now that she was in it, was bigger than it had looked from outside. A group of perhaps twenty pegasi stood in the flat centre of the valley, and with them stood a group of perhaps thirty humans. Sylvi saw the humans with a shock like a blow: how graceless they were, both squat and elongated—how ungrounded and unbalanced—with their strange thin pawing arms and huge clutching hands—and she forgot again that she had remembered how to be human, and she grieved that she was one of them.
A few of the pegasi standing with the humans turned their heads and acknowledged the newcomers, but most did not. None of the humans looked at them. And now, with another shock, Sylvi recognised that the humans were wearing armour, worn, stained armour, and they wore it as if they were used to wearing it and had been wearing it for a long time. They had swords slung round their hips or over their shoulders, and two or three had bows and quivers, and she saw one with a short dagger and halberd; all their faces were tired and grim.
As she noticed these things it was as if the scene were building itself around her. She knew, suddenly, that there was an army camp on the far side of the hill; now that she knew it was there she could hear it, smell the smoke of its cook- and watchfires; there was even a sentinel standing on the brow of the little hill to her right. He could not have been there before—she could not have missed him? Surely she could not have missed him?
She glanced back over her shoulder. The land was empty and silent. All the galloping pegasi were gone, all but the few who stood with her, and the grass they had galloped across was a smooth unruffled sea. Pegasi ordinarily left little mark of where they had been, but there had been hundreds of them, and even if they had contrived to bend not a single grass-stem, her plodding human feet should have broken a path—and there was no sign of her passage either.
She turned forward again. There was a small table, now, at the centre of the valley, around which the humans and the pegasi stood—or rather, on either side of which they stood, the humans on one side and the pegasi on the other. This distressed her; she wanted to walk forward and join the pegasi, or seize two of those ugly human arms with her own ungainly hands and draw them toward the pegasus side of the table. It was not good that they should stay so divided from each other. Was that not why she was here? To help end—to help soften—that division, between human and pegasus?
But where was she? She was walking in the Caves, the pegasus Caves, where no human had ever walked before. She was with Ebon and Lrrianay and Hibeehea. . . .
Where was she?
The armour the humans wore was unfamiliar to her. Old-fashioned perhaps—some of the poorer barons were still using armour their grandparents’ troops had worn, and some of the bits and pieces still in use in the practise yards at the palace were older still—but this seemed to her more than merely that. These men and women did not carry themselves like soldiers in a held-together-with-string unit—nor would one of the poorer barons have twenty pegasi as members of his company.
She knew a little about armour; lessons with Diamon included learning about your equipment and its history. This armour was like nothing she had seen before, mostly leather and very little chain, and the chain curiously linked; they wore no chausses or greaves, and their gauntlets and gorgets were peculiarly cut, as were the panels of their leather cuirasses. When one turned and spoke low-voiced to another, she could half hear the words, which seemed to be at least half known to her but strangely pronounced, and the rhythm of the sentences was odd and outlandish.
The one who had spoken glanced up. There was something odd about him; something about him marked him out from the others . . . no, the man standing next to him was another like him. . . . But what was the oddness? Did they stand differently, move differently, was their skin a different colour, their armour a different kind? They were both wearing slightly shabby once-grand gowns over their armour, but so were several of the others. Nothing she could put