Silently and motionlessly she made an effort, as if she were stepping from under a drift of rainbow fabric and out of a fog of incense. She thought, It’s as if he’s looking at a tree and calling it a window. And he’s trying to make us call it a window too.
“I fear for your daughter,” Fthoom intoned. “I fear the damage she and her new friend may do to the body of the living Alliance between our two peoples, by the ephemerality of easy and careless speech, such as is likely between two young creatures, however well-intentioned and innocent—”
The dais and chairs that the king and his court sat on raised them up only enough that, sitting, they were a handsbreadth or two taller than the people standing on the floor before them. But Fthoom was taller than most humans, and he was wearing high-heeled shoes. He had moved closer and closer to the dais as he spoke, where the royal chairs sat so near the edge that Sylvi’s footstool was precariously placed; he made as if to lay a hand on Sylvi’s shoulder, looming over her, with the arched and coiling tip of his magician’s headdress peering down at her like the head of a snake, and the engulfing cape flinging itself wide with the movement of his arm as if to engulf her.... She flinched and slid away from him, grateful after all for the intimidating size of her chair, ashamed of her own cowardice.
“You may not touch the princess without her leave,” said her father softly.
Fthoom stopped as if he’d come to the edge of a cliff. His hand dropped to his side and he moved away, but as he had bent his obeisance to the king into nothing of the kind, he made his moving away from the princess’ chair a planned stage of his performance, and not a response to reproof; and he seemed to swell even larger. “I, as Fifth Magician, felt the binding go awry yesterday. I felt the wound in the flesh of our treaty—the new bleeding wound in its side.” He managed to invest I feel with a magician’s power: no ordinary human could feel as he did. “I say this is a dangerous thing—as dangerous as any thing could be to our country, founded as it is on the concord between these two most dissimilar and distinct peoples, human and pegasus. And I must ask—indeed I must insist, demand—that the princess Sylviianel and”—he made the hrrring noise in his throat that was the human equivalent of the word that meant king or lord in the pegasus language—“Hrrr Ebon be kept apart, at least until a council of magicians has studied the matter and decided how, in the best interests of our countries and our peoples, to proceed.”
The sigh again, running all round the room. Even the footman who had opened the door and brought her footstool, who still stood near her at the foot of the dais, was a little less expressionless: he looked dismayed. Sylvi risked turning her head and looking at her father: he was cool and regal. His gaze was bent mildly on Fthoom, as if the magician were no more than a small farmer declaring a boundary dispute with his neighbour. She looked at the magicians arrayed behind Fthoom. They looked unhappier than ever, but determined. She wanted to turn her head again, and look at Ahathin, but she did not want to be seen to do it. Ahathin was still murmuring to Ebon.
“My lord,” said Fthoom, and again made his unmindful kneeling. He had never once looked at her, not even when he had tried to grasp her shoulder.
“N-no,” she said. For a moment she didn’t recognise her own voice, nor that she had spoken aloud; her body seemed to be scrambling—not very gracefully—out of her chair without her having directed it to move. She was shaking all over, but she realised that the words she needed to say were already in her mouth, and all she needed to do was let them out. “My lord,” she said to her father, and bowed.
“Lady,” he said, and inclined his head: permission to speak.
“What if Gandam was ... was only old and sick? What if Boronax was ... was mad anyway? When—when they needed a pegasus for Erisika, there weren’t any; too many had died in the war, and the only unbound ones were children. Erisika said, What about Dlaiali? His human