I know humans don’t ride us, but I don’t know any great forbidding about it. You don’t ride us because we’re too small and you’re too big. It’s rather nice of you, I think, to make it into a big forbidding. It’s—it’s to do us honour, I can see that. Human honour. Thank you. But I would like to take you flying. My dad would tell me no—that’s why I’m here in the middle of the night—not because it’s rude but because it’s dangerous. I bet you aren’t allowed to climb down the wall from your window, are you?
No.
Well then.
He moved around till she was facing his near shoulder. He’d flattened that wing and stretched it as far back as it would go; she put one hand on his withers and one just behind, and gave a little heave, and lay belly down over his back. She could do this without thinking on her own pony who was, in fact, a little shorter than Ebon, but who was also, of course, uncomplicated by wings. She lifted her right leg very gingerly as far as it would go and then laid it along his back—his right wing was now stretched out horizontal to prevent her rolling off the other side—wriggled her body around, laid her left leg beside her right, took hold of his mane and wriggled a little further forward. Except for his (mercifully low) withers gouging into her breastbone, she was—surprisingly—fairly comfortable.
Okay?
Okay.
He walked forward a little cautiously. She could feel him trying to adjust to the weight of her; his wings were half spread, and they vibrated as he sought his balance. He bowed his head up and down a few times, stretched his wings to their full extent—they seemed leagues wide to Sylvi—said, Here we go, and shot forward at a gallop. The powerful wings seemed to grab the air; she could feel not only the great muscular thrust down, but the kick of the released air again as the wings rose and freed it; and with each downstroke, Ebon—and Sylvi—briefly left the earth in a long bound. One … two … three … the sweep of wings and the boom of wind deafened her to any other sound; she could just feel the tap of Ebon’s galloping feet, one-two-three, one stride for each wing-stroke, beneath her … four … five … six….
They were airborne.
Sylvi was crying again, but it might have been the wind. She could guess at the extra effort Ebon was making to carry her; the body beneath her was taut with exertion, the muscles both as solid as stone and as live and lithe as running water. It should have been difficult, and terrifying, to stay on, but somehow it was not; the muscles of her belly and thighs seemed to know how to keep her centre of gravity so perfectly balanced over Ebon’s spine that when he turned and banked she merely sank a little closer to him, almost as if she were a part of him. She knew the old horse-riding adage of striving to become one with your horse, but this was nothing like riding a horse, and she had never felt anything with her pony—whom she loved dearly and rode every day—like she now felt with Ebon, as if they were almost one creature indeed.
She’d always found the stories of centaurs a little unsatisfactory. The earthbound centaurs interested her not at all, but she often thought about the winged ones—thought of them for having human faces, voices, hands—and wings. But what would centaurs eat? If they ate hay for their horse digestion, didn’t it hurt their human mouths? If they grazed like horses, didn’t the human heads get dizzy? She thought, Maybe there’s a very, very old story, that we aren’t allowed to know about, that some magician put a spell on so we shouldn’t find it, that centaurs are really humans riding pegasi.
She felt secure enough to rearrange her hands in his mane and raise her face a little so that she could glance to one side and then the other—careful not to move her head far enough or quickly enough to disturb Ebon’s equilibrium.
He was gaining height, spiralling up and up in a huge gyre. Even in the dark she could see—her view came and went, like an eye’s slow blinking, by the whip of Ebon’s wingbeats—the great shadowy loom of the palace, spilling off in one direction with stables and barns, and in another with servants’ quarters, and another with courtiers’ and magicians’ apartments, and another yet with the special open rooms for the pegasi. She could make out the always-lit dome of the Inner Great Court and the walls around the Outer, the whole surrounded by wide formal gardens and carriageways like the erratic spokes of a very strangely shaped wheel. She thought, This is how it really looks.
As all these passed under Ebon’s wings she could see farther and farther, forest and parkland and a clutch of buildings like a small village at a crossroads of the inner city; and there was the Wall. Now, as Ebon turned again, the palace came once more into view, a little smaller this time. Her people were fascinated by what they called sky views; some of the most prized and valuable of the decorative artwork in the palace were paintings of hills and valleys, lakes and forests, towns and villages, as if seen from above, and there were many miniature landscapes called sky holds, made out of stone and wood and clay and, occasionally, jewels. None of them were as beautiful—or as exciting—or as shocking—as this dark-blurred, wing-nicked scene, with the wind streaking past, tangling her hair and chilling her back and her bare feet; but her hands were buried snugly in his mane, and Ebon himself was as warm as a hearth.
She thought, This is how it really looks. And again, wonderingly: This is how it really looks….
At last he stopped climbing and flew for the Wall, and over it. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder (as presumably it had not occurred to Ebon) whether the airborne magic carefully suspended and maintained above the Wall would let a human pass; they had just proved that it would. Moving boringly at walking speed through one of the gates, there was a faint chilly press or wash against your skin rather like diving into Banesorrow Lake; she felt nothing tonight but the wind and the flick of Ebon’s mane.
Sylvi briefly saw the moving figures of two of the guards walking along the Wall as they passed through one of the circles of torchlight, and guessed as well that Ebon had flown so high that they could not possibly see her. Pegasi did not commonly fly at night, but they did do so; no one would think anything of a pegasus flying so late, especially not after a day like today, when there were so many of them visiting the human king.
Once they were over the Wall he turned again, northwest, and they flew for a while over farm and field and more villages, till the mountains at the edge of the plain by some trick of the dark seemed to grow larger though they did not seem any nearer; and then, at last, although Sylvi reckoned that in actual minutes they had not been gone very long, he turned round again and headed back for the Wall, and the palace.
They had not spoken during the flight, but when Ebon was over the Wall again and losing height as they neared the park where they had started out, he said suddenly, I should have taught you how to fall first. I’m afraid this is not going to be one of my better landings. Can you fall?
Of course I can fall, said Sylvi with dignity. I have fallen off my pony many times.
She thought he laughed. Don’t tense up, he said. And you want to try to roll when you hit. I hope your pony-teacher taught you that. Sorry. Damn. Stupid of me. Look, I’ll tip you off a few secs before I land myself, so I won’t fall on you. Ready?
Ready, said Sylvi, since she didn’t have any choice.
The ground was rushing up toward them. The great wings arched and curled, and Ebon seemed to rear in the air, and stalled for the briefest fraction of a moment; then they levelled out, and now the ground was very close indeed. Ebon said, Now, and gave a lurch to one side, and Sylvi let herself tumble off the other side of his tail, and with a vague memory of the horse-dancers who threw themselves on and off their galloping horses to amuse people on feast days, tried to flip herself round in the air. She landed nearly on her feet, ran a few steps, knowing she was going to fall anyway, and managed to roll when she finally did so.
Ebon, who had also fallen, was already up and giving himself a vigorous shake when she staggered to her feet again. Are you in one piece still? Are you all ri
ght? he said, leaving off shaking and coming toward her; and a laugh burst out of her as suddenly as she had burst into tears when he had said he would take her flying. Yes. No. But not from falling. Tonight was the most—
Words failed her, and she went up to him and put her arms round his neck, and rested her face against his hot sweaty shoulder. She felt his nose in her hair, and then his teeth gently gripped a lock of it, and tugged, even more gently, which she would learn was a pegasus caress, like a human kiss.
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 t
he 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.