muscles both as solid as stone and as live and lithe as running water. It should have been difficult, and terrifying, to stay on, but somehow it was not; the muscles of her belly and thighs seemed to know how to keep her centre of gravity so perfectly balanced over Ebon’s spine that when he turned and banked she merely sank a little closer to him, almost as if she were a part of him. She knew the old horse-riding adage of striving to become one with your horse, but this was nothing like riding a horse, and she had never felt anything with her pony—whom she loved dearly and rode every day—like she now felt with Ebon, as if they were almost one creature indeed.
She’d always found the stories of centaurs a little unsatisfactory. The earthbound centaurs interested her not at all, but she often thought about the winged ones—thought of them for having human faces, voices, hands—and wings. But what would centaurs eat? If they ate hay for their horse digestion, didn’t it hurt their human mouths? If they grazed like horses, didn’t the human heads get dizzy? She thought, Maybe there’s a very, very old story, that we aren’t allowed to know about, that some magician put a spell on so we shouldn’t find it, that centaurs are really humans riding pegasi.
She felt secure enough to rearrange her hands in his mane and raise her face a little so that she could glance to one side and then the other—careful not to move her head far enough or quickly enough to disturb Ebon’s equilibrium.
He was gaining height, spiralling up and up in a huge gyre. Even in the dark she could see—her view came and went, like an eye’s slow blinking, by the whip of Ebon’s wingbeats—the great shadowy loom of the palace, spilling off in one direction with stables and barns, and in another with servants’ quarters, and another with courtiers’ and magicians’ apartments, and another yet with the special open rooms for the pegasi. She could make out the always-lit dome of the Inner Great Court and the walls around the Outer, the whole surrounded by wide formal gardens and carriageways like the erratic spokes of a very strangely shaped wheel. She thought, This is how it really looks.
As all these passed under Ebon’s wings she could see farther and farther, forest and parkland and a clutch of buildings like a small village at a crossroads of the inner city; and there was the Wall. Now, as Ebon turned again, the palace came once more into view, a little smaller this time. Her people were fascinated by what they called sky views; some of the most prized and valuable of the decorative artwork in the palace were paintings of hills and valleys, lakes and forests, towns and villages, as if seen from above, and there were many miniature landscapes called sky holds, made out of stone and wood and clay and, occasionally, jewels. None of them were as beautiful—or as exciting—or as shocking—as this dark-blurred, wing-nicked scene, with the wind streaking past, tangling her hair and chilling her back and her bare feet; but her hands were buried snugly in his mane, and Ebon himself was as warm as a hearth.
She thought, This is how it really looks. And again, wonderingly: This is how it really looks....
At last he stopped climbing and flew for the Wall, and over it. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder (as presumably it had not occurred to Ebon) whether the airborne magic carefully suspended and maintained above the Wall would let a human pass; they had just proved that it would. Moving boringly at walking speed through one of the gates, there was a faint chilly press or wash against your skin rather like diving into Banesorrow Lake; she felt nothing tonight but the wind and the flick of Ebon’s mane.
Sylvi briefly saw the moving figures of two of the guards walking along the Wall as they passed through one of the circles of torchlight, and guessed as well that Ebon had flown so high that they could not possibly see her. Pegasi did not commonly fly at night, but they did do so; no one would think anything of a pegasus flying so late, especially not after a day like today, when there were so many of them visiting the human king.
Once they were over the Wall he turned again, northwest, and they flew for a while over