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.”