods save you if you have anything to do with the army. It could be anything on the court schedule, and you have the misfortune to have made a very good impression on your father with your papers on village witchcraft, so he’ll probably want to give you something challenging. And you’ll be expected to study whatever it is carefully and have opinions about it. And they’ll want you to come up with good ideas, but if you manage to do so, you’ll be expected to stand up in front of everybody else on the council and possibly even the senate, and present them. Horrifying. Much worse than anything that happens in the practise yards with mere weapons.”

“Mum,” said Sylvi, “you’ve never been afraid of anything in your life.”

“How wrong you are,” said the queen. “I am afraid of almost everything except what I can go after with a sword. You know where you are with a taralian. When it began to dawn on me that your father was serious, I almost ran away. I probably would have run away the night before the wedding except you’re expected to sleep among your attending maidens. Probably to prevent you from running away.”

Sylvi laughed.

“Court etiquette,” said the queen. “Court gods-save-us etiquette. I was a country baron’s daughter so we had banquets once or twice a year when the queen or a bigger, more formal baron than we were came to visit. And my father held court one afternoon a week for troubles and disputes and so on, which usually degenerated into everyone complaining about the weather. I’d been to the palace for my binding and my sisters’, and it was all huge and confusing beyond imagining, but we didn’t have to imagine it. We had two sky views and a sky hold of the palace, which probably made it worse, being used to being able to hold the king’s palace in the palms of your two hands—and the sky hold is three hundred years old, and the palace was smaller then.”

Sylvi nodded. She had seen it when she visited her cousins; it was made of many different kinds of wood, cut, carved and glued with beautiful precision.

“Maiden I was, but maidenly modesty did not become a colonel of the Lightbearers; and armour and a sword did not become the king’s intended. I didn’t even have dress armour—useless stuff, and we couldn’t afford it. The first speech I gave to your father’s court, I had to brace myself against the plinth because my knees kept trying to fold up, and force my hands flat against the desk to stop them trembling.”

“Was Hirishy with you?” said Sylvi.

“Yes,” said the queen thoughtfully, “she was. It’s funny, because she’s so little, and when you look round for her she’s probably hiding. But when you need—oh, when you don’t know what you need!—she’ll be right there. She slept with all us maidens the night before the wedding, for example. I don’t know of another occasion when a pegasus slept with her human, do you? There should have been a fuss about it, I think, but there wasn’t. It was just Hirishy.”

Sylvi smiled.

“And now you’ve been bound to your pegasus,” said the queen. Sylvi heaved a great, happy sigh and felt her spirits lighten. Even the thought of Fthoom couldn’t entirely spoil the thought of Ebon. “Yes. I have been bound to my pegasus. Ebon. He’s ... he’s ... um.” Again she felt the thrilling, terrifying surge of the lift into the air; the wind-hammer of the huge wings.

“You two bonded yourselves, didn’t you? I’ve never seen anything like it—nor has your father.” The queen paused. “Nor has anyone. Your father told me that you can talk to each other—that that was how you knew his name.”

So her mother had noticed her slip too. Maybe everyone had. Even before Fthoom. Well, they could talk to each other. “Yes.”

“There are barely any folk-tales about such a thing. A few fool tales, I think—it’s as if it’s so driven into us that we can’t talk to each other, we can’t even make up stories about it. Maybe that your fathers can almost talk to each other is some explanation of what happened to you and Ebon, even though it didn’t happen to any of your brothers.”

“They tell jokes, Mum, did you know? The pegasi, I mean.

Mother”—Sylvi sat up and forward, kneeling by her mother so she was tall enough to look her directly in the face—“Mother, does it ever seem to you that we don’t know the pegasi at all?”

“Yes, darling,” said the queen. “I have often thought just that, and wondered what it meant, for all of us, both pegasi and humans.”

