Pegasus

by Robin McKinley

  The queen told this story grinning at the memory: “Scai was such a serious young woman. Her mother had stood in your grandmother’s army, and it makes me wonder what effect it had on her child-rearing.”

  Warfare. It had just been a proud glorious game, when Sylvi was four and six and eight and Danacor was sixteen and eighteen and twenty. Even when he had begun to take his turn on patrol, for they had since Balsin’s day patrolled the border with the wild lands, she had felt no fear. No taralian had a hope of getting the best of her brother; any taralian with any sense would see him and run away. She looked up at him now, the night before he rode out with the Sword at his side, and remembered the tall boy in the practise yards. Danacor looked down at her and smiled, but he didn’t seem to have anything to say either.

  “I’ll come watch you ride out,” she said at last. “As I used to watch you in the practise yards, when you were learning….” Her voice trailed away.

  “Yes,” he said, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. He put his hand on her shoulder, and then looked at her again as if reconsidering something he had previously discarded. “You’re growing!” he said, and this time his smile reached his eyes. “You are growing! Syl, you’re growing at last. Soon you’ll need a special low chair to sit at table with the rest of us,” he said, teasing her, but she burst out—

  “I’m not! I’m not growing!”

  Danacor looked startled, and dropped his hand. “Well, you are, you know, but I thought you’d be pleased. I thought you always hated being small.”

  She couldn’t tell him about Ebon and flying, so instead she muttered the first thing she could think of: “I’m sorry. It’s just—everything is changing.” Has already changed.

  “Yes,” he said again. His eyes strayed to the door. They’d had dinner in the Little Hall off the Great Hall where the Sword still hung for one more night. “Well, it does. Everything changes. But I’ll be back, Sylvi, love. That won’t change.” He stooped and kissed her, and soon after that the melancholy party finished breaking up, everyone going to an early bed, for there would be much to do tomorrow for everyone.

  Again that night Sylvi had difficulty sleeping, to the dismay of the hounds who had lately learnt to like sharing the princess’ bed. She got up at last (to the hounds’ relief), and put her dressing gown on, and went and sat on the window-sill. There was no moon, and the sky was low and dark with cloud; even the air was oppressive, and she could hear more voices and movements than she should be able to at such an hour—on any night that the heir was not riding out the next day carrying the Sword into battle. Restlessly she stood up again, and went to a little chest that stood on a shelf next to one of her sky holds, and opened it.

  It had previously held hair ribbons, but with her sixteenth birthday she would use these rarely any more, and had moved them to the back of a shelf in her wardrobe, incongruously near the hook where her sword now hung. The little chest now contained small souvenirs of her journey to Rhiandomeer: a bright blue feather from an unknown bird, a yellow leaf from a seehar tree (seehars did not grow in Balsinland), a loop of badly plaited llyri grass—badly because she’d done it herself. The little vial of water from the Dreaming Sea. Her hand hesitated over this for a moment, picked it up and held it so that she was looking through it, toward the grey rectangle of the window. She breathed out slowly. Ssshuuwuushuu….

  The water in the little vial moved—expanded—no; her hand held the tiny bottle as before. But her vision sharpened, focussed….

  She saw the roc first: yellow-gold, tawny, huge, so huge that it was several moments before she saw that it moved in response to … a tiny human. A tiny pegasus. One tiny human. One tiny pegasus. No, that was not possible; she sucked her breath in in horror, because in the next moment she would see them killed….

  And with her gasp the vision was gone, and her hand holding the vial was shaking. She laid the vial back in the chest, unwillingly remembering what she had seen: the tawny roc, the bright red-gold pegasus, the human in battle leathers holding a short sword in one hand and a spear in the other—a spear shorter than one of the roc’s toenails, a sword shorter than one of its pinfeathers. When the pegasus had spread its great wings—a blow from a pegasus’ wing could break a taralian’s back—they looked as tiny as the palms of Sylvi’s hands. She stared unseeingly at the other contents of the chest for some minutes, till the remains of the vision left her.

  Aliaalia had given her one of the pegasi’s little embroidered bags as a farewell gift, and Sylvi had put Ebon’s bead in it—the bead she’d worn round her neck during her six days in the Caves. She hadn’t looked at it since she’d been home.

  She tipped it slowly out into the palm of her hand. It lay there, dark, inert—dead. She closed her hand over it and felt as if something inside her were breaking. Her heart? Her will? She squeezed both her hand and her eyes shut. And then slowly opened them again.

  As if it had taken a moment to wake up, sleepy after too long a nap, the bead was just beginning to glow, with a faint throb like a heart. At first she thought she was imagining it, but as she watched, the glow strengthened and steadied, till it was so bright she could not see her hand behind it.

  For several weeks there was little news; Danacor sent terse descriptions, tied to the legs of carrier-pigeons, of quartering the lower slopes of the boundary mountains. Then a dusty, distressed pigeon missing a few primaries brought the news of the first skirmish; there were a few wounded—although neither Danacor nor his brothers, nor any pegasus—but no one killed. A human messenger on a tired horse brought more news, and, when he returned, he took a packhorse with him, loaded with small padded cages containing more carrier pigeons. About a week after that, a pegasus—no one Sylvi knew—came with more news, both what he could tell and a letter from Danacor hung round his neck in a little bag like a nrala: he was closeted with Corone, Lrrianay and Fazuur for several hours.

