and back in a gesture so grand and beautiful and effortless it brought a prickle of tears to Sylvi’s eyes. The queen’s golden wings caught the torchlight and for a moment there was no sky and no land, just two vast burning wings. And then she folded them and was the queen of the pegasi again, greeting the strange human child—briefly she half roused her wings to stretch her tiny feather-hands toward Sylvi, and softly brushed her temples.
Sylvi thought, even their speech is a dance, and, shyly, because her own voice seemed rough and flat, with none of the singing echoes of the pegasi’s voices, replied, “Genfwa, ihhu, Ebon sa sshira sshira fra, dooafwa swhee,” and she held her hands out, one toward the queen and one toward Ebon: the important person she was speaking to and the important person she was speaking about. It was a much grander gesture when you had wings: her arms felt very thin and naked. She hoped she’d said, Thank you, crown-wearer, Ebon is my very best friend—and was feeling a little bit pleased with herself, because it wasn’t a sentence she’d memorised, as she’d memorised her speech, and the words had come to her as if she were speaking a language she knew.
It was only then that she noticed another pegasus standing near the queen, and without knowing anything about him except that he was important enough to be standing alone by the queen she knew immediately that he was much more than that—that he was terribly important—perhaps more important than the queen, possibly as important as the king himself. The queen dropped her hands and stepped back and Sylvi was left to face this alarming pegasus by herself. She wasn’t accustomed to pegasi being alarming.
No, not quite by herself; five of her six bearers had left her, but Ebon had stepped forward and was standing by her right shoulder. Even without his silence warning her, she knew not to speak to him in front of this pegasus.
She had no idea what to do. The queen’s gesture had been both generous and flattering; putting your hands on someone’s temples in greeting was both a great honour and a great intimacy. She had no trouble resisting any temptation to reach out to this pegasus; she felt that trying to touch him might be like putting your hand in a fire—while the queen’s burning wings had seemed like a blessing. She shook herself out of her paralysis, folded her hands over her breast and bowed.
When she stood up again and looked at him, he was still looking expressionlessly back at her. Pegasi were rarely expressionless, even if you couldn’t read what the expression was, and after four years with Ebon she read most pegasi very well. After a silence that could have been no more than a few heartbeats but felt like a century he said,“And so you have come to us, Sylviianel, bond-sister to Ebon.”
She blinked. He’d spoken the words aloud—managing the individual words very clearly. The oral pegasus language all ran together; there were breaks between phrases, not between words—and the phrases tended to be long (pegasus lung capacity had something to do with this). On the rare occasions Sylvi had heard a pegasus try to speak human—usually Lrrianay—they sounded as the queen did, a kind of singing blur with no sharp consonants. She’d never heard a pegasus speak as this one just had—but he had also, she thought, half said them in her mind. In her mind? Like Ebon? In this case—if she weren’t imagining it—it was an uncomfortable and off-balancing mode of communication, almost scratchy, as if she were sitting on a burr. No, she thought, don’t be silly, it’s just strange. And it’s too strange after the day I’ve had, she thought, hopefully or sternly, not wanting to be frightened if she didn’t have to be, when she’d only just arrived, when her father was leaving her here alone the day after tomorrow.... Her father was standing statue-still on the far side of a row of torches. She knew that stillness: he was stopping himself interfering. He was leaving the day after tomorrow. . . . But the queen hadn’t frightened her.
“Sir,” she said, “ffffffwifwif.” Great sir. There were several more ff’s than she needed, because she was stuttering with nerves, but that made his greatness greater, which was perhaps a good idea. She did not try to speak silently—she didn’t want to speak silently to this pegasus, even if