Sylvi dressed carefully, taking her time about it. She had hated court clothes till her mother had said, “Court clothes are just another form of dress armour. And if it’s a bad show, like the combined court and senate, you can sit there designing your breastplate, with all the curlicues you’d never have on working armour. I designed one with a roc swooping down to carry old Barnum away, the wings curling back over my shoulders and a satisfying look of fear on his face, which I think of often.” May a roc fly away with Fthoom, Sylvi thought.

She might be better at sitting still today, with the dread of catching Fthoom’s eye, like the hawk stooping on the rabbit (or the roc on the senator) as soon as it moves. Her black velvet trousers, she thought, with the wide red ribbons wrapped around the ankles; they made her look taller. Fthoom was both tall and big, and magicians and courtiers often wore high heels when they attended the king. She was sure Fthoom would be wearing high heels today. The custom had begun, Ahathin had told her, centuries ago, when Skagal the Giant had been king.

“They wouldn’t have to do it now,”she said.

“It is a custom,” said Ahathin. Ahathin, who was even smaller than the king, never wore high heels.

“And who cares who’s taller anyway?” she said.

Ahathin looked at her and permitted himself a smile.

“Don’t you mind being short?” she blurted.

He spread his small hands and looked at them. “I am a magician, not a princess. A pony costs less to keep than a horse, which means I can buy more books.” He paused. “It is not always a bad thing, to be overlooked.”

As Fthoom had always overlooked her, she thought, until yesterday. She stared at herself in the mirror and sighed. In trousers rather than a skirt, she thought, it was easier to feel that you could run away.

It wasn’t going to matter if she missed breakfast; she was now too anxious to eat. She asked one of her new attendants to bring her tea and toast on a tray. Her nurse would have brought her a proper breakfast and hovered over her till she ate it. Her nurse, in theory, was now retired—her last official act was closing Sylvi’s curtains yesterday evening—but Sylvi wondered if she would stay in the pleasant little suite in the retired courtiers’ wing that now belonged to her, and refrain from reappearing to scold Sylvi on the state of her underclothing. One of the new ladies brought the tea and toast and left it silently. Sylvi tore the toast into scraps to make it look as if she’d eaten something, but drank the tea; her mouth was dry.

She could have had an attendant lady or two accompany her to her father’s court; it could have been her first official something-or-other, as a newly almost-grown-up person with a pegasus, who would be expected to be present at council meetings and develop a useful speciality. She thought about an attendant for all of two seconds, as she pulled her tunic straight and smoothed her hair down. In the first place an attendant would make her feel smaller and more insignificant than ever, not less; and in the second place ... it was too much like copying Fthoom. Her father always had people around him because he was king; but they were councillors and senators and cartographers and colonels and scribes and whoever else was important to what he was doing or trying to do; he didn’t have attendants. Fthoom had attendants.

She paused in the antechamber outside her father’s private receiving room. The inner door was closed, and in the absence of a footman to open the door and bow her through it, she had a momentary reprieve. Her feet took her to one of the low shelves that ran round the room. These shelves bore some of the king’s favourite sky holds. The one her feet paused in front of was a new model of the northwest gates of the palace Wall, with a long curve of Wall running away on either side. She and Ebon had flown over it the night before. It doesn’t look like that, she thought, with a queer little shock, as if finding out one of her parents or some other authoritative grown-up in a lie that was not quite trifling. The curve of the Wall is more gradual, she said to herself, and the trees inside are set farther back, and the grove is more of an S shape.

She was still staring at the little landscape when the inner door opened silently; but she felt the change of air, and turned. One of the expressionless footmen—an especially tall expressionless footman—one of the footmen who had used to lift her onto her heap of seat-cushions so she could see over the edge of the dining table as recently as two years ago, stood there staring over her head. He was staring quite pointedly and directly over her head, however, so she knew he was waiting to bow her through the door. She went.

Fthoom was already there. So was her father, of course, and Lrrianay. So was Ebon.

Hey, are we in trouble? said Ebon. How did you sleep last night? This sorry ass’ great rolling eyes are making me queasy. I didn’t mean to get up so early.