  The day after he left, Garren rode in through the northwest gate of the Wall with Poih at his side.

  Sylvi and Ebon went at once to the king’s receiving room to hear Garren’s report. The scouts, crossing the border and going deep in the wild lands, had discovered the mouths of caves leading—they suspected, as far as they dared explore, as much as the magicians with them could guess—to a great network of underground caves; and the passages they did explore were clearly used by taralians and norindours. Garren looked old and grim and determined. “This is not something Danny wanted to send a messenger with, even a messenger who had seen the caves himself. So I said we’d go, Poih and I. And we could bring more troops back.

  “We had Doarday up to take a look, and he believes that there are many more of both taralians and norindours than we have any idea of—that they have been hiding and growing and increasing for a long time. Maybe generations. We should have been keeping better watch … but the truth is that we would still not have found the caves if we hadn’t been searching that specific area—”

  “Which means that the rocs wanted us to find them,” said the king. “That this is something they have been planning. Neither taralians nor norindours plan far in advance; their great cleverness is on the immediate field of battle, when they can see openings and possibilities that slow humans cannot—and pegasi are too honourable to take such advantage. Nor do the two races live together. All this is, I fear, the doing of rocs.”

  Sylvi listened without understanding the details to the rest of the conversation; it ended when the king said, “I will write it down and send a messenger with it now. You need food and sleep, and a regiment cannot move as quickly as a single horse and rider, especially a quick horse and a clever rider.”

  “If it please you, sir,” said Sylvi. “There is no one quicker or cleverer than Lucretia.”

  “Indeed,” said the king. “If you can spare her, Sylviianel, please send for her.”

  Spare her, thought Sylvi. She’s so edgy and impatient she’s become the scourge of th
e practise yards. We’ll be glad to see her go.

  “We cannot know what the rocs’ plan is,” said Garren, “and Danny says that for now we must do the obvious thing—drive the creatures out of their burrows and destroy them—and watch our backs. How soon can the Second Horse Guards be ready to leave?”

  “Tomorrow,” said the king. “I don’t guarantee before breakfast, but before noon. I will see if there is a company or two of someone else we can spare as well; because if the rocs are putting their plan, whatever it is, into action, then we must assume we need more eyes actively watching here too.

  “That gives you time for food and sleep. And I would have you talk to the queen; she is out on patrol, but she will be here this evening. She hunted taralians in those mountains.”

  Garren nodded. “She kept telling us to look for caves—especially a network of caves. Ginab wasn’t enthusiastic and even Doarday thought it unlikely.”

  “She’ll be sorry she was right.”

  “Yes.” Garren’s smile had no humour in it. He paused long enough to hug Sylvi—without ever quite seeing her, she thought—and left.

  Sylvi made to do the same herself. She had already sent a footman to look for Lucretia; it was as well she had someone to send, because her own limbs felt heavy, and her thinking stunned. Taralians and norindours living underground—many of them—ready to pour out upon the country—her country. She could not grasp it—she could not make herself understand that the king would be putting extra watchers on the Wall in response to Garren’s report—that warehouses and under-used buildings inside the Wall would be readied for refugees, or wounded. What she could grasp was that Danacor and Farley, and Garren again soon, were in terrible danger. A terrible danger that, if they could not contain it, would indeed spread over the entire country … and at last come here, to the king’s city within its Wall, to the palace, to her home.

  She put out a hand blindly and encountered Ebon’s shoulder. Bad, he said.

  Very bad.

  They turned to leave, but her father beckoned to them. There was a new look on his face. She could never remember a time when he did not seem tired and needing to think about too many things at once, most of which he would not or could not explain to his daughter. But always before he could set it aside occasionally, and play with her or tease her brothers or swing her mother around in an impromptu dance—he was an excellent dancer—or engage them all in a ballad-composing contest, which he would win unless all five of them united to outdo him. This new tiredness was of a sort that could not be set aside, till the end of some great matter was reached. She wished she could see it in his face that he believed that the end would be reached as he wished it to be. Lrrianay walked a few paces away from the human king, and Ebon followed him; Sylvi could hear a faint rustle of pegasus speech. She missed Niahi, and Niahi’s gaiety and sparkle. Niahi had flown home with her mother two days after the party, with the shamans. But with this news even Niahi’s brightness might go dull.

  “I have seen Fthoom,” her father said, and sighed. “I am sorry, child—sorry for all of us. But he demands to give his report. I hear in his voice that it is a report that pleases him, which means it will not please us. Those of his assistants who report to me say that he found something not long ago that pleased him tremendously, but they do not know what it is. I have said that we have other, mightier concerns on our hands, but Fthoom says that what he will tell us has great import upon those mightier concerns. You know of the petition to reinstate him—he has hinted all these four years that we need his strength; he says almost openly now that we will need it worse when we hear what he has to say.

