“But it is lucky for both the country and myself that it needs a king who is a good administrator. You are the soldier, my darling, and I have it in my mind to send you out to investigate the rumour of a roc in Contary.”
“A roc?” said the queen. “In Contary?”
And then Sylvi, to her enormous shame and frustration, sneezed, and her parents noticed she was there. “Oh, gods and dev—I mean, Sylvi, my love, you do understand that this conversation is to remain strictly within these four walls?” said the queen.
“Yes,” said Sylvi. “A roc? I didn’t think there were any rocs any more.”
“Officially there aren’t,” said the king. “In practise there’s a sighting once or twice a decade. This is the second one in two years, which is not reassuring.”
“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