as like our palace only a great deal more so. I looked up and Hirishy was looking at me. As if talk about their Caves—her Caves—was something she could hear and answer. For a moment—just a moment of a moment—I felt I saw the Caves, saw them as Hirishy had seen them, was seeing them in her memory at that moment and was trying to tell me.”
“What did you see?” said Sylvi.
“Nothing I can tell you in a way that will make that sudden flash seem astonishing, which it was. It was so very . . . other. Alien. There are caves in the Greentops, you know, and some of the bigger, deeper ones have decorated walls. But this ...” She threw out her free hand in a there-are-no-words gesture. The pegasi had a specific gesture for “there are no words,” which included a single swift up-and-down tail-lash.
“Full?” suggested Sylvi.
“Full,” said her mother thoughtfully. “Full of . . . full. Yes. And yet . . . it was only one enormous cave with—with knobbly walls, except I could see that the humps and valleys and ridges had been made. There was a pegasus standing on a low earthwork, with a tiny brush in its alula hand.”
“Chuur,” said Sylvi.“When you don’t know someone’s gender. Chuur and chuua. Chuur hand.”
“I thought you heard Ebon in your head, like you hear someone speaking.”
“I do. Mostly. But what happens when they use a word you don’t know? Ebon had to explain chuur and chuua to me.” And had found it strange and tactless that her language called a live, gendered being “it” for want of a better choice.
“Chuur alula hand, then. The wall in front of—of chuua—was beautifully coloured in reds and golds. I couldn’t see if any of the bumps and colours were a picture I might recognise; the flash didn’t last long enough. But the feeling that went with it was extraordinary.”
Sylvi smiled a little. “Yes. That sounds like the Caves.” Good for Hirishy. “The whole last three weeks . . .” She paused. “It was all like that, a little. Like that feeling. That flash. That astonishment.”
“Yes,” said her mother softly. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
CHAPTER 17
Sylvi got through the rest of the week without Ebon somehow. She spent as much time outdoors as she could. She polished the sword that might have belonged to Razolon till it gleamed like a bead round the neck of a pegasus. She took extra lessons with Diamon; she volunteered for extra bashing-and-crashing practise, as hand-to-hand was familiarly called out of Diamon’s hearing, and was put up against a variety of opponents, from Lucretia to some of Diamon’s smallest and youngest beginners, including one of her cousins, her uncle Rulf ’s youngest daughter, who had been sent to the palace for six weeks to find out what she needed to learn.
“Well done,” said Diamon, after one long afternoon, as Sylvi was hanging up the rest of her practise gear, with her sword over her shoulder.
“I suppose I’m less threatening than someone bigger,” she said. “Someone like Renny,” her cousin,“is more likely to try what she knows against someone like me.”
“I’m not putting you up against the littles for your size,” said Diamon. “I’m putting you in because you use your strength well. Don’t sell yourself as a three-legged donkey when you’re a pegasus.”
It was an old phrase, as old as “it will hearten us.” She still had to stop herself from saying “I wish.”
“Thank you,” she said.
But she had to spend some time indoors. Ahathin said, “Have you given any thought to how you wish to present your report of your journey?”
“No,” said Sylvi with loathing. There was a pile of blank paper in a corner of her table. She flicked the edge of the pile with her finger: it was beautiful, in its way, hard and crisp and shiny. The pegasi’s softer, duller paper was meant chiefly to take paint, not ink. She had seen several shamans’ sigils: Ebon said that how the paint bled into the paper told you how strong the charm would be, and also something about how it would do its work. I can read a few of the easy ones, what they’re for, Ebon said. But that’s all. I can’t tell you whether it’s a good one or not. It’s one of the things you learn if you’re a shaman’s apprentice. Like this one is for a good harvest. But it could be a good harvest that’s full of