were too many people congratulating her, and she and Ebon were separated in the crush, and she saw him surrounded by his own people. And then her father had his arm round her shoulders—his right arm; the Sword hung on his left side, for easier drawing—and people were making way for them because he was the king. “How did you learn his name?” the king said softly to his daughter. It was the first thing he had said since the ritual.
She had been expecting something like “well done” because her father wasn’t anything like his aunt Moira, and always tried to find the best in what you’d done and to recognise that you’d been trying. She realised that he was asking her if she had deliberately broken the rule that she was to know nothing about Ebon before this meeting and that he was making an effort to give her the benefit of some doubt. There should not have been any way she could have learnt Ebon’s name before he told it to her. Her father sounded grim, because her answer mattered, not just because she might have done something she knew she wasn’t supposed to. And she knew it must matter, or he’d have said “well done” first.
She felt suddenly cold, and again she remembered the feeling of wrongness when she and Ebon had stood under the rainbow fabric and the magicians’ smoke had been so thick they couldn’t see each other. And then she felt a little light-headed and queasy and she thought, No, I am not going to be sick. But her voice still came out squeaky when she said, “He told me, just now, on the platform. That’s why I forgot to wait for you. We were talking when I was supposed to be saying all those words, and I got confused. It was—it was—” She had no idea what to say about the discovery that she and Ebon could talk to each other. She hadn’t really taken it in herself yet. Maybe—maybe it wouldn’t last. Maybe it was something to do with the binding ritual. This made her instantly unhappy: Ebon was already her friend. But—no. No one had said anything to her about anything like this, and someone would have. She looked up at her father. “I’m—I’m sorry. Is it very bad that I didn’t ask you?” She was afraid to ask if it was very bad that she could talk to her pegasus. What if he said yes? What if there was some reason why humans and pegasi could not talk to each other that they weren’t going to tell her until she was older?
She was relieved to see that the king believed her, but he still looked grim. In fact, she thought, he looked grimmer, as if he’d almost rather she’d broken the rule—broken faith. And keeping faith was the king’s first rule. “You’re a princess,” he said to her every time she got into enough trouble that someone tattled to her father about it. “You have to know that you are no better than your people at the same time as you must behave as if you are.” Hadn’t she read somewhere that anyone giving the name of its future pegasus to a child who hadn’t been bound yet could be charged with treason? She began to feel sick again—sick and frightened. Was it a bad thing that she could talk to Ebon? Wasn’t the whole thing about keeping the Speakers in the background because if everything had gone the way the Alliance-makers had hoped, nobody would need Speakers?
The king said, “Have you ever spoken to a pegasus before? Spoken—I mean not just by sign?” He knew that she rarely used the sign-language if she could help it; she made the necessary courtesy greetings, occasionally said “isn’t it a pretty day,” and on formal occasions she was so paralysed by shyness she couldn’t do the more elaborate ones fast enough to get them over with. “Lrrianay or Thowara perhaps?”
She remembered Hirishy for a fraction of a second, and then shook her head emphatically. “No. Never. Nothing. That was partly why this was so—so muddling.” She thought sadly of the initial rush of delight, which now seemed a long time ago. She looked around for Ebon; the crowd was beginning to move purposefully toward the banqueting tables set round near the walls of the Court. In deference to the pegasi this was a standing-up banquet, although there were plenty of chairs for