Her mother told her years later that her governess had let her escape far oftener than a stricter or more traditionalist educator would have. The young woman gravely told the queen that fresh air was always good for a growing child, and that since children will find people to idolise, it seemed to her a good thing to indulge the lady Sylviianel in idolising such a fine young man.
The queen told this story grinning at the memory: “Scai was such a serious young woman. Her mother had stood in your grandmother’s army, and it makes me wonder what effect it had on her child-rearing.”
Warfare. It had just been a proud glorious game, when Sylvi was four and six and eight and Danacor was sixteen and eighteen and twenty. Even when he had begun to take his turn on patrol, for they had since Balsin’s day patrolled the border with the wild lands, she had felt no fear. No taralian had a hope of getting the best of her brother; any taralian with any sense would see him and run away. She looked up at him now, the night before he rode out with the Sword at his side, and remembered the tall boy in the practise yards. Danacor looked down at her and smiled, but he didn’t seem to have anything to say either.
“I’ll come watch you ride out,” she said at last. “As I used to watch you in the practise yards, when you were learning. . .” Her voice trailed away.
“Yes,” he said, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. He put his hand on her shoulder, and then looked at her again as if reconsidering something he had previously discarded.“You’re growing!” he said, and this time his smile reached his eyes. “You are growing! Syl, you’re growing at last. Soon you’ll need a special low chair to sit at table with the rest of us,” he said, teasing her, but she burst out—
“I’m not! I’m not growing!”
Danacor looked startled, and dropped his hand.“Well, you are, you know, but I thought you’d be pleased. I thought you always hated being small.”
She couldn’t tell him about Ebon and flying, so instead she muttered the first thing she could think of: “I’m sorry. It’s just—everything is changing.” Has already changed.
“Yes,” he said again. His eyes strayed to the door. They’d had dinner in the Little Hall off the Great Hall where the Sword still hung for one more night. “Well, it does. Everything changes. But I’ll be back, Sylvi, love. That won’t change.” He stooped and kissed her, and soon after that the melancholy party finished breaking up, everyone going to an early bed, for there would be much to do tomorrow for everyone.
Again that night Sylvi had difficulty sleeping, to the dismay of the hounds who had lately learnt to like sharing the princess’ bed. She got up at last (to the hounds’ relief), and put her dressing gown on, and went and sat on the window-sill. There was no moon, and the sky was low and dark with cloud; even the air was oppressive, and she could hear more voices and movements than she should be able to at such an hour—on any night that the heir was not riding out the next day carrying the Sword into battle. Restlessly she stood up again, and went to a little chest that stood on a shelf next to one of her sky holds, and opened it.
It had previously held hair ribbons, but with her sixteenth birthday she would use these rarely any more, and had moved them to the back of a shelf in her wardrobe, incongruously near the hook where her sword now hung. The little chest now contained small souvenirs of her journey to Rhiandomeer: a bright blue feather from an unknown bird, a yellow leaf from a seehar tree (seehars did not grow in Balsinland), a loop of badly plaited llyri grass—badly because she’d done it herself. The little vial of water from the Dreaming Sea. Her hand hesitated over this for a moment, picked it up and held it so that she was looking through it, toward the grey rectangle of the window. She breathed out slowly. Ssshuuwuushuu. . . .
The water in the little vial moved—expanded—no; her hand held the tiny bottle as before. But her vision sharpened, focussed....
She saw the roc first: yellow-gold, tawny, huge, so huge that it was several moments before she saw that it moved in response to . . . a tiny human. A tiny pegasus. One tiny human. One tiny pegasus. No, that was not possible; she sucked her breath in in horror, because in the next moment she would see them killed....
And with her gasp the vision was gone, and her hand holding the vial was shaking. She laid the vial back in the chest, unwillingly remembering what she had seen: the tawny roc, the bright red-gold pegasus, the human in battle leathers holding a short sword in one hand and a spear in the other—a spear shorter than one of the roc’s toenails, a sword shorter than one of its pinfeathers. When the pegasus had spread its great wings—a blow from a pegasus’ wing could break a taralian’s back—they looked as tiny as the palms of Sylvi’s hands. She stared unseeingly at the other contents of the chest for some minutes, till the remains of the vision left her.
Aliaalia had given her one of the pegasi’s little embroidered bags as a farewell gift, and Sylvi had put Ebon’s bead in it—the bead she’d worn round her neck during her six days in the Caves. She hadn’t looked at it since she’d been home.
She tipped it slowly out into the palm of her hand. It lay there, dark, inert—dead. She closed her hand over it and felt as if something inside her were breaking. Her heart? Her will? She squeezed both her hand and her eyes shut. And then slowly opened them again.
As if it had taken a moment to wake up, sleepy after too long a nap, the bead was just beginning to glow, with a faint throb like a heart. At first she thought she was imagining it, but as she watched, the glow strengthened and steadied, till it was so bright she could not see her hand behind it.
For several weeks there was little news; Danacor sent terse descriptions, tied to the legs of carrier-pigeons, of quartering the lower slopes of the boundary mountains. Then a dusty, distressed pigeon missing a few primaries brought the news of the first skirmish; there were a few wounded—although neither Danacor nor his brothers, nor any pegasus—but no one killed. A human messenger on a tired horse brought more news, and, when he returned, he took a packhorse with him, loaded with small padded cages containing more carrier pigeons. About a week after that, a pegasus—no one Sylvi knew—came with more news, both what he could tell and a letter from Danacor hung round his neck in a little bag like a nrala: he was closeted with Corone, Lrrianay and Fazuur for several hours.
The day after he left, Garren rode in through the northwest gate of the Wall with Poih at his side.
Sylvi and Ebon went at once to the king’s receiving room to hear Garren’s report. The scouts, crossing the border and going deep in the wild lands, had discovered the mouths of caves leading—they suspected, as far as they dared explore, as much as the magicians with them could guess—to a great network of underground caves; and the passages they did explore were clearly used by taralians and norindours. Garren looked old and grim and determined. “This is not something Danny wanted to send a messenger with, even a messenger who had seen the caves himself. So I said we’d go, Poih and I. And we could bring more troops back.