Sylvi was silent.
“What were they like, the Caves?” said her mother hesitantly.
The question had not been asked before. There was—to Sylvi’s ears—an unhappy little silence around it now. Sylvi had been home two days, and no one, not even her father and mother, had asked her anything about her journey. With Hibeehea’s words still in the front of her mind, and dismayed and disoriented about her sense of strangeness in her own home, she had not tried to talk about it. When she came back from her cousins’ she couldn’t stop talking—although Powring and Orthumber and Nearenough and Shirrand, where her various aunts and uncles lived, were very well known to both her parents, and she could just talk, she didn’t have to explain anything. Or avoid explaining anything.
Since she’d been back, this was the first time she’d been alone with either parent. She left her window-sill and sat on her bed next to her mother. She thought about how you weren’t supposed to touch the pegasi, and yet the pegasi touch each other constantly—and her too, while she was with them. She reached out and took her mother’s hand.
Her mother squeezed it and said, “I just said that sometimes you can show when you can’t say the words. The one occasion I’ve ever felt that Hirishy and I were—were in contact somehow, was about the Caves. I’d had difficulty understanding how important they are, and your father was trying to tell me. This was long ago—Danny was a baby. Cory was explaining that the Caves are thousands of years of pegasus art and culture, and more than that: the heart of themselves as a people. I was wrestling with this, trying to imagine it, I suppose, as like our palace only a great deal more so. I looked up and Hirishy was looking at me. As if talk about their Caves—her Caves—was something she could hear and answer. For a moment—just a moment of a moment—I felt I saw the Caves, saw them as Hirishy had seen them, was seeing them in her memory at that moment and was trying to tell me.”
“What did you see?” said Sylvi.
“Nothing I can tell you in a way that will make that sudden flash seem astonishing, which it was. It was so very . . . other. Alien. There are caves in the Greentops, you know, and some of the bigger, deeper ones have decorated walls. But this ...” She threw out her free hand in a there-are-no-words gesture. The pegasi had a specific gesture for “there are no words,” which included a single swift up-and-down tail-lash.
“Full?” suggested Sylvi.
“Full,” said her mother thoughtfully. “Full of . . . full. Yes. And yet . . . it was only one enormous cave with—with knobbly walls, except I could see that the humps and valleys and ridges had been made. There was a pegasus standing on a low earthwork, with a tiny brush in its alula hand.”
“Chuur,” said Sylvi.“When you don’t know someone’s gender. Chuur and chuua. Chuur hand.”
“I thought you heard Ebon in your head, like you hear someone speaking.”
“I do. Mostly. But what happens when they use a word you don’t know? Ebon had to explain chuur and chuua to me.” And had found it strange and tactless that her language called a live, gendered being “it” for want of a better choice.
“Chuur alula hand, then. The wall in front of—of chuua—was beautifully coloured in reds and golds. I couldn’t see if any of the bumps and colours were a picture I might recognise; the flash didn’t last long enough. But the feeling that went with it was extraordinary.”
Sylvi smiled a little. “Yes. That sounds like the Caves.” Good for Hirishy. “The whole last three weeks . . .” She paused. “It was all like that, a little. Like that feeling. That flash. That astonishment.”
“Yes,” said her mother softly. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
CHAPTER 17
Sylvi got through the rest of the week without Ebon somehow. She spent as much time outdoors as she could. She polished the sword that might have belonged to Razolon till it gleamed like a bead round the neck of a pegasus. She took extra lessons with Diamon; she volunteered for extra bashing-and-crashing practise, as hand-to-hand was familiarly called out of Diamon’s hearing, and was put up against a variety of opponents, from Lucretia to some of Diamon’s smallest and youngest beginners, including one of her cousins, her uncle Rulf ’s youngest daughter, who had been sent to the palace for six weeks to find out what she needed to learn.
“Well done,” said Diamon, after one long afternoon, as Sylvi was hanging up the rest of her practise gear, with her sword over her shoulder.
“I suppose I’m less threatening than someone bigger,” she said. “Someone like Renny,” her cousin,“is more likely to try what she knows against someone like me.”
“I’m not putting you up against the littles for your size,” said Diamon. “I’m putting you in because you use your strength well. Don’t sell yourself as a three-legged donkey when you’re a pegasus.”
It was an old phrase, as old as “it will hearten us.” She still had to stop herself from saying “I wish.”
“Thank you,” she said.
But she had to spend some time indoors. Ahathin said, “Have you given any thought to how you wish to present your report of your journey?”
“No,” said Sylvi with loathing. There was a pile of blank paper in a corner of her table. She flicked the edge of the pile with her finger: it was beautiful, in its way, hard and crisp and shiny. The pegasi’s softer, duller paper was meant chiefly to take paint, not ink. She had seen several shamans’ sigils: Ebon said that how the paint bled into the paper told you how strong the charm would be, and also something about how it would do its work. I can read a few of the easy ones, what they’re for, Ebon said. But that’s all. I can’t tell you whether it’s a good one or not. It’s one of the things you learn if you’re a shaman’s apprentice. Like this one is for a good harvest. But it could be a good harvest that’s full of weeds that we’ll have to pick out. Sigils for rain are tricky, for example, because you want a nice steady medium rain, not like the rain-spirits overturning the sky-bowl so all the rain falls on you at once.
“I recommend you do so,” said Ahathin. “I wish to be able to tell your father before the festivities for your birthday when he can expect to see it.”
Could she write about the shamans’ sigils? She could at least write about watching them make their paper. Her outstretched arm revealed Niahi’s bracelet below the end of her sleeve. She could write about meeting Ebon’s little sister. She could write about how the pegasi made yelloni for each other, but for ears and ankles. She could not write that Niahi had decided that human wrists were best. She could not write that Niahi had said anything to her at all.
She had spoken to no pegasus since Ebon left. When she saw one in a corridor or in one of the gardens, they bowed to each other but did not stop. In human groups . . . the humans were always making so much mouth noise it was hard to think.
She looked at Ahathin and could think of nothing to say, no loud human words. But even the silence in the human world lay differently than silence with the pegasi.
“The king has faith in his daughter’s intelligence and perception, and so do I,” said Ahathin.
“You mean, be careful what I put in my report.”
“Remember that your report may be read by anyone who goes to the library and asks to see it.”
“Which might include Fthoom.”
“Which will undoubtedly include Fthoom.”
“Will you help me?” she said sadly.
“I will certainly help you, if you wish it.”