future—I’m going to become an engineer, and build dams and bridges all up and down the Kishes and the Greentops—wouldn’t come. What came to her instead was, I’m going back to Rhiandomeer, if they’ll have me, and then I’m going to find out if there’s a little not very interesting Cave somewhere that someone would let a human try and sculpt. A human no one would miss much, being the king’s fourth child. And I’d come back occasionally, and visit you humans.
But she couldn’t say that, even to Danny.
Danacor said, “Mum warned me your journey had changed you. Maybe it’s a little like after Mum said yes to Dad, or after the Sword accepted me. Everything does change. But nobody—no human—has ever been to Rhiandomeer before. You’re the pegasus expert now. Everyone will want to know what you think about anything to do with the pegasi, now.”
“No!” she said, horrified. “I am not the pegasi expert! I’m going to learn engineering, and build dams! They are—they are—oh!” She remembered her father sitting down through the long pegasus banquet; she remembered telling her mother about chuur and chuua.“Knowing more—oh—it’s more like knowing less!”
Danny laughed. “Yes, I—er—know. But you’re the expert to the rest of us. Dad would tell you he’s not the expert on running a country, and I would certainly tell you I’m not the expert on making taralians and norindours—and sea monsters—go away and stop bothering us. But we’re all we’ve got. You too. You’d better get used to it.”
She stared at him. He was right, of course. But it hadn’t occurred to her before. She was too busy thinking about herself—and missing Ebon—and worrying about her presentation. She wondered if this was why her father had not asked her any private questions about her journey—that he had guessed what she was feeling. The warrior had blurted it out when the negotiator had chosen to say nothing.
“But you’ll give a brilliant presentation. Just like Dad would. It’s written all over you, as well as on all those papers.” He kissed the top of her head and was gone again.
At the prospect of being the pegasus expert she had been even more careful what she had, and had not, said. Was it all right to describe the crops they cultivate? The fields of llyri grass so tall she could not see over their waving tassels, even in spring? The colonies of spiders they fed and tended, that they might harvest their silk? The spinning, dyeing and weaving, the paper-making? That they had no houses, but that each trade had its small cotes or cabins or cottages? Could she describe the pavilions, the furniture, the ingenious way they harnessed each other to carry loads? The last was done at the palace, but somehow humans rarely saw them doing it; nor would humans ever have seen them carrying their long tables on poles, and fitting the pieces together, and the tray-frames that let them carry full serving-bowls or anything else that must not be jostled, and the various pokers, prodders and hooks that let them shift the things they carried; and the deft way they used their knees, their chests and their teeth—everything based on, and arising from, their weak but clever hands. Why did humans see so little of this creative dexterity? On the rare occasions the pegasi hosted an event, they did it in one of the Courts, and there were human servants to do the fetching and carrying. Was this sense—there were human servants, why not make use of them—or was it the humans barging in where they were not needed because barging was what humans did?
Ahathin had come to see how she was getting on a little after Danacor had left her.
“I’m not,” she said.“Getting on. Danacor was just here and . . . ” But there was nothing she could ask Ahathin when she wasn’t telling her own father the truth. She looked up from her increasing pages of notes. Ahathin was looking at her thoughtfully.
“If you had come back from a month at your cousins’ and been asked to give a report, what would you have said?”
“I was asked,” she said, half laughing and half impatient. “I was always asked. I hated it when I was younger, you know, I felt it spoilt the holiday. It was more interesting lately, when I could talk about rivers and bridges. But the pegasi don’t need bridges.”
“It is the role of teachers,” Ahathin said tranquilly, “to spoil their students’