He was gaining height, spiralling up and up in a huge gyre. Even in the dark she could see—her view came and went, like an eye’s slow blinking, by the whip of Ebon’s wingbeats—the great shadowy loom of the palace, spilling off in one direction with stables and barns, and in another with servants’ quarters, and another with courtiers’ and magicians’ apartments, and another yet with the special open rooms for the pegasi. She could make out the always-lit dome of the Inner Great Court and the walls around the Outer, the whole surrounded by wide formal gardens and carriageways like the erratic spokes of a very strangely shaped wheel. She thought, This is how it really looks.
As all these passed under Ebon’s wings she could see farther and farther, forest and parkland and a clutch of buildings like a small village at a crossroads of the inner city; and there was the Wall. Now, as Ebon turned again, the palace came once more into view, a little smaller this time. Her people were fascinated by what they called sky views; some of the most prized and valuable of the decorative artwork in the palace were paintings of hills and valleys, lakes and forests, towns and villages, as if seen from above, and there were many miniature landscapes called sky holds, made out of stone and wood and clay and, occasionally, jewels. None of them were as beautiful—or as exciting—or as shocking—as this dark-blurred, wing-nicked scene, with the wind streaking past, tangling her hair and chilling her back and her bare feet; but her hands were buried snugly in his mane, and Ebon himself was as warm as a hearth.
She thought, This is how it really looks. And again, wonderingly: This is how it really looks....
At last he stopped climbing and flew for the Wall, and over it. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder (as presumably it had not occurred to Ebon) whether the airborne magic carefully suspended and maintained above the Wall would let a human pass; they had just proved that it would. Moving boringly at walking speed through one of the gates, there was a faint chilly press or wash against your skin rather like diving into Banesorrow Lake; she felt nothing tonight but the wind and the flick of Ebon’s mane.
Sylvi briefly saw the moving figures of two of the guards walking along the Wall as they passed through one of the circles of torchlight, and guessed as well that Ebon had flown so high that they could not possibly see her. Pegasi did not commonly fly at night, but they did do so; no one would think anything of a pegasus flying so late, especially not after a day like today, when there were so many of them visiting the human king.
Once they were over the Wall he turned again, northwest, and they flew for a while over farm and field and more villages, till the mountains at the edge of the plain by some trick of the dark seemed to grow larger though they did not seem any nearer; and then, at last, although Sylvi reckoned that in actual minutes they had not been gone very long, he turned round again and headed back for the Wall, and the palace.
They had not spoken during the flight, but when Ebon was over the Wall again and losing height as they neared the park where they had started out, he said suddenly, I should have taught you how to fall first. I’m afraid this is not going to be one of my better landings. Can you fall?
Of course I can fall, said Sylvi with dignity. I have fallen off my pony many times.
She thought he laughed. Don’t tense up, he said. And you want to try to roll when you hit. I hope your pony-teacher taught you that. Sorry. Damn. Stupid of me. Look, I’ll tip you off a few secs before I land myself, so I won’t fall on you. Ready?
Ready, said Sylvi, since she didn’t have any choice.
The ground was rushing up toward them. The great wings arched and curled, and Ebon seemed to rear in the air, and stalled for the briefest fraction of a moment; then they levelled out, and now the ground was very close indeed. Ebon said, Now, and gave a lurch to one side, and Sylvi let herself tumble off the other side of his tail, and with a vague memory of the horse-dancers who threw themselves on and off their galloping horses to amuse people on feast days, tried to flip herself round in the air. She landed nearly on her feet, ran a few steps, knowing she was going to fall anyway, and managed to roll when she finally did so.
Ebon, who had also fallen, was already up and giving himself a vigorous shake when she staggered to her feet again. Are you in one piece still? Are you all right? he said, leaving off shaking and coming toward her; and a laugh burst out of her as suddenly as she had burst into tears when he had said he would take her flying. Yes. No. But not from falling. Tonight was the most—
Words failed her, and she went up to him and put her arms round his neck, and rested her face against his hot sweaty shoulder. She felt his nose in her hair, and then his teeth gently gripped a lock of it, and tugged, even more gently, which she would learn was a pegasus caress, like a human kiss.
CHAPTER 6
She was so sodden with sleep the next morning that her new attendant could not rouse her. It was only when her mother came and shouted in her ear, “Your father wants to see you immediately after breakfast!” that she dragged herself unwillingly to the surface. She had been dreaming about flying. She had discovered, climbing up the wall to her bedroom window the night before, that both holding on and diving off had used (or misused) more skin and muscles than she had realised at the time, and between trying to find a comfortable way to lie and an inability to stop reexperiencing the magic journey over and over in her head, it had been nearly dawn before memory slid gradually into dream, and she was a pegasus too, and it was her own wings that carried her aloft with Ebon.
Her father wanted to see her after breakfast. Fthoom. She was suddenly thoroughly awake, and the joy drained out of her, leaving only a leaden grey tiredness shot through with a sick-making gleam of fear.
“Where—?”
“In his private receiving room.”
Not the public court then. Fewer people ... but Fthoom would seem even bigger in a small room.
Her mother looked at her, frowning, put her hand under her chin and tipped her head up. “Did someone give you unwatered wine last night? If you were a few years older, I would say you looked hung over.”
Sylvi managed to smile. “I—I had a lot of trouble falling asleep. I just kept—going on thinking about things.”
The queen sat on the edge of her bed. She had stopped frowning, but she looked a little quizzical. “Yes. You’re twelve years old now, and nearly a grown-up in all the wrong ways. You still can’t make your own decisions—you can’t even stay up late without permission—but you’ll have to come to all the official banquets, although you will be allowed to leave early. As I think about it, maybe I could develop a gentle little wasting illness whose only symptom is that I have to go to bed early on official banquet nights.” She smiled at her daughter, and her daughter smiled back. The queen had an old wound in one hip that made it difficult for her to sit for long periods—mysteriously, however, it did not trouble her in the saddle—but she refused to use it to get out of state events. Maybe when I’m older, she’d said when Sylvi had once asked.
“You’ll now be expected to come to most council meetings,” the queen went on, “at which you will have no say and no vote. But your father or Ahathin will decide on a speciality for you—farming or the guilds, or rivers and waterways, or roads—or the army: gods save you if you have anything to do with the army. It could be anything on the court schedule, and you have the misfortune to have made a very good impression on your father with your papers on village witchcraft, so he’ll probably want to give you something challenging. And you’ll be expected to study whatever it is carefully and have opinions about it. And they’ll want you to come up with good ideas, but if you manage to do so, you’ll be expected to stand up in front of everybody else on the council and possibly even the senate, and present them. Horrifying. Much worse than anything that happens in the practise yards with mere weapons.”