Sylvi swallowed the laugh that tried to jump out of her; she felt her face wrinkle up to contain it. Ebon was right; Fthoom’s eyes did rather roll around. It was all part of what she called to herself his magician act, but she was still afraid of him. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes, and her stomach lurched, and she no longer felt like laughing.

“My lady Sylviianel,” said her father gravely.

“My lord Corone,” she said, and bowed. As she straightened up again she looked at who else stood by her father: those closest were Danacor and his pegasus, Thowara, the king’s Speaker, Fazuur, and Lord Cral, who was probably her father’s closest friend as well as a member of both the blood and the high council, and Lord Cral’s pegasus, Miaia. As she looked, someone a little beyond them moved, as if deliberately to make her notice him, and it was Ahathin.

Fthoom rustled forward. He was wearing some great stiff cape that stuck out round him as if on wires, and round his head was the magicians’ spiral, this one silver and set with pale stones over his forehead and rising nearly a double hand’s span in the air above him. His foot-steps made a curious hollow thunder: his shoes had not only high heels but built-up soles. He looked as tall as Skagal the Giant, but he was not the king.

Sylvi looked behind him. There were half a dozen other magicians in his train, and they all looked unhappy, although they looked unhappy in different ways. Kachakon, who was about the best of them in Sylvi’s opinion, looked worried and unhappy; Gornchern, who was almost as big a bully as Fthoom, looked angry and unhappy. Warily she looked again into Fthoom’s face; he only looked angry. She remembered something her nurse used to say to her when she was young and sulky: what if your face froze like that? Fthoom’s face looked like it had frozen yesterday morning, presumably at the moment when she had said Ebon’s name. But this anger looked like the deep, powerful, strategic anger of a general about to engage his enemy. His enemy?

The moment stretched. She glanced at her father looking at Fthoom, and at Fthoom looking at her father. Fthoom began to turn rather purple. Majestically, her father indicated that she should sit beside him. At some other time she might have been exhilarated as well as unnerved by the honour; usually the heir sat on one side of the king and the queen on the other, but the queen’s chair was empty this morning. Lucky queen, she thought, although she understood the political game being played: to have both the queen and the heir present would grant Fthoom too much power.

Very carefully, for her limbs felt strangely rigid, she settled herself in the great chair. She was accustomed to hoicking herself into chairs that were too tall for her, and had even learnt to do it (relatively) smoothly; but this one made her feel smaller than usual, for it was as wide and deep as it was tall, so she could not lean against the back of it without having her legs sticking straight out in front of her like a baby’s. Her feet still hung well clear of the floor. She grasped the clawed forelegs of some vast animal that were its arms, and straightened her spine. She had chosen this tunic because she knew it would sit well across her shoulders as long as she didn’t slump. Her father was the king and could stare down Fthoom; her mother was life colonel of the Lightbearers, and had twice killed a taralian single-handed, once in coming to the aid of a fallen comrade. Their daughter could sit up straight. But when one of the footmen knelt in front of her to slide a stool beneath her dangling feet, she wasn’t sure but what that made it worse, not better. Silently she took a deep breath. Her father was wearing his very grandest manner; she would not let him down by being too small, too young, and too frightened. Ebon moved with her, and stood at her right shoulder; Ahathin came to stand at her left.

“My lord,” said Fthoom, and knelt, somehow making the gesture pointless, almost careless, as one might raise a hand to brush a fly away, even though one was addressing a king. The stiff cape flourished out around him as he knelt and then reformed itself as he stood. When he had regained his feet, he said, looking straight past Sylvi as if she were either a criminal or an inanimate object, “My lord, I believe our country is at a crisis point.”

There was a sigh from the courtiers around her father’s chair. She hadn’t dared count how many people—and pegasi—were present; the room was made to hold about twenty, but there were councillors, senators, barons and magicians crowded along the walls—probably nearer twice that. She saw Lord Kanf lean to whisper something in Grand-dame Orel’s ear; Orel’s look of worry deepened.

Fthoom drew himself up even taller—the tip of the spiral quivered—as the king said gently, “Because my daughter can speak to her pegasus, and he to her?”

