Her mother looked at her in surprise and distress. “I don’t think so. There’s a paragraph in the treaty somewhere about it, but I don’t think it’s ever been used.”
But there’s never been a bond like mine with Ebon, thought Sylvi. “Have you ever heard of Redfora and Oraan?”
“No-o,” said her mother slowly. “Who are they?”
“They’re a story the pegasi tell,” Sylvi said, who had decided beforehand what she would say in answer to this question. “They’re supposed to be bondmates who could talk to each other.”
“I’d’ve heard if such a story had been unearthed,” said the queen. “It hasn’t. What a pity. It’s just what we want, isn’t it? It’s interesting that the pegasi have such a story and we do not.” She gave her daughter a long look. “Try not to worry. I’m not looking forward to what Fthoom has to say either, because there will probably be something in it we will have to take into account, but those of us who are bound now will stay as we were bound.”
Sylvi’s heart, which had begun to slow down to its normal pace, heard the tone of her mother’s voice and speeded up again. “What about Fthoom?”
“He has asked for an appointment with the king.”
“And you already know what he’s going to say.”
“We know your father’s gamble hasn’t worked, yes. Did any of us ever really think it would?” she added, almost as if speaking to herself. She sighed, and after a moment went on: “Which bears on what you and I need to talk about. Your birthday party is in nine days—two days after Ebon’s return. And you must not only appear utterly, completely normal for the next seven days—exactly as you were before you visited the peg—Rhiandomeer, you must not change by the flicker of an eyelash when you have Ebon with you again, and at your party. And I think perhaps you should not wear your inspiring new robe for all of that time.”
Sylvi smiled at her mother’s return joke. “You said ‘appear,’” she said slowly.
“You’ve changed,” said her mother. “You’re not just lost in your own home, you’re not just missing your best friend, you’ve changed. What we need to do is make it appear merely that you are growing up—which you are—and that it has nothing to do with three weeks spent alone with the pegasi. Listening to subversive tales of bondmates who could talk to each other.”
Sylvi was silent.
“What were they like, the Caves?” said her mother hesitantly.
The question had not been asked before. There was—to Sylvi’s ears—an unhappy little silence around it now. Sylvi had been home two days, and no one, not even her father and mother, had asked her anything about her journey. With Hibeehea’s words still in the front of her mind, and dismayed and disoriented about her sense of strangeness in her own home, she had not tried to talk about it. When she came back from her cousins’ she couldn’t stop talking—although Powring and Orthumber and Nearenough and Shirrand, where her various aunts and uncles lived, were very well known to both her parents, and she could just talk, she didn’t have to explain anything. Or avoid explaining anything.
Since she’d been back, this was the first time she’d been alone with either parent. She left her window-sill and sat on her bed next to her mother. She thought about how you weren’t supposed to touch the pegasi, and yet the pegasi touch each other constantly—and her too, while she was with them. She reached out and took her mother’s hand.
Her mother squeezed it and said, “I just said that sometimes you can show when you can’t say the words. The one occasion I’ve ever felt that Hirishy and I were—were in contact somehow, was about the Caves. I’d had difficulty understanding how important they are, and your father was trying to tell me. This was long ago—Danny was a baby. Cory was explaining that the Caves are thousands of years of pegasus art and culture, and more than that: the heart of themselves as a people. I was wrestling with this, trying to imagine it, I suppose, as like our palace only a great deal more so. I looked up and Hirishy was looking at me. As if talk about their Caves—her Caves—was something she could hear and answer. For a moment—just a moment of a moment—I felt I saw the Caves, saw them as Hirishy had seen them, was seeing them in her memory at that moment and was trying to tell me.”
“What did you see?” said Sylvi.
“Nothing I can tell you in a way that will make that sudden flash seem astonishing, which it was. It was so very … other. Alien. There are caves in the Greentops, you know, and some of the bigger, deeper ones have decorated walls. But this …” She threw out her free hand in a there-are-no-words gesture. The pegasi had a specific gesture for “there are no words,” which included a single swift up-and-down tail-lash.
“Full?” suggested Sylvi.
“Full,” said her mother thoughtfully. “Full of … full. Yes. And yet … it was only one enormous cave with—with knobbly walls, except I could see that the humps and valleys and ridges had been made. There was a pegasus standing on a low earthwork, with a tiny brush in its alula hand.”
“Chuur,” said Sylvi. “When you don’t know someone’s gender. Chuur and chuua. Chuur hand.”
“I thought you heard Ebon in your head, like you hear someone speaking.”
“I do. Mostly. But what happens when they use a word you don’t know? Ebon had to explain chuur and chuua to me.” And had found it strange and tactless that her language called a live, gendered being “it” for want of a better choice.
“Chuur alula hand, then. The wall in front of—of chuua—was beautifully coloured in reds and golds. I couldn’t see if any of the bumps and colours were a picture I might recognise; the flash didn’t last long enough. But the feeling that went with it was extraordinary.”
Sylvi smiled a little. “Yes. That sounds like the Caves.” Good for Hirishy. “The whole last three weeks …” She paused. “It was all like that, a little. Like that feeling. That flash. That astonishment.”
