players and there was the dire threat that neither would appear. Danacor tried to take the lead from his father, but was only half successful. His left hand, as if involuntarily, kept touching his belt, where the Sword had hung this afternoon for the first time, and where it would hang tomorrow for . . . no one knew how long. Their pegasi had been present only briefly; Thowara and Oyry had preparations to make for the morrow—and even Ebon had said, Best I go with my brothers now, dearheart. Sylvi had nodded, feeling the difference between them again yawning like a void—or like the beak of a roc, which was big enough to catch and swallow a pegasus. Rhiandomeer seemed a million years ago.
Sylvi finally managed, at the end of the evening, to slip up to Danacor to say a private good-bye; and then she could find no words for it.
She looked up at him—she remembered when he was her age now, and she not much more than a toddler, and he had been so big and fine and grand, and she was so proud to have him as her big brother. She had been much more dazzled by the manifest splendour of her big brother than by the fact that her parents were king and queen of the country; being a king and queen seemed chiefly to mean talking to a lot of boring people about boring things (and being a princess seemed to be about being polite to people you didn’t want to have to speak to at all, and learning boring indoor book-ink-and-paper lessons even on sunny days), while Danacor was spending his afternoons in the practise yards with the horsemaster and the master-at-arms—and occasionally the queen, who didn’t like boring indoor things very much either. Sylvi, when she could escape nursemaid and governess, would hang on the fence and watch.
Her mother told her years later that her governess had let her escape far oftener than a stricter or more traditionalist educator would have. The young woman gravely told the queen that fresh air was always good for a growing child, and that since children will find people to idolise, it seemed to her a good thing to indulge the lady Sylviianel in idolising such a fine young man.
The queen told this story grinning at the memory: “Scai was such a serious young woman. Her mother had stood in your grandmother’s army, and it makes me wonder what effect it had on her child-rearing.”
Warfare. It had just been a proud glorious game, when Sylvi was four and six and eight and Danacor was sixteen and eighteen and twenty. Even when he had begun to take his turn on patrol, for they had since Balsin’s day patrolled the border with the wild lands, she had felt no fear. No taralian had a hope of getting the best of her brother; any taralian with any sense would see him and run away. She looked up at him now, the night before he rode out with the Sword at his side, and remembered the tall boy in the practise yards. Danacor looked down at her and smiled, but he didn’t seem to have anything to say either.
“I’ll come watch you ride out,” she said at last. “As I used to watch you in the practise yards, when you were learning. . .” Her voice trailed away.
“Yes,” he said, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. He put his hand on her shoulder, and then looked at her again as if reconsidering something he had previously discarded.“You’re growing!” he said, and this time his smile reached his eyes. “You are growing! Syl, you’re growing at last. Soon you’ll need a special low chair to sit at table with the rest of us,” he said, teasing her, but she burst out—
“I’m not! I’m not growing!”
Danacor looked startled, and dropped his hand.“Well, you are, you know, but I thought you’d be pleased. I thought you always hated being small.”
She couldn’t tell him about Ebon and flying, so instead she muttered the first thing she could think of: “I’m sorry. It’s just—everything is changing.” Has already changed.
“Yes,” he said again. His eyes strayed to the door. They’d had dinner in the Little Hall off the Great Hall where the Sword still hung for one more night. “Well, it does. Everything changes. But I’ll be back, Sylvi, love. That won’t change.” He stooped and kissed her, and soon after that the melancholy