“It is not the way, that human should speak to pegasus,” said Fthoom heavily. As he said it, “the way” became “The Way,” although Sylvi had never heard of it. What way?

“I know—much—much—much about the history of human and pegasus. I have read the original treaty; I have felt its aura with my own hands,” and here he held them up as if there were some axiom written across his palms for all to read.

Sylvi stared at him. The treaty hung on the wall of the Great Hall next to the mural of the signing, but Sylvi could not read it. The fanciest calligraphy of eight-hundred-year-old scribes was much harder to decipher than the plain handwriting of Viktur. There was glass over it too, glass that was specially treated to prevent any interference, by magical or physical force, and this made it shimmer faintly. Sylvi had studied what it said in her schoolroom copy of the annals; when she looked at the treaty itself, she saw the pale twinkle of eight-hundred-year-old flower petals and long curling twists like vines which were the black lines of the script—and Fralialal, one foreleg raised, ready to step down from the wall, the eight-hundred-year-old ink still wet on the edge of his wing. She didn’t like the idea of Fthoom standing close enough to the treaty to read its aura—leaning nearer and nearer yet till his breath misted the glass, his big hands only just clear of its surface—so close that if Fralialal chose that moment to step free of the wall, his wing might brush Fthoom’s face.

“I have felt the strength of the centuries like the Wall that wraps around the palace. I have read the chronicles of the magicians who served their rulers from that day to this; I have read the diary of Gandam, who as you know put himself under intolerable duress to learn the pegasus language, that he might write the treaty, and died of the strain.”

Everyone knew about Gandam. It was one of the first history lessons all human children learnt. Sylvi had always wondered who had taught Gandam, and if Gandam had tried to teach the human language as well; was there a pegasus shaman who died? She would ask Ebon.

“From that very first meeting—from the first sighting, when the soldiers knelt, for they feared they were in the presence of gods or demons—from that first contact, it is clear: it is not for humans to speak plainly to the pegasi, nor the pegasi to humans: not without the safeguard of a magician’s strong magic between the two. The two races are too dissimilar: any attempt to draw them close together can only do injury—the incomprehension between our two peoples is a warning we ignore at our peril. The only other human besides Gandam who has ever become truly fluent in the pegasus language was the magician Boronax, and he too went mad. Since Boronax there have been rules laid down for us, the magicians and Speakers who serve you, lord, and who have served and will serve all the kings and queens before and after you—rules, so that we may learn enough of the pegasus language to make that service well and truly, and yet not so much as to harm ourselves or you; and even so we use magic to protect ourselves in ways we cannot use to protect you.”

Maybe it’s only magicians it happens to, thought Sylvi, but she was beginning to feel a little frightened. She remembered saying to Ahathin, when he told her of how Speaking was taught, but the pegasi are so light. She thought of Fralialal, and the twinkle of eight-hundred-year-old flower petals.

She looked away from Fthoom, toward Ebon. What’s going on? he said. I can tell you’re not happy, and my father doesn’t like what he’s hearing from your father and Fazuur, but I can’t pick up any of it.

Ebon, do you know about Gandam? The magician who wrote the treaty and then went mad and died? Did a pegasus die too?

What? Gandam died because he was old and sick. I never heard he was mad. D’you mean did a pegasus get knocked on the head to keep him company on the Long Road? Ugh. Is that what old Eyeballs there is telling you?

No. It’s just—oh, I can’t listen and—I’ll tell you later.

Ahathin only just brushed his Speaker sticks—the faint tock they made could only have been heard by Sylvi and Ebon, and possibly the nearest expressionless footman. Sylvi said, Oh—I’m being a featherbrain. Ahathin can tell you. And she made, for the first time, the gesture asking a Speaker to translate.

Fthoom droned on: “. . . the sovereign families of each race are bound to the sovereign families of the other; king to king, king’s child to king’s child: here is the true strength of the treaty, as stone and brick are set together to make a wall....”

