about the pegasi, but from actual physical harm. She had wanted to believe that even Fthoom hadn’t meant anything by his gesture that day in the king’s receiving room, beyond that he was angry at not getting his own way about something. She could guess that all her guards were wearing a variety of glamour-neutralising and magic-disabling charms. She stared at Glarfin’s uniform, but the charms wouldn’t be anything you could see.
She wouldn’t be able to browbeat Ahathin the way she had just done poor Glarfin; she wondered what Ahathin might tell her if she merely asked him what charms he kept in his pockets that he hadn’t done before her twelfth birthday—what guard-magic now followed her—whether a guild spell-maker had been engaged to do the work. If so, he was a good one, because she couldn’t feel it plucking at her, nipping at her heels, haunting the shadows at the corners of her eyes.
She could feel herself drooping. She wasn’t really like her father.
“I’m sorry ... Sylvi,” said Glarfin with an obvious effort.
“Thanks,” said Sylvi, and smiled.“You can call me lady when there’s anyone else around, okay?”
She did ask her father why he hadn’t told her that she had had a special guard assigned to her. Her father looked at her thoughtfully. “I knew you’d figure it out,” he said. “And I hoped that by the time you figured it out, you would be sufficiently accustomed to the situation for the realisation to be less ... dispiriting.”
Sylvi was silent a moment. At last she said, “I wish you’d told me.”
“Next time I will,” said the king. “But you are older now: next time I would have told you anyway.”
“Next time?” said Sylvi.
“There’s always a next time,” said the king, “unfortunately. You just don’t know what it’s going to be about.”
And she asked Diamon if she could have Lucretia as a sparring partner—occasionally.
“She’ll knock you down,” said Diamon. “She’s not one to pull her punches, our Lucretia.”
“I know,” said Sylvi. “But she could show me how she did it after, couldn’t she?”
She had been assigned to the development of the river network in the Kish Mountains as her special project, and so she knew that potential locations of wheels and dams were dependent as much on their defensibility as on the geography of the rivers: because there were taralians in the Kishes—and, lately, there were also norindours. There had always been a few taralians in the Kishes, which also bordered on the wild lands, but she’d been present when one of the engineers reported to Danacor that it was the worst season for taralians he’d ever seen, and he’d been working in and around the Kishes for forty years, man and boy.
“And now a ladon,” he said, and shook his head. Riss lay in the foothills of the Kishes.“Damned snaky basilisk things,” he said. “They make taralians look like housecats. Nearly.”
Bridges, dams and water-power was interesting work—she didn’t mind being good at maths when she could use it for something—and she enjoyed trying to negotiate with water and rock. She didn’t like worrying about taralians.
To everyone’s surprise but her father’s, Sylvi was able to make suggestions about how the village witches might be included in the planning and the defences: several of her best interviewees about village magic were from the Kishes. The engineers blinked at the idea of asking a local wart-charmer and love-potion-mixer for advice about choosing wood and stone most likely to resist interference—a ladon in a temper might well be able to pull a bridge down—but Sylvi would bet on old Marigale or young Vant’s knowledge of their own neighbourhoods, perhaps even against a ladon, and said so. Firmly. The engineer, Sasko, who had said that it was the worst year for taralians he’d ever seen, smiled faintly and said, “You are very like your father, lady. I know Marigale. I will ask.”
She wondered what the pegasi thought about the increasing numbers of sightings of their old enemies in the human lowlands. It seemed to her that Lrrianay never went home any more—that he was always standing by her father’s chair at council now. She didn’t talk to Ebon about taralians and norindours and ladons, or about the rivers of the Kish Mountains—or about the flickering Sword. And he didn’t tell her what he did when they weren’t together—and she didn’t ask. She had discovered that talking to Ebon seemed to happen in the busy, front part of her mind. It was hard to keep anything