Which was probably true. But what did you do with questions like that? She’d come storming—or rather, she’d walked perfectly calmly, but inside she was storming—from a council meeting where Senator Barnum had wished to discuss her comportment—hers and Ebon’s—at their public appearances, and how they needed to appear sensible and mature. “Mature!” she’d burst out later to Ebon. Mature! And Dad and Ahathin just say that that fat tick Barnum is a citizen too and he’s not the only—the only pompous pudding-head we need to remember will be doing his best to find fault!
Ebon had unfolded and refolded a wing—whoosh snap—and shook his head violently two or three times, which was the nearest a pegasus ever came to angry: Yes. I’ve already had the pitch from Dad, and Gaaloo. I promise not to trample any small children or to sneeze in anyone’s food. If they think we’re so dangerous to concord and prosperity, why do they want us to go?
After a little silence Sylvi said, You know why. Ebon made a half whuffle, half hum, that she knew from the rituals; it meant “our fate is our fate.” But he added, That’s always been a dumb line. It just means shut up and don’t make trouble. Sometimes you have to make trouble. He paused. But this isn’t one of those times. Okay. He sighed a vast gusty sigh—the vast gusty sigh that only a pegasus can sigh—and Sylvi rubbed his mane. And he tried to repress himself—not always successfully—and Sylvi tried to be careful what she repeated back to their human audience.
They saw magicians in the crowds sometimes—never among the people immediately around them wanting answers to their questions—but rather more often at the outskirts of those people than seemed to Sylvi at all reasonable. These were not the village witches, the little wizards, whom they often saw, and who could be expected to come to their local fêtes, but the big magicians, the members of the guilds, who didn’t come to little country fêtes. Except that they did. Sylvi tried to tell herself that before Ebon she hadn’t gone to many country fêtes herself, and maybe guild magicians came to more of them than she realised. But she didn’t believe it.
She rarely recognised any of them, but the magicians’ robes were easy to spot—and the way ordinary people tended to leave space around them. What were they watching for? What were they seeing?
What were they reporting back to Fthoom?
She thought of asking Ahathin about the number of guild magicians she saw, about why there were so many ... but couldn’t think how to do so without betraying the intensity of her dislike and distrust of magic and magicians. What had still been half a joke on her twelfth birthday was, since the morning after her twelfth birthday, no joke at all. She often thought, bleakly, that all the things she most wanted to ask Ahathin because he was a magician, she could not, because he was a magician.
Ahathin himself she was glad to have beside her. Ahathin’s presence—and, she had to admit, Glarfin’s or Colm’s or Lucretia’s—made her feel braver; as her Speaker, Ahathin could whisper in her ear, even when he was saying things like “you need not answer that question” or “tell him that is a question for a judge.” And most of the questions were innocuous enough—she also learnt to wait, fractionally, for any stir or startle from her entourage. She asked the questions about the pegasi themselves, like how many of them there were (Yikes. I haven’t a clue. Lots. Not as many as you humans, though), or where they lived (See the mountains that start behind the far Wall of the king’s palace? If you fly—er—if you walked, uh, up and down, over those mountains, Rhiandomeer begins on the other side) and if their king lived in a huge grand beautiful palace too (Yuck! No way. Who wants to be trapped in the same old stiff up-and-down walled-in thing all the time, where the sun can only come through the same holes?).
Sylvi had some trouble translating that one. Okay, it’s not trampling children, she’d said crossly to Ebon, but can’t you think of a little nicer way of putting it? Your shfeeahs stay in the same place, don’t they?
Sort of, said Ebon. But most of the walls come off