have remembered what to do and to say, because her father was smiling at her and Danacor (drat him) looked relieved. Thowara stood just behind Danacor’s right shoulder, looking exquisite; the flowers tucked among his primaries glittered like jewels. She wanted to pinch him, just to dent his dignity a little, even though she knew it wouldn’t’ve worked. He would have looked at her gravely and in mild surprise. Beyond Danacor and Thowara stood the rest of the family and their pegasi; the queen, Sylvi’s other two brothers, two of her uncles and three of her aunts. Lrrianay was absent; he would be escorting her pegasus into the Court in a little while. What her father did have to bear him company was the Sword.
The Sword was the greatest treasure of their house, and the most important symbol of their rule, for the Sword chose the ruler. Balsin, who signed the treaty with the pegasi, had been carrying the Sword; some histories claimed that it was the Sword that Argen wanted out of his country, not Balsin. For some generations now the Sword had passed from parent to eldest child, but when Great-great-great-great-uncle Snumal had died without direct descendents, the Sword had chosen which cousin the crown should pass to. Sylvi had never understood what happened when it passed—when the Sword had left Grinbad and come to Great—eight greats—uncle Rudolf, how did they know it had happened?
She’d asked her father this several times and he’d only shaken his head, but recently she’d asked again and possibly because she was going to have to swear fealty to him and it on her twelfth birthday, he stopped mid head-shake, stared at nothing for a minute and finally said, “It’s rather like a bad dream. You can see it in your mind’s eye, and it’s so bright you think it will blind you. You can’t move, and it comes closer and closer and ... there is the most extraordinary sensation when it finally touches you, somewhere between diving into icy water and banging your elbow really hard, and even though you’ve seen it nearly every day of your life—and you know you’re in this fix because it’s already accepted you—you know that it’s the greatest treasure of your house and you’re suddenly and shamingly afraid it will cut you because you, after all, eldest child of the reigning monarch or not, are not worthy of it. But it doesn’t cut you, and you feel almost sick with relief. And then you seem to wake up, only it’s still there.”
He stopped looking at nothing and looked at his daughter, and smiled, but it was a rather grim smile. “And then you really feel sick, because you know what that’s just happened means.” Her father, Sylvi knew, had been given the Sword in a quiet ceremony of transfer on his thirtieth birthday, when his mother retired, but the Sword had acknowledged him as heir in the great public ritual of acceptance ten years before. “Afterward my mother said—” He stopped.
“What did Grandmother say?” Sylvi only barely remembered her father’s mother, who had died when Sylvi was four years old: a Sword-straight and Sword-thin old lady who looked desperately forbidding in her official retired-sovereign robes, but who somehow became benign and comforting (if a little bony) as soon as she picked tiny Sylvi up and smiled at her.
The king looked at his daughter for another long minute and then said, “She said she felt twenty years younger and six inches taller.”
Sylvi shivered.
“You get used to it,” said the king. “You have to. And you’re trained for it. Well—we’ve been trained for it, some generations now. I’ve often wondered how one of those unexpected battlefield transfers happens—how whoever the Sword has gone to copes. It’s shocking and disorienting enough when it happens in the Little Court. Fortunately it doesn’t happen that way very often. And you, my dear, do not need to worry: Danacor is very healthy and very responsible. And you have two more brothers to spare.”
Danacor’s sense of responsibility was such a family joke (as Sylvi had told her cousins, especially Faadra, who was inclined to be sweet on him) that when Sylvi asked her oldest brother what being accepted was like, she was not prepared for the king’s heir to look hunted, and reply immediately, “Like the worst dressing-down you’ve ever had, and a little bit over, except the Sword doesn’t talk, of course—it sort of looks at you.” He fell silent and stared