banquets, although you will be allowed to leave early. As I think about it, maybe I could develop a gentle little wasting illness whose only symptom is that I have to go to bed early on official banquet nights.” She smiled at her daughter, and her daughter smiled back. The queen had an old wound in one hip that made it difficult for her to sit for long periods—mysteriously, however, it did not trouble her in the saddle—but she refused to use it to get out of state events. Maybe when I’m older, she’d said when Sylvi had once asked.
“You’ll now be expected to come to most council meetings,” the queen went on, “at which you will have no say and no vote. But your father or Ahathin will decide on a speciality for you—farming or the guilds, or rivers and waterways, or roads—or the army: gods save you if you have anything to do with the army. It could be anything on the court schedule, and you have the misfortune to have made a very good impression on your father with your papers on village witchcraft, so he’ll probably want to give you something challenging. And you’ll be expected to study whatever it is carefully and have opinions about it. And they’ll want you to come up with good ideas, but if you manage to do so, you’ll be expected to stand up in front of everybody else on the council and possibly even the senate, and present them. Horrifying. Much worse than anything that happens in the practise yards with mere weapons.”
“Mum,” said Sylvi, “you’ve never been afraid of anything in your life.”
“How wrong you are,” said the queen. “I am afraid of almost everything except what I can go after with a sword. You know where you are with a taralian. When it began to dawn on me that your father was serious, I almost ran away. I probably would have run away the night before the wedding except you’re expected to sleep among your attending maidens. Probably to prevent you from running away.”
Sylvi laughed.
“Court etiquette,” said the queen. “Court gods-save-us etiquette. I was a country baron’s daughter so we had banquets once or twice a year when the queen or a bigger, more formal baron than we were came to visit. And my father held court one afternoon a week for troubles and disputes and so on, which usually degenerated into everyone complaining about the weather. I’d been to the palace for my binding and my sisters’, and it was all huge and confusing beyond imagining, but we didn’t have to imagine it. We had two sky views and a sky hold of the palace, which probably made it worse, being used to being able to hold the king’s palace in the palms of your two hands—and the sky hold is three hundred years old, and the palace was smaller then.”
Sylvi nodded. She had seen it when she visited her cousins; it was made of many different kinds of wood, cut, carved and glued with beautiful precision.
“Maiden I was, but maidenly modesty did not become a colonel of the Lightbearers; and armour and a sword did not become the king’s intended. I didn’t even have dress armour—useless stuff, and we couldn’t afford it. The first speech I gave to your father’s court, I had to brace myself against the plinth because my knees kept trying to fold up, and force my hands flat against the desk to stop them trembling.”
“Was Hirishy with you?” said Sylvi.
“Yes,” said the queen thoughtfully, “she was. It’s funny, because she’s so little, and when you look round for her she’s probably hiding. But when you need—oh, when you don’t know what you need!—she’ll be right there. She slept with all us maidens the night before the wedding, for example. I don’t know of another occasion when a pegasus slept with her human, do you? There should have been a fuss about it, I think, but there wasn’t. It was just Hirishy.”
Sylvi smiled.
“And now you’ve been bound to your pegasus,” said the queen. Sylvi heaved a great, happy sigh and felt her spirits lighten. Even the thought of Fthoom couldn’t entirely spoil the thought of Ebon. “Yes. I have been bound to my pegasus. Ebon. He’s ... he’s ... um.” Again she felt the thrilling, terrifying surge of the lift into the air; the wind-hammer of the huge wings.
“You two bonded yourselves, didn’t you? I’ve never seen anything like it—nor has your