Although not always consort to consort, thought Sylvi. And the cousins are always a muddle. And ... Dad’s dad had the same thing happen to him; everybody thought their queen was going to marry someone else. I wonder how often that happens. I’ll ask Ahathin. She could hear Ahathin murmuring to Ebon, and didn’t want to interrupt. And what about when the sovereignship goes to another family, like when the Sword left Grinbad and went to Rudolf ? And what about someone like Erisika? She grabbed the Sword when the king died because she was nearest and then there wasn’t anyone to give it to so she kept it and she won the battle and when the king’s son grew up and became King Udorin he married her even though she was a cabinet-maker’s daughter because, he said, what did he want with a lady when he could have the woman who saved the realm? And she’d borne him three daughters and a son, as fast as she could, she said, because she was old for child-bearing. Sylvi told herself the story with Fthoom’s voice booming in her ears, to give herself courage. Erisika would not have been frightened of Fthoom, and she, Sylvi, had Erisika’s blood in her veins.

Fthoom was still going on, sentence after ostentatious sentence, about the Alliance. I don’t believe any of it, thought Sylvi. It’s like he’s making it up and—and—

Silently and motionlessly she made an effort, as if she were stepping from under a drift of rainbow fabric and out of a fog of incense. She thought, It’s as if he’s looking at a tree and calling it a window. And he’s trying to make us call it a window too.

“I fear for your daughter,” Fthoom intoned. “I fear the damage she and her new friend may do to the body of the living Alliance between our two peoples, by the ephemerality of easy and careless speech, such as is likely between two young creatures, however well-intentioned and innocent—”

The dais and chairs that the king and his court sat on raised them up only enough that, sitting, they were a handsbreadth or two taller than the people standing on the floor before them. But Fthoom was taller than most humans, and he was wearing high-heeled shoes. He had moved closer and closer to the dais as he spoke, where the royal chairs sat so near the edge that Sylvi’s footstool was precariously placed; he made as if to lay a hand on Sylvi’s shoulder, looming over her, with the arched and coiling tip of his magician’s headdress peering down at her like the head of a snake, and the engulfing cape flinging itself wide with the movement of his arm as if to engulf her.... She flinched and slid away from him, grateful after all for the intimidating size of her chair, ashamed of her own cowardice.

“You may not touch the princess without her leave,” said her father softly.

Fthoom stopped as if he’d come to the edge of a cliff. His hand dropped to his side and he moved away, but as he had bent his obeisance to the king into nothing of the kind, he made his moving away from the princess’ chair a planned stage of his performance, and not a response to reproof; and he seemed to swell even larger. “I, as Fifth Magician, felt the binding go awry yesterday. I felt the wound in the flesh of our treaty—the new bleeding wound in its side.” He managed to invest I feel with a magician’s power: no ordinary human could feel as he did. “I say this is a dangerous thing—as dangerous as any thing could be to our country, founded as it is on the concord between these two most dissimilar and distinct peoples, human and pegasus. And I must ask—indeed I must insist, demand—that the princess Sylviianel and”—he made the hrrring noise in his throat that was the human equivalent of the word that meant king or lord in the pegasus language—“Hrrr Ebon be kept apart, at least until a council of magicians has studied the matter and decided how, in the best interests of our countries and our peoples, to proceed.”

The sigh again, running all round the room. Even the footman who had opened the door and brought her footstool, who still stood near her at the foot of the dais, was a little less expressionless: he looked dismayed. Sylvi risked turning her head and looking at her father: he was cool and regal. His gaze was bent mildly on Fthoom, as if the magician were no more than a small farmer declaring a boundary dispute with his neighbour. She looked at the magicians arrayed behind Fthoom. They looked unhappier than ever, but determined. She wanted to turn her head again, and look at Ahathin, but she did not want to be seen to do it. Ahathin was still murmuring to Ebon.

“My lord,” said Fthoom, and again made his unmindful kneeling. He had never once looked at her, not even when he had tried to grasp her shoulder.

