“Roc?” said her mother, but Sylvi knew she was bluffing.
“Yes,” said Sylvi. “In Contary. Father sent you to look.”
The chain twitched as the queen tweaked it. “No.”
She was still bluffing. “But?” said Sylvi.
The queen sighed. “You’re as bad as your father. He always knows when I’m not telling him everything. My official report says ‘the evidence was inconclusive.’ Which is true. But I’m privately certain—which is what I told your father and Danny—that a roc had been through Contary.”
“Oh.” The wild lands around Balsinland were uncomfortably full of large, fierce, and often half-magical creatures, but only the taralians, who were the least magical, made a regular nuisance of themselves in Balsinland. Norindours were unusual, ladons rare, and the last wyvern sighting had been in Sylvi’s great-grandfather’s day.
But rocs, with their savage intelligence and relentless ferocity, were another category of hazard altogether. Rocs, it was believed, belonged to another world. No one knew why they occasionally emerged into this one; when they did, catastrophe followed.
“Yes. Oh.” The queen patted Sylvi’s hair. “There. Almost as good as one of the ladies could have done.”
Sylvi was distracted by this, and only half noticed the sudden hush in the hall. And then her Speaker arrived.
She had been braced for this. Or rather, she hadn’t been braced for it at all: she’d been trying to brace herself for it, and failing. She didn’t like magicians. They gave her the creeps. The idea of having one who was assigned to her—who was now going to be around all the time, because your Speaker tended to lurk in your vicinity even when your pegasus wasn’t there—was the worst thing about this whole rite of passage. Pegasi were a little scary and she knew she’d mess up what she was supposed to do with hers, if not today then tomorrow or the day after or the next ceremonial occasion or something, but this was different. She didn’t like magicians—save Ahathin and Minial—and she was afraid of them—even Ahathin and Minial. She’d wasted a little time hoping that since she was only a fourth child they wouldn’t bother to give her one, but she knew better. She was a princess being bound to a pegasus, and she’d have to have a Speaker.
She heard the clatter of the Speaker sticks before she turned around to see who it was—if it was anyone she’d ever seen before. The Speakers’ Guild had a tendency to be secretive.
“Sylvi—” began her mother, and Sylvi turned around and bowed in all the same gesture, putting off for another few seconds meeting him, whoever he was. She heard the Speaker sticks clatter again, as he bowed too.
She straightened up slowly.
It was Ahathin. Her tutor. Little round bald Ahathin with his spectacles sliding down his nose, the way they always did slide down his nose, although she was used to seeing him trying to juggle several rolls of parchment and an armful of books while pushing up his glasses, and she’d never seen him wearing Speaker sticks. She hadn’t known he was a Speaker. She took another look at the sticks, to make sure she wasn’t imagining things, as her heart, or maybe her stomach, seemed to take a great leap of relief.
He stood up from his bow, pushed his spectacles up his nose, awkwardly shook his sticks so they’d lie flat, and said, “My lady, I am your least servant.”
“Oh!” she said. “Ahathin.”
“Sylvi,” said her mother sharply.
You met your Speaker in private, right before the binding ceremony, and you weren’t supposed to know who he was until that moment (just as you weren’t supposed to know anything about your pegasus). It was still an enormously formal occasion and you had more words you were supposed to have memorised to say. Sylvi had memorised them, but the shock of discovering that her Speaker was almost the only magician she’d ever met who didn’t make her flesh crawl was so great she forgot them.
“Sir Magician—Worthy—sir—” But she couldn’t remember any more, so instead she said what she was thinking: “I am so glad it’s you.”
“Oh, Sylvi,” said her mother.
Ahathin’s face twitched, but he said placidly, “Yes, your father seemed to think that might be your reaction.”
The guild chose a Speaker, not the king. A king could request, and in order to have done a favour for the king, the magicians might listen to a request for a specific Speaker for an unimportant royal. But being her tutor was