“It may not be true,” said the queen.“I would go so far as to say it is in the greatest degree unlikely to be true.”
“Someone can mistake a roc?” said Sylvi, who had studied rocs and the tactics of battle with something the size of one of Rulf ’s barns, and as clever—and devious—as a human. “They’re—er—kind of large.”
“You’d be surprised,” said the queen.“You’re a little young to be facing up to your responsibilities as a princess, but you might as well begin to prepare yourself for being surprised at what people do. I give you even odds that this roc is a blanket, laid out to be aired before it’s put away for the summer, which the wind stole. And if I’m going to Contary anyway, perhaps I could swing round past Pristin. We haven’t heard from Shelden all this year, have we?”
“You could take me with you,” said Sylvi, knowing the answer would be no. “My godsmother Criss lives in Pristin.”
“Criss is coming to your binding,” said the queen. “You can see her then. You have to get a little bigger before you start riding messenger for the king.”
“You are the queen,” said the king, “not the king’s messenger.”
“To Shelden I’m a rustic bumpkin,” said the queen.“He never misses an opportunity to ask me how my family back in Orthumber are.”
“Danny was riding with you when he was eleven,” said Sylvi. Danacor was Sylvi’s oldest brother, and the king’s heir. “He told me so.”
“I said bigger, not older,” said the queen. “Your day will come.”
Sylvi had mixed feelings about her binding. She looked forward to her birthday because her parents always made something exciting happen on that day, and the food was always amazing. But this birthday she was going to have to go through with the magicians’ ritual, and be bound to her pegasus, and the food would be at a banquet, and maybe she’d be one of the ones who fainted. She’d never been comfortable with magicians’ work. Some of the smaller charms could be comforting, and a few years ago when she’d had a very bad season of nightmares, Ahathin had made a charm for her that had finally let her sleep without waking screaming a few hours later. And everyone, herself included, knew how to make the basic ill-deflect charm, although you needed some charm string from a magician first. But quite ordinary rituals made her feel peculiar.
She thought the pegasi very beautiful, and their faces looked very wise, and being bound to one might be rather exciting—but they were also perhaps too beautiful and too wise (if you could understand them), and having one around that was supposed to be hers would not make her feel Alliance-embodying empathy, but smaller, grubbier, and more awkward. And she didn’t like most magicians—except Ahathin—any better than she liked their queasy magic, and there were always too many magicians around when it was anything to do with the pegasi.
She’d been drilled and drilled in the sign-language since she had been a baby, and could still remember trying to make her fingers behave at the same time she was trying to say her first words. The language of sign and gesture that all humans who had regular contact with pegasi and pegasi who had regular contact with humans were expected to learn was complicated, and the complexity seemed only to add a greater variety of ways for communication to go wrong, beginning with the immutable fact that the pegasus execution of any sign was critically different from the human. Pegasi had mobile ears and long flexible necks and tails, but their hands were small, and had no wrists; and furthermore the number of their fingers was variable, which was the cause of another crucial difference between humans and pegasi. Viktur had described it: “Their mode of enumeration seemed to us at first most strange. Where we, having each of us ten fingers, do count most easily by tens, they cannot, for the number of their fingers on each hand does vary, being four, five or six; wherefore, having each of them four legs, they do count by fours.”
All of this damped any enthusiasm you might initially have had (thought Sylvi) and perhaps that’s what made concentrating on learning sign so difficult. It was worse than maths. (She was rather good at maths, but her brothers complained about it, so she thought she ought to. She could even count in fours, but no one seemed to expect her to, so she stopped trying.) It wasn’t that she was bad at languages; she’d learnt enough Chaugh to be polite to the Chaugh ambassador’s horrible daughter, who was both taller and older than Sylvi—although the taller didn’t take much, thought Sylvi sadly—and who never ignored a chance to remind Sylvi of both these facts.“Oh, how funny that skirt looks on you,” she’d said at their last meeting.“But then you’re still very young and your legs are so short.”
“Imagine her on the point of your sword,” the queen advised her daughter. “I have got through a number of state banquets that way.”
Sylvi had seen her father once, about a year ago, alone with the pegasus king, Lrrianay, signing awkwardly but determinedly and at some length, accompanied by a ragged murmur of words, punctuated by a few pegasi whuffles, choffs and hums, both of them utterly intent on each other and no Speaker in sight. They came to the end of whatever they were saying. Her father’s hands had dropped as if they were too heavy to hold up any longer, and he was wearing a look half thoughtful and half exhausted. As she watched, he put a hand out to the back of a chair as if to steady himself—very much the way Sylvi put out a hand for a chair or a table or a tall dog’s back when there was magicians’ magic in the air. Lrrianay had turned his head to preen a feather or two back into place, which Sylvi had long suspected was a pegasus thinking-about-something gesture.
And the king’s Speaker, Fazuur, had burst into the king’s private office. Not even the king’s Speaker entered the king’s private office without being announced.
“Fazuur,” said the king calmly, “if you would be so good as to wait a moment. Pendle will tell you.” Pendle was the footman on king’s-door duty that day.
Fazuur came to a shuddering halt, bowed stiffly and left the room again only very slightly slower than he’d arrived. Sylvi stood riveted, thinking about what she’d just seen—both her father and Lrrianay, and the way her father had put his hand out, and the precipitate arrival of Fazuur. He’d come through the door not like a man late for a meeting, even a man late for an important meeting, but like a man desperate to avert catastrophe.
Sylvi herself had been announced, but casually; Pendle had opened the door and said, “Your daughter, my king,” and waved her through without waiting for a response—which was usual; she would not be troubling her father during his (official) working hours without cause. She had seen him and Lrrianay “speaking” before, without Fazuur present, but she thought she had never seen them speaking so intently .
Her father was now looking at her with mild surprise: he hadn’t heard her announced. “What is it, love?” She jerked herself back to attention.“I—oh—it’s just a note from the head librarian about something Ahathin wants me to read.”
The king smiled. “Ahathin likes frightening the librarians, I think. Let me see. Well. You appear to be studying the beginning of the Alliance.” He made a quick hand-sign at Lrrianay, who bowed his head, holding it down for a second or two in the respectful-acknowledgement gesture.
“Ahathin says every human should study the roots of the Alliance. That if it were up to him every human would. The head librarian says it’s—it’s impertinent to want to understand everything, that what is important is to understand what comes of the things that have happened.” She made the Alliance gesture at Lrrianay, and drew her hand out to one side, which should mean “topic of conversation” or “studying.”
“They’re both right,” said the king.
Sylvi sighed inaudibly. That was exactly the sort of thing her father always said.