“N-no,” she said. For a moment she didn’t recognise her own voice, nor that she had spoken aloud; her body seemed to be scrambling—not very gracefully—out of her chair without her having directed it to move. She was shaking all over, but she realised that the words she needed to say were already in her mouth, and all she needed to do was let them out. “My lord,” she said to her father, and bowed.

“Lady,” he said, and inclined his head: permission to speak.

“What if Gandam was ... was only old and sick? What if Boronax was ... was mad anyway? When—when they needed a pegasus for Erisika, there weren’t any; too many had died in the war, and the only unbound ones were children. Erisika said, What about Dlaiali? His human died trying to save the old king, and we fought side by side that long awful day. And they said no, it is wrong that a queen be bound to a pegasus who was bound before, and to a minor baron, it would weaken the Alliance, but she said, I am a cabinet-maker’s daughter, and I count Dlaiali a friend, and Udorin spoke for her and she and Dlaiali were bound, and Udorin’s reign was long and prosperous and—and happy. Ebon and I are bound. He is—he is my pegasus, and my friend.”

Fthoom gave a roar like a taralian, and threw up his hands as if with a gesture he would turn her into a slime-mould or a newt; the expressionless footman, to her amazement, leaped up on the dais and thrust her behind him, knocking her footstool off the stage to crash to the floor. Gornchern and Kachakon grabbed Fthoom’s arms, and Gornchern spoke fiercely in his ear; only half a stride behind the footman came Ebon, his ears flat to his head and his nostrils flared and red as a racehorse’s. She found herself encircled by one powerful wing, and crushed into his ribs. She staggered—her knees were not at all steady—and a pinfeather got up her nose; she sneezed. Ebon folded the wing down far enough that she could see over it, but he did not loose her, and she could feel that he was trembling too. Ahathin, she saw, was now standing beside the footman.

Several of the courtiers were shouting; one of the magicians was making a kind of keening chant, moving his hands in the air as if creating something, perhaps a better scene than this one which he could replace it with. Danacor was also standing, saying something urgent to another footman, who turned and ran for the door. Lrrianay gave a low rustling neigh. Sylvi felt Ebon twitch; there were several other pegasi present—and they murmured back. Their wings were half roused; in pegasi this was a sign of wariness, watchfulness, alarm. She was sure they were mind-speaking to each other, but she heard no whisper of it.

The shouting died. There was her father, standing in front of Fthoom; Sylvi had not noticed him step down from his chair. She had never seen him look so angry. Even Fthoom subsided a little, and the two magicians who held him dropped their hands.

The king waited till there was perfect silence again. It came quickly, because he made the silence by his expectation of it. Then he reached out one steady hand and plucked the magician’s spiral off Fthoom’s head. There was a gasp, and Sylvi felt the atmosphere in the hall move and change. She leant against Ebon’s side and was glad of the support, and not sorry that the tall footman was still standing near her.

The king dropped the spiral as if it were rubbish; it tinged against the stone floor, and the thready chime of it went on too long, as if it had a voice and was protesting its treatment. “ There is no defence for raising your hand against the king’s daughter; there is no defence for the raising of a hand to anyone met in the king’s private room.

“You are hereby removed from the council of magicians which serves the king, but you are not relieved of all your duties to us. You will, as quickly and scrupulously as you can, beginning now, search all the histories in all our libraries, till you have found and documented every reference, every notation, every marginal scratch, in all the chronicles, royal, theurgical and laic, of free speech or friendship between human and pegasus; and then you will bring the list to the king—and be you sure that the citations are correct and complete to the last syllable, the last full stop—and the royal council, the magicians’ council, the senate and myself shall read it, and consult over it, and decide if there is any foundation in the charge you brought before us today.

“I believe that the one thing that has come out of this—extraordinary—meeting this morning is an awareness that we have, perhaps, been careless about the critical relationship between human and pegasus, careless in our resignation that no better bond than what we are accustomed to can exist. The king agrees with you that his daughter and Lrrianay’s son suggest a different way. But the king’s view, and indeed hope, for that way is diametrically opposed to your own. Bring what the histories can tell us both, and the councils will decide whose concept of the way forward has more merit.