“Yes,” said her mother softly. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
CHAPTER 17
Sylvi got through the rest of the week without Ebon somehow. She spent as much time outdoors as she could. She polished the sword that might have belonged to Razolon till it gleamed like a bead round the neck of a pegasus. She took extra lessons with Diamon; she volunteered for extra bashing-and-crashing practise, as hand-to-hand was familiarly called out of Diamon’s hearing, and was put up against a variety of opponents, from Lucretia to some of Diamon’s smallest and youngest beginners, including one of her cousins, her uncle Rulf’s youngest daughter, who had been sent to the palace for six weeks to find out what she needed to learn.
“Well done,” said Diamon, after one long afternoon, as Sylvi was hanging up the rest of her practise gear, with her sword over her shoulder.
“I suppose I’m less threatening than someone bigger,” she said. “Someone like Renny,” her cousin, “is more likely to try what she knows against someone like me.”
“I’m not putting you up against the littles for your size,” said Diamon. “I’m putting you in because you use your strength well. Don’t sell yourself as a three-legged donkey when you’re a pegasus.”
It was an old phrase, as old as “it will hearten us.” She still had to stop herself from saying “I wish.”
“Thank you,” she said.
But she had to spend some time indoors. Ahathin said, “Have you given any thought to how you wish to present your report of your journey?”
“No,” said Sylvi with loathing. There was a pile of blank paper in a corner of her table. She flicked the edge of the pile with her finger: it was beautiful, in its way, hard and crisp and shiny. The pegasi’s softer, duller paper was meant chiefly to take paint, not ink. She had seen several shamans’ sigils: Ebon said that how the paint bled into the paper told you how strong the charm would be, and also something about how it would do its work. I can read a few of the easy ones, what they’re for, Ebon said. But that’s all. I can’t tell you w
hether it’s a good one or not. It’s one of the things you learn if you’re a shaman’s apprentice. Like this one is for a good harvest. But it could be a good harvest that’s full of weeds that we’ll have to pick out. Sigils for rain are tricky, for example, because you want a nice steady medium rain, not like the rain-spirits overturning the sky-bowl so all the rain falls on you at once.
“I recommend you do so,” said Ahathin. “I wish to be able to tell your father before the festivities for your birthday when he can expect to see it.”
Could she write about the shamans’ sigils? She could at least write about watching them make their paper. Her outstretched arm revealed Niahi’s bracelet below the end of her sleeve. She could write about meeting Ebon’s little sister. She could write about how the pegasi made yelloni for each other, but for ears and ankles. She could not write that Niahi had decided that human wrists were best. She could not write that Niahi had said anything to her at all.
She had spoken to no pegasus since Ebon left. When she saw one in a corridor or in one of the gardens, they bowed to each other but did not stop. In human groups … the humans were always making so much mouth noise it was hard to think.
She looked at Ahathin and could think of nothing to say, no loud human words. But even the silence in the human world lay differently than silence with the pegasi.
“The king has faith in his daughter’s intelligence and perception, and so do I,” said Ahathin.
“You mean, be careful what I put in my report.”
“Remember that your report may be read by anyone who goes to the library and asks to see it.”
“Which might include Fthoom.”
“Which will undoubtedly include Fthoom.”
“Will you help me?” she said sadly.
“I will certainly help you, if you wish it.”
“You mean you are a magician too.”
“I am indeed a magician too. But my similarity to Fthoom ends there, as I would most humbly beg the lady Sylviianel to remember.”
She thought of the Hall of Magicians, where he could go and she could not. She thought of Redfora; she thought of the fact that Ahathin was one of her oldest friends. She let her mind drift … and for a moment she was standing in the little valley with an army behind her, and the king of the pegasi was sweeping his wingtip across the bottom of a long piece of soft white paper: she could hear a faint rustling as some human hand shifted its grip. And the two magicians with the human king looked up. She remembered the one—the one whose smile, back in the Caves, said, It is too late. It is done.
But the second one looked at her now and in his eyes she read, Try.
“I believe you,” she said aloud. “And I would be grateful for your help.”
“It shall be my last official act as your tutor,” said Ahathin. “I thank you for that.”
At night—especially on the three quiet clear nights that would have been perfect for flying—she told herself that there had been many perfect flying nights they had not gone flying because Ebon wasn’t there. There had been many weeks when Ebon had been at home among the pegasi, having lessons from his master, teasing his little sister, being bored by council meetings—not with her at the palace, among the humans. This had not seemed strange to her then. But that was then, she thought. That was before I visited their country, and their Caves.
She had after all told no one, not even her father, that she had spoken to other pegasi in Rhiandomeer—pegasi other than Ebon. It turned out that it was easy—miserably, painfully easy—not to tell anyone. It was not only that no one asked directly—who was going to say to her, “Did you find, in Rhiandomeer, that you could speak to the rest of the pegasi too? That for you almost a thousand years of the way things are were nothing at all?” She had not thought of this clearly; she had been too busy bracing herself to lie. She had been, before she was brought back to the human world, so full of her experience of the pegasi, it had seemed to her that anyone who met her might read the truth of it, somehow, off her face, her bearing, as visible as a siraga around her shoulders.
