father.” The queen paused. “Nor has anyone. Your father told me that you can talk to each other—that that was how you knew his name.”
So her mother had noticed her slip too. Maybe everyone had. Even before Fthoom. Well, they could talk to each other. “Yes.”
“There are barely any folk-tales about such a thing. A few fool tales, I think—it’s as if it’s so driven into us that we can’t talk to each other, we can’t even make up stories about it. Maybe that your fathers can almost talk to each other is some explanation of what happened to you and Ebon, even though it didn’t happen to any of your brothers.”
“They tell jokes, Mum, did you know? The pegasi, I mean.
Mother”—Sylvi sat up and forward, kneeling by her mother so she was tall enough to look her directly in the face—“Mother, does it ever seem to you that we don’t know the pegasi at all?”
“Yes, darling,” said the queen. “I have often thought just that, and wondered what it meant, for all of us, both pegasi and humans.”
Sylvi dressed carefully, taking her time about it. She had hated court clothes till her mother had said, “Court clothes are just another form of dress armour. And if it’s a bad show, like the combined court and senate, you can sit there designing your breastplate, with all the curlicues you’d never have on working armour. I designed one with a roc swooping down to carry old Barnum away, the wings curling back over my shoulders and a satisfying look of fear on his face, which I think of often.” May a roc fly away with Fthoom, Sylvi thought.
She might be better at sitting still today, with the dread of catching Fthoom’s eye, like the hawk stooping on the rabbit (or the roc on the senator) as soon as it moves. Her black velvet trousers, she thought, with the wide red ribbons wrapped around the ankles; they made her look taller. Fthoom was both tall and big, and magicians and courtiers often wore high heels when they attended the king. She was sure Fthoom would be wearing high heels today. The custom had begun, Ahathin had told her, centuries ago, when Skagal the Giant had been king.
“They wouldn’t have to do it now,”she said.
“It is a custom,” said Ahathin. Ahathin, who was even smaller than the king, never wore high heels.
“And who cares who’s taller anyway?” she said.
Ahathin looked at her and permitted himself a smile.
“Don’t you mind being short?” she blurted.
He spread his small hands and looked at them. “I am a magician, not a princess. A pony costs less to keep than a horse, which means I can buy more books.” He paused. “It is not always a bad thing, to be overlooked.”
As Fthoom had always overlooked her, she thought, until yesterday. She stared at herself in the mirror and sighed. In trousers rather than a skirt, she thought, it was easier to feel that you could run away.
It wasn’t going to matter if she missed breakfast; she was now too anxious to eat. She asked one of her new attendants to bring her tea and toast on a tray. Her nurse would have brought her a proper breakfast and hovered over her till she ate it. Her nurse, in theory, was now retired—her last official act was closing Sylvi’s curtains yesterday evening—but Sylvi wondered if she would stay in the pleasant little suite in the retired courtiers’ wing that now belonged to her, and refrain from reappearing to scold Sylvi on the state of her underclothing. One of the new ladies brought the tea and toast and left it silently. Sylvi tore the toast into scraps to make it look as if she’d eaten something, but drank the tea; her mouth was dry.
She could have had an attendant lady or two accompany her to her father’s court; it could have been her first official something-or-other, as a newly almost-grown-up person with a pegasus, who would be expected to be present at council meetings and develop a useful speciality. She thought about an attendant for all of two seconds, as she pulled her tunic straight and smoothed her hair down. In the first place an attendant would make her feel smaller and more insignificant than ever, not less; and in the second place ... it was too much like copying Fthoom. Her father always had people around him because he was king; but they were councillors and senators and cartographers