Ebon interrupted. What Dad will take the next day and a half to say in king talk is yes, the problem is your magicians, or anyway the magic they do, or the way they do it—it’s all wands and smoke and—and—stuff. Have you ever wondered why none of our shamans seems to stay long when they visit your palace? And you don’t see the same one very often? Is there any shaman you knew by name but Hissiope? At first—eight hundred years ago—they thought it was just that we were so strange to one another. Later they decided that the magic your magicians made was keeping it that way.
Lrrianay said gravely, There has never been any such decision—
Oh, Dad, that’s king talk again! Can we please go the short way? We already know Fthoom is a bad guy! Syl and I have known it since our binding—or anyway I knew it then and I guess Syl has known since she first met the brute. It stands out around him like that weird robe he likes to wear. Syl?
It was a long journey, Sylvi thought, going Ebon’s short way. I’ve always been afraid of Fthoom, which isn’t the same thing. It wasn’t till the binding . . . I knew something was wrong. And . . . not all our magicians are bad. Ebon, you know Ahathin.
Yes, said Ebon. He’s another freak.
I take my son’s point about—er—king talk, said Lrrianay, but it’s not as simple as that human magicians are the villains in our story. There is a great deal of strength in humankind that we do not have. It is a good strength when it stops the taralians and norindours from killing all of us, but it is not a good strength when one of your villages goes to war with their neighbours over the ownership of a field. We think there is something of the same about your magicians’ powers. It was a good power when it forged our Alliance, much quicker, and possibly more securely, than our shamans would have been able to do it. But it was . . . perhaps not the best alliance that could have been made.
We feel that perhaps the misfit of our Alliance is coming to a time of crisis. It is interesting that you—the link that you and Ebon have—should come at the same time as the magician Fthoom. It is that sense of crisis, I believe, that made your father force through an acceptance of you coming to us. He had to . . . displease some people it would have been better not to displease.
Lord Kanf, Sylvi thought. Senator Barnum. “ The king is the most tightly tied by his freedom to rule,” was one of Ahathin’s favourite maxims, and she tried not to believe it because she knew it was so—and because she was the king’s daughter.
Only about ten days before she had been due to depart, and when she knew that the senate had still not officially ratified her going, one of the oldest of the king’s council members had sought her out at one of those state dinners she was now obliged to attend. She knew that Senator Orflung was one of those who were against her journey. She braced herself, and tried not to let it show that she was bracing herself.
“My lady, my apologies for my presumption”—which was a phrase she was accustomed to hearing in her father’s court but she’d never heard it addressed to herself before—“but would you be good enough to tell me if you—you yourself, with no one whispering in your ear—if you want to visit the pegasi’s land? ”
She looked at him blankly for a moment, as if he were a strange pegasus speaking pegasi. She had given a short, formal speech to the combined senate when her father had first introduced the news of her impending journey, in which she had said that she did want to go, very much. But she had also been saying it to two hundred senators, lords, ladies, barons and granddames, and she had been concentrating on getting through it, not on being convincing. She noticed now—having not studied his face close up before—that there were deep smile lines round Senator Orflung’s eyes and his mouth, and the frowning look he wore at present was more worried than angry or bullying. She relaxed a little. “Yes, my sir, I do wish to visit it. The—the full senate is very intimidating, you know. ”
The frown disappeared and he smiled. “Yes, my lady, I do know. After forty years I still have to take a deep breath before I climb to my feet to address it.” The smile disappeared.“I am, of course, aware of the prohibition against querying you about the pegasi. But I would ask you to indulge me so far as to tell me . . . you feel you and Hrrr Ebon to be true friends, is that correct? As—as you might be friends with my daughter. ”
His youngest daughter was eight years older and a foot taller than Sylvi, and almost as daunting as her father. “Ebon and I are friends, yes,” she said carefully. “And I can speak to him as I could speak to your daughter. ” She realised that this might sound too similar to what she had said to the senate, and cast around for something she could add that would sound genuine, that would not sound as if she were hiding some important truth. “We can laugh together. He—he teases me. He tells terrible jokes. ”
The smile crept back into his eyes again. “The pegasi tell jokes? I am glad to know that. They are always so grand and solemn at court—and we rarely see any but those who are human bound. We never see the little ones, the children—I understand that it is too long a flight for them. Do they play, like human children? Do they scamper and jump and fall over? It is not only that we cannot speak to them clearly—how can you know anything about a people if you have never seen its children? But I am sure, if they tell jokes, that their children also play.
“And I will ask you one more question, and then excuse you from the burden of my company any further. My lady, forgive me, but I wish to recast the question I began with. Do you want to visit your friend at his home? Aside from any other question of who you are or who your friend is, or what your parents’—er—colleagues think of the matter, or whether anyone else with a friendship such as yours has done such a thing. Do you want to go—not just over the Starclouds to somewhere no human has been, but to visit your friend, because you can laugh with him, and exchange terrible jokes? ”
She thought, how odd that no one has asked me this but my mother and father, and Danacor, and Lucretia and Diamon—Ahathin didn’t have to ask, and Glarfin would think it was none of his business. But it was easy to answer immediately:“Yes, my sir, I do wish to go. For just those reasons. Because he visits me at my home. I want to visit him at his.”
He nodded, staring at her. “ Thank you, my lady. I believe you. ”
The next day her father said to her, “I don’t know what you said to old Orflung last night—I saw you talking to him—but Barnum tried to begin a last-minute rebellion this morning about your journey and Orflung essentially shouted him down. Said you were no longer a child but a young woman and you knew your own mind and wanted to go, and we should let you. Finally. Barnum wouldn’t have won, if it had come to that—I’d’ve invoked king’s fiat. But I have hoped I wouldn’t have to—and everyone listens to Orflung. But why it never occurred to anyone before to ask you—I’ve even suggested it two or three times, to Orflung among others. ”
“It’s because I’m so little, ” said Sylvi. “I’m just big enough to be a parcel to be wrapped up and sent somewhere. Or not. ”
The king snorted. “Helpless wrapped-up parcels don’t knock their experienced sparring partners over—with tricks the sparring partners have taught them. ” Lucretia had been so delighted by her protégé’s progress she’d brought the story to the king herself.
“You should have let me challenge Barnum to single combat. I’d’ve shown him what a parcel can do. ”