But Balsin’s coat of arms showed only the Sword and the palace and the Singing Yew.
Furthermore the human sovereign, and certain of the sovereign’s extended family, were each assigned an individual pegasus, as a kind of ceremonial companion, as if such blunt discrete pairings might ease or soften the lack of communication between the two peoples. Most of these couples saw, and expected to see, each other rarely: those humans who did not live within the Wall might not see their pegasi from one year to the next. For the sovereign’s immediate family it was different: those pegasi were often at the palace, and something like a relationship sometimes grew up between human and pegasus. There was genuine friendship between Sylvi’s father and his pegasus, who was the king of his people, and, it was said, they could almost understand each other, even without the services of the human king’s Speaker.
Some form of Speaker—of translator—had been obviously necessary from the beginning; the human magicians and pegasus shamans were the only ones who could speak across the species boundary at all. Even the sign-language, as it was developed, was unreliable and prone to misinterpretation, because of the enormous differences in anatomy between the two peoples. At first it had merely been that anyone on either side who seemed to have some talent for it learnt what they could, and the numbers of magicians and shamans were about equal. But the magicians seemed slowly to take the charge over, echoing—or perhaps going some way to causing—the tendency that in all things the humans should be superior and the pegasi should defer. The idea of the bound pairs had been Gandam’s; the idea of the Speakers, magicians specially trained to enable what communication there was between human and pegasus, was Dorogin’s. It had been Dorogin’s idea also that the sovereign, the sovereign’s consort and the sovereign’s children should each have an individual Speaker as each was bound to a pegasus.
The binding was done when both human and pegasus were children; when possible the human ruler’s children were assigned the pegasus ruler’s children. This was supposed to promote friendship between the two races, although the children did not always cooperate.
The royal human child and its pegasus were introduced to each other for the first time on the human child’s twelfth birthday. At this time several of the royal magicians would create a spell of binding between the two which was supposed to enable them some communication with each other. The spell of binding was specific, between that one human child and that one pegasus child; occasionally it worked, and there was a real connection between the two—emotional if mostly wordless—and more often it did not. Who beyond the immediate royal family was selected to be bound to a pegasus was an erratic process ; the children of anyone who had grown close to or performed a significant service to the sovereign might be added to the list as the children of third or fourth cousins who never came to the palace might drop off it. It was the greatest honour of the human sovereign’s court for someone’s child to be nominated for binding, but it was a slightly tricky honour, because it bound the child to the sovereign and court life as well.
When a royal marriage could be predicted sufficiently in advance, the future consort might be bound to a member of the pegasus royal family, but these forecasts had a habit of going wrong. What often happened was that some adult human became a member of a royal or noble family by marriage, and thereupon was assigned a pegasus; but while the binding spell was just as punctiliously made, there were no records that these late pairings ever learnt to empathise, or to communicate beyond the few words of gesture-language common to anyone who cared to learn them. One of Sylvi’s uncles, brother-in-law to the king, was famous for saying that he had more fellow feeling for his boots, which were comfortable, protected his feet and didn’t make him feel like a hulking clumsy oaf.
The usual ritual and binding spell were delayed, however, till the human child’s twelfth birthday because it was a strong spell and might be too great a burden for anyone younger. Very occasionally the human child nonetheless became sick or ill, or fainted, and had to be carried away, and missed the banquet afterward, although there was a folk-tale that these bindings were often the most successful. While there was no record of any pegasus being made ill by the human binding magic, pegasus children were never bound before they were better than half grown—and, crucially, capable of the long flight from the pegasus country to the human palace. The pegasi’s life span was slightly longer than human, but they came to their full growth slightly sooner. It sometimes happened that there was no suitable pegasus for an eligible twelve-year-old human; usually some slightly less suitable pegasus was found in these cases, because of the likelihood that if the binding was put off more than a year or two there was no hope of its becoming a strong one. And, perhaps because of the continuing weakness of shared language, this shared empathy was greatly desired for the good of the Alliance.
It was several generations before Dorogin’s idea of the individual Speakers became traditional, but for many generations now every important bound pair had had a magician assigned when they were bound, to aid their connection. The magician neither took part in the binding ceremony nor was officially presented, because the need for such a facilitator was considered shameful, a proof of continued failure of one of the pivotal aspects of the Alliance the human domain was built on. The guild of Speaker magicians was however the most revered of all the magicians’ guilds—and the most inscrutable. Among the Speakers themselves the posting to a royal pair was hotly sought after.
Sylvi was the fourth child of the king and the first girl, and while her parents had been glad to see her, with three older brothers, she was not considered important to the country’s welfare. She was pleased about this, as soon as she was old enough to begin to understand what it meant, because she was much more interested in horses and dogs and hawks and stealing sweetmeats when the cook’s back was turned than she was in being a princess. She had a vague notion that there were lots of available horses and dogs and hawks—and sweetmeats—partly on account of her being a princess, but she believed that the connection was not all that close (her cousins, who didn’t live at the palace, had lots of horses and dogs and hawks and sweetmeats too), and that being king chiefly meant that her father looked tired all the time and was always either talking to or reading something from someone who wanted something from him.
Her cousins’ fathers weren’t quite so always reading and talking. Her favourite uncle—the one who had more in common with his boots than his pegasus—was a farmer, and while, he said, he mostly told other people what to do, sometimes he harnessed up a pair of his own horses and ploughed one of his own fields.“So I’ll remember what I’m asking,” he said. He and his wife, one of the queen’s sisters, had each a bound pegasus, but they usually only saw them on trips to the palace: “Can you imagine a Speakers’ Guild magician living on a farm?” But both pegasi occasionally visited. “It’s a funny thing, the animals like ’em,” said her uncle, whose name was Rulf. “ They always insist on sleeping outside—we’ve got a perfectly good room at the end of the house with doors that open out under that big old oak tree. But they sleep outdoors. In bad weather they may sleep in the barn. And wherever they are, the animals drift that way. The cows and the horses are all at whatever end of their pasture to be nearer the pegasi, and the outside dogs are usually curled up with them, like the house dogs sleep on our bed.”