The pegasi she met were careful to acknowledge her—but the pegasi were always careful to acknowledge any human bound to one of their own, and any pegasus in the palace grounds knew who the bound humans were. She wondered, as she punctiliously responded to pegasus acknowledgements, just as punctiliously as she responded to human acknowledgements, how many of the pegasi disapproved of her visit to their country. Was it that she was human, and was accustomed to reading human gestures and expressions, that she so often knew immediately which humans disapproved of her journey, or was it that humans made their disapproval so obvious? She could not read the pegasi any more—was that because she had lost what she had learnt of them in Rhiandomeer, or was it that they held themselves differently—as she felt she held herself differently—here in Balsinland?
She could almost hear Ebon saying, Disapprove? That’s another of your human things. What’s it for? Once something’s been decided, that’s it, isn’t it?
But what if someone—call it dislike rather than disapprove? Hibeehea didn’t like me talking to the queen when I first arrived. Hibeehea didn’t want me to come at all. . . .
But she couldn’t hear his answer. Faintly she heard Redfora’s voice, but she couldn’t hear the words she said—and furthermore she knew she was making it up, to comfort herself.
She said aloud, “Gonoarin, wheehuf ”—“the best of good days, noble sirs, noble madams”—making the correct human motions with her human hands. She could say the pegasi vowels, the ff’s, the mrr’s, better now than she had been able to a month ago. This much at least she could keep of her journey; a few clear superficial words, a slightly greater fluency with sign.
The pegasi bowed their heads to her so that their long manes swept forward like curtains of silk: beautiful, remote, unknowable.
Of course she never went near the pegasi annex. She had no reason to.
Once she met Hirishy alone, outside her mother’s rooms. She paused to make her bow and when she raised her head Hirishy was very close to her, reaching out one tiny feather-hand to stroke her cheek. Sylvi thought—she almost thought—she heard Oh, poor sweetheart— and in her mind she saw, briefly but so vividly she could not, could not, have imagined it, one of the cultivated hill-meadows of the pegasus land. There were pegasi hoeing between the little green rows, and a pavilion at one corner of the field: a simple, comforting, homey scene, nothing demanding or formidable, like the Caves, or the Dreaming Sea . . . or the palace where they stood.
And then Waina, who was one of the ladies-of-the-queen’s-chamber on duty that week, opened the door. Hirishy moved unhurriedly away from Sylvi’s side, nodded a slow human-style nod to Waina, and stood waiting for Sylvi to precede her through the door. The moment—whatever it had been—was over.
Sylvi had been rather hopelessly making notes toward the presentation she was going to have to give about her journey, writing down three things she thought she could talk about and then crossing two of them off again. It would be so much easier to have a pegasus to ask, she thought.
She sighed, and pushed herself away from the table, and went and sat on the window-sill. She had been given her own office when she began to work on dams and waterways, so she could receive reports and have a place to unroll the charts and diagrams that various people brought her. She had been offered rooms on the ground floor, where most of the rest of her family had their offices, but she had wanted something as high up as possible and was in fact in an attic.“I may try that,” her father said. “Anyone who will climb four flights of stairs to consult me must really want my advice.”
The attics had only slightly lower ceilings than the rest of the palace—and the wind that came through the windows tasted a little more like free air than house air, although when she had chosen the rooms almost four years ago she’d chiefly been interested in the view. She looked out over one of the palace’s smaller courtyards, then the outthrust bulk of the Great Hall, with a curl of old trees softening its outline. Beyond it there was parkland, and beyond that she could see the faint haze over the practise yards—and very far away, the thick dark line that was the Wall.
She sighed again, and had just stood up to go back to her desk when there was a quick knock on the door—and the head that was put round it was Danacor’s.
“Oh!” she said, and ran to throw her arms around him, her mood lightening immediately.
“How’s my favourite sister?” he said, smiling, but when she looked up at him she thought he looked tired and worried.“I’m sorry I wasn’t here for your arrival. How did it go? Or is that a bad question?” And he looked at her table. “When’s your presentation?”
“Three days,” she said glumly. “Three days before the party.”
“Dad’ll have scheduled it before you left. And written the list of questions. Which he wrote an addendum to after he got back, am I right?”
There was a list of questions, and there was an addendum, but her father had said, “These are only because I can’t help myself. This is your report. Tell us what you choose to tell us.” She had looked at him quickly and looked away. Lrrianay was standing just behind him; if she looked into her father’s face she risked catching Lrrianay’s eye. Fazuur sat at a table set end-on to Corone’s desk. He looked up from the papers he was reading and smiled at her.
Danacor added, “I hope I’ll be back in time to hear you.”
“They’re sending you away again immediately?” she said, dismayed.
He sighed.“We haven’t got any quiet borders left at the moment—except the Starclouds. It’s just a question of how far in, and how much effort to force them back. The wild lands are the worst, but we’ve got Ipinay and her Queen’s Own holding the most hazardous stretch of that line. I’m off to look at Pantock—there are reports of sea monsters. Sea monsters are a new one.”
Fthoom is from Ghorm, thought Sylvi, which is next to Pantock. Maybe it’s his family come to visit.
“From some other messenger I’d be inclined to say, ‘Mm hmm, send me another report in a month,’ but the mayor of Pantock is pretty reliable. If he says sea monsters, there probably are sea monsters. But I’ll be back for your party. So finish your presentation so you can enjoy it.”He looked at her, smiling.“My little sister, all grown up. Well, maybe not up, exactly. . . .”
“Troll,” she said equably. “Think of all the horse-fodder bills I will save the realm by never getting tall enough to ride anything bigger than a pony.”
“Of course. My future chancellor of the exchequer thanks you.” He paused again. “You look so much like Dad. It’s uncanny.”
“And you look more and more like Mum.”
He grimaced. “Yes. I’m the warrior, not the negotiator. You’ll have to take over the negotiating when Dad retires. Farley wants to raise horses and Garren wants to find new plants for his herbalism.”
“Not me,” she said. “I’m going to—to—” But her usual declaration of her future—I’m going to become an engineer, and build dams and bridges all up and down the Kishes and the Greentops—wouldn’t come. What came to her instead was, I’m going back to Rhiandomeer, if they’ll have me, and then I’m going to find out if there’s a little not very interesting Cave somewhere that someone would let a human try and sculpt. A human no one would miss much, being the king’s fourth child. And I’d come back occasionally, and visit you humans.
But she couldn’t say that, even to Danny.
Danacor said, “Mum warned me your journey had changed you. Maybe it’s a little like after Mum said yes to Dad, or after the Sword accepted me. Everything does change. But nobody—no human—has ever been to Rhiandomeer before. You’re the pegasus expert now. Everyone will want to know what you think about anything to do with the pegasi, now.”