“But you can give this to the head librarian.” On the neat scrap of paper the librarian had sent he quickly drew the stylised replica of Balsin’s signature on the treaty of Alliance, which had been the official mark of the reigning monarch ever since. She’d never really thought about this before; she’d seen the mark, over and over again, all her life, and she knew what it was and where it came from. But she looked at it now as if she were seeing it as an older, wiser Sylvi, a Sylvi who had studied the Alliance and who understood what had happened as a result. And she thought of Fazuur, waiting in the anteroom....
She looked up and found both her father’s and Lrrianay’s eyes on her. She bowed to the pegasus king and he bowed back. She hesitated ; she had what she had come for—she should go. But she was very curious about what she had just seen. “I thought, after the binding, aren’t you supposed to start talking in your head too, the way the pegasi do, not just hands and mouth?”
She made a brave attempt to sign some of this for Lrrianay—it was considered rude to have a human conversation in front of a pegasus without making the attempt at inclusion, even if there were no Speaker present—but while she knew the signs for the binding and for the pegasi’s silent-speech, she didn’t know how to put them together. This could be her own ignorance, but it was also every human’s experience of the muddle of sounds, words, gesture and sign that was the means by which human and pegasus attempted, and mostly failed, to communicate with each other. You could never quite say what you wanted to; your mind seemed to slip from you, like a sled on a snow-slope, and the language seemed to writhe away from you like a small wild animal you had inadvertently caught: let it go, or it might bite.
“The silent-speech is in the annals,” said Sylvi’s father. “In practise, no. Has Ahathin told you we don’t know for sure how much the pegasi use silent-speech among themselves? We’re guessing—our magicians are guessing. The pegasi may also be using some subtle form of sign and gesture we’re too dull to pick up.” Her father’s hands were moving as he spoke, and he paused and murmured something, and there was a murmur—an answering murmur—from Lrrianay.
“After your binding there’s a ... a sense of someone else there, that you didn’t have before, like knowing there’s someone else in a dark room with you. Anything else ... it’s rather like weather. Every now and then you have a clear blue day and you can see a long way. Mostly it’s overcast and stormy—and the rain runs in your eyes and you can’t see a thing. That makes our Speakers a kind of ... waterproof, perhaps.” He smiled at her.
She took her cue, bowed to each king in turn and left. She’d never heard her father say anything sceptical about the Speakers before.... And the way Fazuur had bolted into the room, as if a taralian were after him ...
But everything about the pegasi, and about dealing with them, was rather daunting. It was enough—it was more than enough—that they flew, that they were every human’s secret fantasy, alive and breathing. And then they were so beautiful—it was impossible to get away from the fact of their astonishing beauty in any thoughts or contact with them, any more than you could forget that they could fly, and then you couldn’t help feeling that they must be grand and noble and so on because they looked it.
After the binding itself there were some silly sentences you had to say to your pegasus: “Welcome, Excellent Friend, into this our Court, and the Court of our Fathers and Mothers, and welcome too into our heart this glorious day, that we may be the best of companions for many long years” and so on. “Who wrote this stuff ?” she’d said to her father, outraged, after she’d read the script for the first time.
“No one knows,” said her father. “Perhaps it—er—sounded better then, whenever then was.”
“If no one knows who wrote it, and it wasn’t Balsin or Gandam or Fralialal, why can’t we change it?”
“Because, my love, you have to choose your battles, and that one isn’t worth engaging.”
She’d had her mouth open to ask who would care, but she shut it