Instead there was a new, curious distance, an awkwardness, between her and—everyone. She had thought everyone would be longing to hear about her visit, the adventure that no one else had had before. And perhaps they were. But no one asked. Even Ahathin, helping her organise her thoughts and her notes into a presentation she could give to her father and the senate, asked her no questions except about what she had already volunteered, already written down. She wanted to ask him, Do you think the pegasi shamans’ magic is antithetical to human magicians’ magic? Would you go to Rhiandomeer if you had the chance? Do you think it would make you confused or sick or powerless? Have the magicians ever discussed this barrier between humans and pegasi? Do they know why so few shamans come here, and why they never stay long? Is there a special group within some magicians’ guild that studies the situation, like Fthoom looking for stories of friendship between human and pegasus? Has it taken you over eight hundred years to reach no conclusions?
She wasn’t even sure she could, here, in the human country, speak to pegasi, any more than Hibeehea could speak to humans, here. The air, like the silence, lay against you differently here, and she put her hand to her cheek as if to brush back a veil. The difference did not seem to make her ill, as it made the pegasus shamans, but it made her feel as if she had not come home after all—as if some of her had not come home, the part that understood sky views and sky holds, the part that found human noise and human sitting-down banquets normal.
She had dreaded what her father might ask her about speaking to the pegasi: she dreaded it because of the look in Dorogin’s eyes, because of Hibeehea’s advice, because she did not want to think about why she knew in her bones it was good advice. Lrrianay, on that first incredible night when she had begun speaking to the other pegasi, had told her what the two kings hoped, and her father had noticed that her speech at the banquet had already become more fluent after only a day among the pegasi in their own country. She dreaded almost anything he might now ask her about her journey, but he asked her nothing at all. The morning he and she had seen the doorathbaa pegasi who had brought her back leave to fly home to their country—the morning she had had to hold on to her father to keep herself standing as she watched Ebon vanish—he had said to her afterward, “I’m sorry, young one, that it’s so hard. But I’m glad to have you back.”
But he said nothing more, that day or the following days. And she never seemed to see him except in some councillor’s company, or among a group of senators—or with Fazuur and Lrrianay. She could have asked to see him alone, but she didn’t. She wondered if he thought she was avoiding him. She wondered if he was avoiding her. It was so easy to avoid someone, here at the palace, with all the bustling, clattering humans, all the comings and goings, all the meetings, all the discussions, all the messages, all the different groups of people concerned about different things and insisting on the greater importance of whatever their subject, their charge, their preoccupation was…. She had never realised before that it was too much. But it hadn’t been too much, before. Before Rhiandomeer and its birdsong, rustling-tree silences, the hum of the pegasi; before the taste of her porridge, of fwhfwhfwha, of the llyri grass. Before the Caves. Before ssshuuwuushuu.
She didn’t try to speak to any other pegasus, and none tried to speak to her. She felt that if she did try, she might fall down, as she had that evening she had first spoken to Niahi and then Lrrianay. She felt that despite the things that wouldn’t change—the two legs, the big hands with the rotating wrists, the lack of wings—that she was less secure in her humanness than she had been before she visited Rhiandomeer, and that was exactly what she dared not risk revealing. She dared not risk trying to speak to a pegasus. And—changed as she was in other ways—she dared not risk the despair if she failed.
She wondered if Lrrianay had said anything about her to the other pegasi at the palace, abou
t what had happened to her in Rhiandomeer—and if so what might he have said? Had he told them not to try to speak to her—she the wingless biped who had spent five days in the Caves, who, in Rhiandomeer, could speak to all the pegasi, and not only to Ebon? Had Lrrianay guessed about the despair? Or was it only that Lrrianay agreed with Hibeehea—although Lrrianay had, in the end, said nothing about what Hibeehea had told her. Lrrianay’s last words to her had been on the morning of her flight home, merely: Thank you for coming. And she had replied, Thank you for having me. Her aunt or her uncle might have said just the same, and she responded the same, at the end of one of her visits to her cousins.
But her state of mind was not as important as the fact that any hint of communication between the princess returned from Rhiandomeer and any other pegasus than the one she was so strangely bound to would be reported directly and immediately to Fthoom. Fthoom, the powerful and power-mad, Fthoom, about whom a petition was gathering support and signatures, calling for him to be reinstated in his former place of authority and influence in the king’s council; Fthoom, who hated her.
She thought Lrrianay was avoiding her—but she knew she was avoiding him. From the outside, she thought, the pegasi looked just as before—formal, aloof, polite, perhaps kind, but disinterested. That was a good thing, she reminded herself. She was supposed to pretend—to appear—that nothing had happened except that she had been gone for three weeks; except that she had made history. I won’t make any of the kind of history anybody will have to learn later. I promise, she had said to her father. And he had replied, Be careful of your promises. I’m not going to hold you to this one.
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