He held it out to her and she accepted it on her palm. It was darkest red, almost black, and the pinprick of its centre seemed to glow like the heart of a fire. This is some kind of—magic, she said. It was a soft sort of magic though, she thought. Soft not itchy.
Ebon frowned—ears halfback, head turned slightly to one side—I don’t think so. Well . . . there are words you say while you’re doing it. Different words for different cloths. He picked one up, and then another one, and handed them to her, and Sylvi could feel—faintly, subtly—that the two cloths had different textures. It’s a . . . it’s a . . . I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a little like learning stories or histories. You kind of go to a different place in your head. You go to a different different place from the lesson-learning different place to say the words while you’re polishing. And it was a shaman—several shamans—who made up the words originally, but that was thousands of years ago. Some of the words don’t exist any more, except in these chants.
Sylvi, fascinated, said, Could you tell me one of the chants?
Ebon looked surprised (drawing back of head, raising nose, slight rustle of feathers at the shoulders). Probably. We’ll have to stand up.
Usually we do it like this, and he put his feather-hands to her temples. This is the first one, the simplest one. These words are all normal. And then he began to make one of the funny almost-humming noises again, and Sylvi heard the words he was saying in her mind, as she usually heard Ebon, but they sounded strangely far away and slightly echoing, as if she were listening to her father addressing an audience in the Outer Court and she was at the back, next to the Inner Great Court wall.
And as she thought that, another picture began to cohere as if it were being built by the clean shining words Ebon was saying, and she closed her eyes to see it better. It bloomed from the blackness as if she had been walking in a dark place and had now stepped into light. Candlelight, firelight, light flickering off the glossy black flank of the pegasus standing just in front of her, polishing, polishing, polishing some curve—some complex series of curves—on the wall in front of him; the flame-light made those curves flicker with movement, with life: a human woman stood, holding a sword....
He stopped humming. He took his hands away from her temples, but patted her face as he did so. Syl?
Oh, she said. Oh, I . . . oh . . .
Golden summer sunrise and blue winter sunset, he said, don’t tell me you had a vision.
Well . . . yes. I think so. Perhaps she had imagined it; she knew that this was to do with Ebon’s desire to be a sculptor, and the pegasus Caves—it was an obvious thing for her to imagine. But the black pegasus was bigger even than Ebon—and a human woman with a sword? She suddenly and powerfully did not want to tell him what she had seen.
Golden, he said wonderingly. Gold and blue. Well. That doesn’t happen all that often. It happened to me. It’s a good omen if you want to be a sculptor. Or a shaman. Never knew it ever happened to humans.... But then I don’t suppose there’ve been a lot of humans who’ve tried. Maybe you should be a sculptor too.
Or a shaman, she thought involuntarily. She noticed he didn’t ask her what she’d seen, nor tell her what he had seen. I’m hungry, she said abruptly. Let’s go find something to eat.
Yes, let’s, said Ebon, who was always hungry. Usually they went to the pegasus annex because Sylvi liked to pretend that the palace’s best fruit was always given to the pegasi—and because she’d discovered she loved the open feeling of the rooms with only three walls. The windbreak of trees kept the worst of the weather out, and in winter she tended to stay on the lee side of Ebon, pressed up against his side or tucked under a wing. Sylvi had also developed a taste for pegasus bread, which had a lighter, airier texture than dense human bread kneaded by strong human hands.
The first time he had offered to take her there, she had hesitated. Won’t they—the others—mind?
You and your minds, said Ebon. As long as you don’t eat all the grapes or pull anyone’s tail they won’t mind. Grapes were very popular; the pegasi could not grow them.
Ebon wrapped the little black-red stone up again, tucked it into its bag, flipped the ribbon over his nose with a feather hand and tossed his head in an obviously habitual gesture so the little bag settled round his neck again. As they walked down the corridor Ebon said, apparently as eager to change the subject as she was, We’re going out again tonight, aren’t we? You can stay awake tomorrow? Even between themselves they rarely said “flying.” The weather’s going to change; this is our last chance.
Yes, said Sylvi. There’s that stupid banquet—you have to come too, don’t you?—for the Echon of Swarl, because Dad wants to use some of his soldiers. They’re good at climbing trees. Swarl is all forest. But we can go straight from there and no one will notice. I’ll wear my flying stuff under my dress.
They did. But Sylvi, choosing in the dark, had not been lucky with the tree she had left her banqueting clothes in, and she had green smudges and bird slime to explain the next morning. But no one had been very surprised that she had crept outdoors after the banquet. Lucretia said, “Get one of the Echon’s folk to show you how to climb trees in daylight next time, okay?”
But she couldn’t think about unimportant things like her court clothes when she was focussed on flying. They had explored the countryside in every direction, up to almost half a night’s flight away, and there had been one or two terrifying near-dawn returns. Sylvi had learnt the rota and schedule of the Wall guards at the very first, so that they could fly over a bit whose sentries were at the other end of their span; the same pegasus seen flying regularly over the Wall at night would be taken note of, and Ebon was black, which was an unusual colour in pegasi, and therefore would be recognised too easily as himself. That he was known to be flying at night for a project he was doing as part of his apprenticeship was some help, but they wished to take no more chances than they had to.
Spring and autumn were the best seasons for their expeditions, when the nights were longer than they were in the summer, and warmer than in winter. Summer used to be my favourite season, Sylvi had said to Ebon as they snatched a quick midsummer’s flight between late and early twilight, in the first year of their friendship. I used to love the long days and short nights.
Even Ebon could not fly very far carrying a passenger; they set down once, twice, maybe three times in a long night’s flying, to let him rest and stretch his wings: Sylvi had learnt where to rub and dig in her thumbs along his shoulders, especially the thick heavy muscles that were the beginning of his wings. Mmmmmmh, Ebon would say. Harder.