if I hear anything at all, then it is possible that others may hear something too.”
She wanted to shout at him, Would it be so terrible if we were found out? If it was known we went flying together? But she remained silent because she knew the answer: Yes, because it was forbidden. Yes because if they tried to claim that they had not been expressly forbidden to go flying together it would mean they were irresponsible children. And yes because everything about the unprecedented strangeness of their relationship was risky, because some people were frightened by strangeness. Because some people listened to Fthoom.
There was a knock on the door. Ahathin stepped back from the table and became his normal self again, small, faintly rumpled, mild, ordinary, nearly invisible, except for the fact that he was tutor and Speaker to the princess. “Come,” she said, and one of her mother’s women entered, bowed first to Ahathin, and then a much deeper bow to Sylvi: “A change of schedule, princess, because of this news your pegasus brought. . . .”
CHAPTER 9
They still flew after that, but less often, and it was increasingly difficult. More than once they saw a party, torch-lit, riding or walking swiftly with the unmistakable purposefulness of someone bringing news to the king, or going on the king’s urgent orders. Ebon had been forbidden to fly beyond the Wall—I nearly got grounded completely, Ebon said. I said it would spoil my project, and Gaaloo said I should have enough sketches—unless I was being negligent, I shouldn’t need to fly around at night any more.
Oh no! This had been what she’d been afraid of.
Oh yes. But I pointed out that it was a little unkind to ground me when I’d brought them useful news.
Once when she was younger—before Ebon—Sylvi had found a silver penknife that her father had lost, found it somewhere she was expressly forbidden to be. She had stood with the beautiful, treacherous thing in her hands, not deciding what to do—she already knew she would take it to him and tell him the truth—but nerving herself to do it.
When she had done so he too had stood looking at his penknife with an expression, she imagined, very like the one she had worn when she found it: delighted, dismayed, baffled, unhappy.
“What were you doing in the Hall of Magicians?” he said at last.
Again she answered honestly; her father did not try to make you say things that would make it worse for you. He wanted to know.
“Someone”—Garren, but she didn’t need to say that—“told me that the Hall of Magicians smelled of magic, and if I went there some time by myself when no one else was around, I would learn what magic smells like, and then I would always know.” He had also told her that on a sunny day you could see faint reflective ribbons of the enormous power used to maintain the protective magic of the Wall, dancing in the sunlight like dust motes.
“And did you learn what magic smells like?”
She hesitated. She knew, now, that her brother had set her up. She should have known immediately, because that was, in her experience, what brothers did; but she had badly wanted to know what magic smelled like—or some other way to recognise when magic was being used around you so you knew why you felt so queer. So she had ignored her common sense, and gone to the Hall. Where she’d realised she’d been played for a fool—she couldn’t see that the dust motes in the sunbeams were any different from any other dust motes either—and found the king’s little knife.
“It doesn’t have a smell, does it?” she said. “Just when they use incense and things, it smells of incense. But . . . but it does something, doesn’t it? Because you do feel it, when you’re all alone in the Hall.”
“That may merely have been the apprehension of approaching trouble for being where you oughtn’t,” said her father drily, and sighed. “I don’t know what it’s like to be an ordinary person bound by ordinary rules—you can perhaps ask your mother—I was born the ruling monarch’s eldest child. And as a person who may rule absolutely over other people you must absolutely obey the rules. I will ask Ahathin to set you new work: in a month’s time you will bring me a paper on village magic, on what the local wise woman or wise man can be expected to do, and