Ebon was on his knees beside her almost before she finished falling. Syl?
She heard me! said the young pegasus. I know she did! I heard her hearing me!
Slowly Sylvi said, I don’t know your name.
The young pegasus spoke both aloud and silently, Niahi!
Sylvi said—still sitting down, but one hand gripping Ebon’s mane—Ebon, your name isn’t precisely Ebon either, is it? It’s—
Ebon is close enough, said Ebon, sounding worried. Are you all right?
There were murmurs all round her, in her ears, in her head—in her eyes, she thought, I am seeing murmurs. Tell me your real name!
“Eeehboohhn,” said Ebon, and it was one of those ripply, pegasus noises in her ears, and a seen murmur, as well as the familiar nonsound in her mind. Who cares? Ebon for short. Like Syl.
I care, said Syl. Everything’s different.
Nothing’s different, said Ebon, rather desperately. I’m still me. You’re still you. And we’re still bound to each other. The only difference is that we’re here rather than there.
Sylvi was still listening to the difference. It’s only the difference between being alone with someone and being in a crowd, she told herself. It’s only . . . but it’s not. It’s not only. There’s nothing only about it. It’s . . . maybe it’s a little like the difference between hearing one person singing and a choir. Maybe, if you were used to listening to someone singing by themselves, a choir—a sudden choir—all those different voices singing slightly different things, would make you dizzy. It might make you so dizzy, perhaps, that you’d fall down. She’d said to her father, “I’m human. I’m a human among pegasi. I’ve only got two legs and I can’t fly. None of that’s going to change. ” It was easier if she could only talk to Ebon. It was easier to have only two legs and no wings, to be carried around like a parcel or someone’s washing—it was easier to be different, if she could only talk to Ebon. She wanted to cry. She did not want to cry. She bit down on her lip. She should try to stand up. She didn’t think she could.
And then someone else knelt beside her: Lrrianay. Oh, no! Sylvi said, and struggled to sit up, climbing Ebon’s mane like ladder rungs.
Syl— began Ebon.
Don’t struggle. Rest a little. Let yourself find yourself again. This is a tremendous change—a tremendous thing that has happened. Please, said Lrrianay. And then Sylvi cowered back against Ebon, and put her hands over her face, because she heard Lrrianay too. We are born knowing we can’t talk to the pegasi, she said to herself; it’s as much a certainty as anything written on the treaty—as not having wings.
How can I bear to talk to them when I cannot fly?
Did you bring me here hoping this would happen? Is this what this is about? Is this why I could say spirit and heart and l-love in my speech at the banquet—say them out loud? Why don’t humans ever come here? It’s one of the first things we ever talked about. You come to us. We don’t come here. Ebon, she said, stumbling over using his name because for the first time she needed to specify who she was talking to—I just wanted to see where you lived. It was too strange that I didn’t know what your home looked like, even if it didn’t have four walls, and—and bedrooms. It was even stranger that I didn’t know where you lived than that we could talk to each other—
Lrrianay interrupted. Child, believe me, you would not have been a disappointment to us if this had not happened!
And she heard the colour red; she listened to the choir. She believed him.
She sat on the ground among the little unknown wildflowers, clinging to Ebon’s mane and the saving familiarity of their friendship, and the breeze in her nostrils smelled sweetly of green spring and of pegasi. The pegasi accepted what came. Ebon had been telling her that for four years. Here, in his country, talking to his father and his sister in the pegasi’s silent-speech, she finally believed him. I don’t know the wildflowers yet, she thought, but I know I’m sitting on llyri grass.
But it was—worth the thinking of, Lrrianay went on, tentatively, watching her, watching her closely, earnestly, kindly, gauging her reaction to what he wanted to tell her—reminding her, suddenly, powerfully, in that gentle but implacable watchfulness, of her own father. That your father and I can half talk to each other is much more than most bondmates have. True talking is so unimaginable that we barely tell stories about it—we pegasi do not, nor humans either, I believe. Your magicians translate, as our shamans may also; what real need have we to talk? It is the way things are. But we—your father and I—hoped that what we had might repeat itself. We have thought of it since before Danacor and Thowara were born. But it seemed less likely after each of your brothers was bound, and none of them can talk to their bondmates even so much as your father and I can. I was not thinking of it at all when Ebon said you should have Niahi, and not him. There are precedents for such discontinuous bindings.
Ebon put his nose in Sylvi’s hair and said, “Phoooooey. ”
We did think of it: the youngest child of the king and the only sister after several brothers. But the shamans advised against it, and so it was done the usual way.
But it was Niahi just now— began Sylvi.
Yes,said Lrrianay. It was. It may only have been that you were another day distant from your own land—a day distant from your father’s departure—a day farther into our land. Perhaps also that Niahi was very—er—eager to meet you. We did not allow her to come to your banquet, much to her dismay, hoping that these other things might help produce a new connection with the sister of your bondmate, the sister you might have been bound to, when you finally met her. It was nothing we did that put those words in your mind last night—but you are right that we took note that you used—could use—them.
I’m afraid, he went on, I’m afraid this has been in our minds since the beginning—since the extraordinary binding between you and Ebon. Since Niahi is a king’s daughter and your father has no more children, and because she is small for her age and until this year would have found the journey to your palace difficult, we have been able to avoid binding her. Because we have been wondering . . .
Sylvi said sadly, None of us has wondered anything. To us—to us humans—Ebon and I are just freaks. The magicians translate; that is the system. There is nothing to—to talk about. She looked at Lrrianay, and he looked back, from his dark, deep, inscrutable pegasus eyes. What are you still not telling me? she said. There was a pause. She took a deep breath, finished letting it out and said, It’s about our magicians, isn’t it?
There was another, longer pause. The other pegasi had now retreated a little farther—beyond eavesdropping distance, Sylvi assumed ; she’d heard Niahi being herded away by her mother, protesting every step.
You have held to the treaty, Lrrianay said at last, and that great promise has given us our lives, by your strength to hold. And your commitment to our bonding ritual tells us that we are a part of your lives and not merely ink marks on an old page.