Lrrianay said gravely, There has never been any such decision—
Oh, Dad, that’s king talk again! Can we please go the short way? We already know Fthoom is a bad guy! Syl and I have known it since our binding—or anyway I knew it then and I guess Syl has known since she first met the brute. It stands out around him like that weird robe he likes to wear. Syl?
It was a long journey, Sylvi thought, going Ebon’s short way. I’ve always been afraid of Fthoom, which isn’t the same thing. It wasn’t till the binding . . . I knew something was wrong. And . . . not all our magicians are bad. Ebon, you know Ahathin.
Yes, said Ebon. He’s another freak.
I take my son’s point about—er—king talk, said Lrrianay, but it’s not as simple as that human magicians are the villains in our story. There is a great deal of strength in humankind that we do not have. It is a good strength when it stops the taralians and norindours from killing all of us, but it is not a good strength when one of your villages goes to war with their neighbours over the ownership of a field. We think there is something of the same about your magicians’ powers. It was a good power when it forged our Alliance, much quicker, and possibly more securely, than our shamans would have been able to do it. But it was . . . perhaps not the best alliance that could have been made.
We feel that perhaps the misfit of our Alliance is coming to a time of crisis. It is interesting that you—the link that you and Ebon have—should come at the same time as the magician Fthoom. It is that sense of crisis, I believe, that made your father force through an acceptance of you coming to us. He had to . . . displease some people it would have been better not to displease.
Lord Kanf, Sylvi thought. Senator Barnum. “ The king is the most tightly tied by his freedom to rule,” was one of Ahathin’s favourite maxims, and she tried not to believe it because she knew it was so—and because she was the king’s daughter.
Only about ten days before she had been due to depart, and when she knew that the senate had still not officially ratified her going, one of the oldest of the king’s council members had sought her out at one of those state dinners she was now obliged to attend. She knew that Senator Orflung was one of those who were against her journey. She braced herself, and tried not to let it show that she was bracing herself.
“My lady, my apologies for my presumption”—which was a phrase she was accustomed to hearing in her father’s court but she’d never heard it addressed to herself before—“but would you be good enough to tell me if you—you yourself, with no one whispering in your ear—if you want to visit the pegasi’s land? ”
She looked at him blankly for a moment, as if he were a strange pegasus speaking pegasi. She had given a short, formal speech to the combined senate when her father had first introduced the news of her impending journey, in which she had said that she did want to go, very much. But she had also been saying it to two hundred senators, lords, ladies, barons and granddames, and she had been concentrating on getting through it, not on being convincing. She noticed now—having not studied his face close up before—that there were deep smile lines round Senator Orflung’s eyes and his mouth, and the frowning look he wore at present was more worried than angry or bullying. She relaxed a little. “Yes, my sir, I do wish to visit it. The—the full senate is very intimidating, you know. ”
The frown disappeared and he smiled. “Yes, my lady, I do know. After forty years I still have to take a deep breath before I climb to my feet to address it.” The smile disappeared.“I am, of course, aware of the prohibition against querying you about the pegasi. But I would ask you to indulge me so far as to tell me . . . you feel you and Hrrr Ebon to be true friends, is that correct? As—as you might be friends with my daughter. ”
His youngest daughter was eight years older and a foot taller than Sylvi, and almost as