“The king is prepared to consider the possibility that your outburst arose from a dedication to the well-being of our country too profound for restraint; but he is only barely prepared so to consider it. You may leave us. Now.”

Fthoom stood for a moment longer, swaying a little, like a tree that has felt the final stroke of the axe and will fall to earth in the next moment. And then he knelt, not carelessly this time, but heavily, and he needed Kachakon’s hand under his elbow to regain his feet. Another footman had opened the door, and he turned toward it. As he turned, his eyes swept across Sylvi’s face and paused there briefly; as his eyes met hers she saw how much he hated her, and she thought that if he had held her eyes even a moment longer he might have turned her into a slime-mould or a newt after all. Again she was glad for Ebon, and for the not-quite-expressionless footman—for Ahathin—and for her father. But she wished—just for a moment—that she wasn’t a king’s daughter, even if that meant she would not have met Ebon.

Fthoom stood now as if recalling his strength, and he walked away from them as Fthoom always walked: grandly, arrogantly, although his head looked strangely low and bare rising above the wide unyielding frame of his cloak. He disappeared through the door and was gone.

The king turned to his daughter. Ebon dropped his protecting wing and stepped back; out of the corner of her eye she saw Lrrianay cross behind her father and put his nose to Ebon’s cheek, and she wondered what the pegasus king might be saying to his fourth child; but then her father put his hands on her shoulders and her attention was all on him.

“My darling,” he said quietly, and sighed. “What a mess we seem to be in. But if you are ever again moved to tell a powerful magician he is a fool, to his face and in public, would you please warn me in advance?”

“Oh—I—”

“No, you did extremely well. I am proud of you—and proud of all those library slips I signed. I admit I had not considered—er—arguing with Fthoom. But—well.”

He removed one hand long enough to beckon to the footman who had thrust Sylvi behind him. “I want to think it was an unnecessary gesture, but I thank you for your protection of my daughter.”

The previously expressionless footman turned a deep crimson maroon and swallowed hard; footmen are not accustomed to their kings addressing them as “I” and using the familiar form of “you.”

“Thank you, lord,” he muttered, and Sylvi could guess he was trying to decide whether he should kneel or not. She was very interested; she had always, before today, disliked him, because she thought his expressionlessness meant that he didn’t approve of her, or pitied her for being so short that she had still needed, at ten years old, a footman to lift her up and put her on a stack of cushions so she could sit at dinner with her family like a normal person. She couldn’t remember having heard his voice before.

Her father could guess the footman’s confusion of mind too; he laughed, and the hand he had used to beckon with he now laid on the footman’s shoulder. He had to reach up to do it, for the footman was a tall man; again Sylvi was mystified at how her father lost none of his majesty by being short. “Will you fetch us wine?” said the king. The footman’s face cleared, and he turned away from them with visible relief.

“Dad,” said Sylvi wretchedly, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I—of course I didn’t mean to make the mistake, but I’m sorry I blurted Ebon’s name out like that yesterday.”

The king shook his head. “The mistake doesn’t matter; it’s why you made the mistake that matters—that you and Ebon can talk—really talk—to each other. Just as well, I think, that we knew from the first.” He dropped his hand. “It is just you and Ebon, is it not? You hear no one else, and no one else hears you? Lrrianay and Miaia say they cannot hear you.”

“Yes,” she said, trying not to sound relieved: what if someone overheard them talking about flying? “It’s just me and Ebon.”

He nodded and paused momentarily, then went on more briskly: “You can be spared the rest of this scene; I am not free yet, but you and Ebon may go in a moment. Listen to me first, however, Sylviianel: listen to me carefully.”

Her father only ever called her by her full name at formal and ritual occasions. “Oh—Dad—my lord—”

“No, child, listen. You needn’t my-lord me, and you have done no wrong. But you must listen as closely as you have listened to anything in your life. If anyone—anyone at all—but myself, your mother or Danacor asks you what Ebon says to you about anything, or if you would ask Ebon a question for them—tell me at once. Anyone: your ladies, your practise-yard partner, a senator making conversation at court—even Farley and Garren, although I will have woken them up to the situation before the end of today, and they won’t—anyone. Do you understand?”

