to have been told. Very well. But if this goes on much longer we’ll have to think again. I could ask Nirakla if she has anything for sleepwalking.”
She didn’t, but she gave me some liniment that your shaman-healer gave her the recipe of—she said it was better than the stuff she’d always used before—you don’t have to rub so much. I thought that was pretty funny.
It’s for flying bruises, said Ebon. The first few years you’re flying you go through the stuff by the lakeful. Maybe some of us more than others. I was maybe one of the mores.
She and Ebon finally began getting this sorted out just before the queen made a real fuss, and the danger passed. The experience had a further interesting effect however. Sylvi had always had to fight for her time at the practise yards; everyone kept telling her to wait till she’d grown a little—even the queen, who had introduced her there in the first place. She was thirteen when she was finally allowed her first mounted lessons—and Diamon said that she fell off better than any student he’d ever had. “Anyone would think you’d been riding with the horse-dancers,” he said.
Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn’t be, even if it was somewhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary. The scrumped apples (they only stole a few) tasted better than the ones from the bowl in your study; the wind in your ears sang secrets it never whispered under the sun; even the dogs that came out wagging their tails were an adventure at night, and it wasn’t only because you were glad they weren’t barking at you. Everything was an adventure, at least when you could stop yourself thinking that you were defying your father’s ban.
Everything was an adventure at night, but not every adventure was a good one. There were the bulls, and the big snarling dogs, and once they saw a magician walking swiftly down a little side street and knocking on a door before he slipped inside. Sylvi had just time to wonder what a magician in his official robes was doing in a tiny country alley before panic swamped her thoughts and she and Ebon spun round and headed for the deepest dark they could find—which happened to be a barn, luckily dog-free; a few of the cows glanced at them, and returned to cud-chewing.
But the worst was the night that Ebon, gliding for a landing, suddenly changed his mind, lurched frantically in the air, nearly unseating Sylvi—Don’t fall off she heard—and clawed his way upward again while Sylvi clung on, slithering with every wingbeat and miserably aware that if he failed to get aloft again it would be her fault—but he banked clumsily as soon as they were clear of the ground and flew away faster than they’d ever gone. He didn’t stop till they were back over the Wall, and then he came down like a stone dropping, and when he fell on landing this time—neither of them had fallen on landing in months—it was a second or two before he got up again. Long enough for Sylvi to have taken a first running step toward him, shouting Ebon! in her mind and breathing his name aloud, as if mind-speech was not enough in this extremity.
But he was on his feet before she reached him. Sorry, he said, and that was all.
Ebon—?
After a long pause, he said, Norindour. I smelled it.
Norindour!
Norindour—so close to the palace. Just outside the Wall. Norindours didn’t come this far from the wild lands. Taralians sometimes. Never norindours.
You’re sure? I—I wouldn’t know.
We’re taught norindour, although they don’t like our mountains—oh, you don’t teach smells, do you? We’re taught taralian, and ornbear, and norindour—well, and human—and, he went on desperately, also stuff like if a drak bush is fruiting or not—it all goes on underground so you can’t see it, you have to know what it smells like because they’re poisonous if they’re fruiting, and they can do it any season although sometimes they don’t for years. . . .
Sylvi could hear how frightened he was—frightened and exhausted—so she didn’t say anything, but put her arms round his neck, and after he’d run through a little more pegasus botany he fell silent. At last he sighed and said again, Sorry. I’m so tired I can’t. . . . We’ll have to walk the rest of the way.
Sylvi had not had a