  “He says he brings proof of the tale that he will tell, and on my orders he spent yesterday in the Hall of Magicians, being grilled by his own. Andovan and Fahlraken have brought me the guilds’ confirmation that what he says is true and that his proof is true proof, though they do not know what of any more than I do. I trust their word, and I trust the Hall.”

  It was one of the purposes of the Hall of Magicians that any magician standing in it had to tell the truth. It had been Gandam’s idea that there should be somewhere in the palace of the monarch where not even the cleverest magician would be able to beguile and deceive. It did not work as well as Gandam had hoped, perhaps because his own powers had been failing when he laid its five cornerstones; but as Ahathin had explained, somewhat drily, to Sylvi some years before, it was at least a good deal harder to lie in the Hall of Magicians than out of it. A determined panel of questioners could get at the truth—or so it had been believed for eight hundred years. Andovan and Fahlraken were two of the oldest members of the magicians’ guilds, and had been in the service of the monarch all that time—they were among the few magicians who were neither dazzled nor frightened by Fthoom. Neither of them had been present four years before, when the king had banished him.

  “Sylviianel,” said her father, calling her back to the present, “I have agreed to listen to him. I can do nothing else; I do not have the time to waste to keep putting him off—even more so now that we have heard Garren’s news.”

  Sylvi thought, I do not want to depend on Fthoom’s strength. I do not want to know that there are times when the king can do only what he wants not to do. I do not want to hear my father say to me, I can do nothing else. I wish that Danny and Garren and Farley and the folk with them were home safe—and that the Second Horse Guards were not going anywhere tomorrow. I wish those caves were empty. I wish that there were no caves….

  I wish I had never come home from Rhiandomeer.

  I must tell Dad … tell him what? That I could talk to the other pegasi in their own country, but that I—I don’t know how reliable it is now that I’m home again? That I am not reliable now that I am home again? That I see things in little bottles of water? That the air I breathe in Balsinland is heavy in a way the air in Rhiandomeer is not? That I agree with the pegasi that what is wrong between us is something about our magicians—our magic? That I think so because I met Dorogin in the pegasi Caves? Dorogin, who has been dead for seven hundred years?

  That I am allying myself with the pegasi against my own people? Isn’t that exactly what Fthoom would want, so he could exile me?

  She put her hand to her throat, as if she could not breathe, as if she could not speak. I wish I might have had one more flight with Ebon. I wish we might have had one more afternoon lying on the grass in the sunlight, even knowing the end is coming. I wish….

  They had not gone flying since she had returned from Rhiandomeer. They had not been flying, therefore, just the two of them as they had once done whenever Ebon was at the palace, since before her journey to his homeland—a time that now seemed so long ago she could barely remember it.

  Perhaps they had never been flying, just the two of them, with Ebon’s mane tangling her own hair, and the world framed by his wings. Perhaps she had imagined it. Perhaps she had imagined that she could talk to the pegasi.

  She wished she had imagined it.

  She had said to her mother, How can everything change in three weeks? Three little weeks. Her mother had smiled and answered, Sometimes they change in a moment.

  Her father continued, “I have given Fthoom a conference for the day after tomorrow. You and Ebon will attend, of course.” He stood up. “I must talk to Lrrianay.” As he looked around for his bondmate, Lrrianay turned his head as if he had heard his name spoken, and Fazuur materialised at the king’s elbow. The king turned back to his daughter for a moment and put his hands on her shoulders and stared at her as if she held some answer to an important question.

  “Dad—” she began, nerving herself to ask him for a moment of private speech, to tell him what she had to tell him, but as she said it her voice cracked, and he didn’t hear her.

  The same look she had seen in Danacor’s eyes the last evening came into her father’s. “You’re growing!” he said.

  She bit her lip. But she repli
ed, “Yes. I know. I am.”

  CHAPTER 19

  There were many more people present for Fthoom’s report than there had been on the day, four years ago, when the king had plucked the magician’s spiral from Fthoom’s head and sent him away. Sylvi had been surprised when Glarfin had reported that the meeting would occur in the Little Hall—which was little only in comparison to the Great Hall—rather than the king’s private receiving room. That meant that this was not only a semipublic occasion but that many people were expected to attend. Glarfin would be there again, as he had been four years ago; but this only made her remember his leaping in front of her, to protect her from Fthoom.

  Ebon knew the business was serious, but he refused to admit that he took it as seriously as Sylvi had to. His response to Fthoom’s prospective return from exile was, Pity. Any day you see that great rolling barrel in the corridor is a blighted day. And then, sadly, in a tone that sounded eerily like his father, I don’t understand why your magicians grow so—so—umblumbulum, which was a pegasus word that meant, roughly, out of order. Pegasi did not use words like “belligerent” and “aggressive” about their friends and allies, and—she guessed—would hesitate to use such words about any human. Even “powerful” implied the misuse of that power, because why did you possess so much of it? Power existed to be given away. She had seen over and over again how his people approached Lrrianay, had seen how different it was from how his people approached her father—her father who was the kindest and quietest of men—far more like Lrrianay than Fthoom.

  She thought again—as she often, involuntarily thought—of Dorogin’s stony eyes in his stony face, staring out at her from the Cave wall, and his stony smile, all saying, Too late.