“Ye-es, my lo—Father.”

“We’ll decide later what use we might put you and your bondmate to—if you agree so to be used. For now you have but yesterday turned twelve, and you are not only the king’s child, you are under the king’s protection”—for a moment the king in him was very clear indeed, strong and sharp as the blade of the Sword.

There was movement at the edge of her vision. Her father glanced that way. The room was still crowded, but almost everyone was now standing as stiff and still as statues. Kanf had his arms crossed; Orel was biting her lip; Cral was staring at the ceiling. But Danacor was speaking—Sylvi blinked—with a colonel of the Skyclears, the sovereign’s heir’s own regiment; it was this man’s arrival who had caught her and the king’s attention. He was wearing his sword and badge over his ordinary clothing, which meant he’d been pulled out of his private hours to attend to the king’s heir’s summons immediately. Sylvi did not want to think about this.

“He hates me,” she said, very quietly—so quietly she was not sure her father would hear her. “Fthoom.”

“Yes,” said her father, as gently as he could. “I’m afraid so. You are a terrible threat to him, my darling, by being what you are—and that was before you spoke out against him in the king’s receiving room in front of an audience, and that in spite of the glamour he was using. I almost threw him out for that; it’s forbidden, of course, in any court or council; it is typical of the man that he thought he could get away with it.”

“He’s not a Speaker,” she said, still half not understanding and half not wanting to understand.

“He is a member of the Speakers’ Guild,” said her father.“But he did not wish to be tied to the position of personal Speaker.” He smiled without humour.“Fortunately he was too young when the Speaker to the queen’s heir was chosen—and too established when it was Danacor’s turn. But, my darling, if there were no necessary but incomprehensible pegasi, how constant and immediate to our royal lives would our magicians be? The magicians who maintain the Wall do so in secrecy.”

Which would not suit Fthoom at all, thought Sylvi.

The footman returned at that moment with a tray with three goblets and three low bowls on it. He offered it first to his king, who took up one goblet; another footman materialised to lift one of the bowls and hold it for Lrrianay. The second goblet went to Danacor, who now came to stand beside his father and sister, wearing much the same worried expression the king was wearing, only it was much starker on his young face; the second bowl went to Thowara. And then the third goblet came to Sylvi—she peered into it: the water was barely pink with a spoonful of red wine—and another footman took the third bowl to Ebon.

He flattened his nose and took a brief sip for politeness: Eeeugh, he said. What is this stuff?

Watered wine, said Sylvi. It’s always watered—maybe not this much—except at really big or important parties or occasions or events or things, even for the grown-ups. I like water with loomberry juice better, but you have to make a fuss to get it.

Ebon took a second sip. Does not improve on acquaintance. You should drink our—he made a pegasus noise that sounded like “fwhfwhfwha”—it’s much nicer.

Upon a murmur from the human king, six more footmen had followed the first, bearing many more goblets and a few more bowls, and wine was offered to everyone in the room, human and pegasus. When the footmen came to the magicians, Kachakon and Gornchern, who were still standing next to each other, were first: Kachakon quickly picked up a goblet, Gornchern only after several seconds’ delay. The king was binding them together against Fthoom; closing Fthoom out of a new alliance which included the princess and her pegasus. He would have less talking to do after they had drunk together—and one did not refuse a drink offered by the king. She could see Kachakon’s hand was shaking, and that Gornchern drank his wine as if it burnt him. She thought, He would have gone with Fthoom, but he remained so that he can tell Fthoom what happened.

The king bent to kiss her forehead.“You may go,” he said, speaking so that no one would hear but herself. “I do not deny you your friend, nor do I ask you not to speak to him. But I do ask you: try not to behave in any way that anyone looking on could mark as different from the relationship of any bound human and their pegasus—and do not answer any questions. Do you understand?”

No flying, thought Sylvi, and gulped.“Yes, Father.”