I’ll just tell you to have fun. And that I love you and will miss you. How very unkingly of me. ”
Sylvi meant to say something—good-bye, I love you—but her mouth wouldn’t work.
He turned away as if it hurt him, and walked to his drai. Two pegasi fastened the safety-ropes around him, and then stood away. The eight pegasi moved sideways, taking up the slack till the human king swung clear of the ground. Sylvi caught her breath: she heard Guaffa say the necessary word, heard it echoed by the others—heard echoes she was sure had nothing to do with her ears—heard the chord the shamans sang. Almost she saw the magic-weave that held the king’s drai twinkle into being, but perhaps that was just something about her eyes this morning, watching her father leave her—and then, in perfect unison, the pegasi broke into a canter, and almost immediately into a gallop, racing away from her. Six pegasi accompanied them; three of them she knew were shamans. The two luggage-bearers followed last, a little to one side, as if aware of the princess’ eyes on her father’s drai. It was interesting, thought Sylvi distantly, her immediate attention floundering in what her father had just told her, in her awareness that she had chosen to stay, and that he was leaving right now—it was interesting seeing what was happening from the ground, seeing what it looked like. It was just another pegasus dance.
The pegasi leaped into the air. Her father raised his arm over his head. She started to raise hers in response and realised he couldn’t see her. It seemed barely a breath or even a heartbeat before he was little more than a black dot above the trees on the horizon.
Her eyes burned. She kept them stretched wide open, watching the dot disappear. Ebon had joined her, and tucked the top of an open wing around her as she stood where her father had left her. She stood like that for a long moment more, still and cold as stone, but then she began to notice the warmth of Ebon’s feathers and the gentle movement of his side as he breathed. The dot had disappeared: she was staring with her dry, burning eyes at empty sky.
“I’ll have my bath now, please, ” she said aloud, as if she were talking to a human.
“Baff, ” said Ebon. “Fwaayomee. ” Follow me.
Those were almost the last words she said aloud for the rest of that day. As soon as her father was gone there seemed very little reason to speak out loud; there was Ebon, of course, but more mysteriously she seemed not to want to speak aloud to the pegasi. Their own oral language was liquid and musical, but it was only “spoken” with the kinetic language which the human body could not emulate, and it seemed to her, listening and watching, that the unspoken word breaks were instead created by gesture; the sound alone was a kind of murmur, like wind or water. All those pegasi vowels, she thought. This was something else she could not imitate; she had to breathe too often, and her breaths were shallow.
Ebon had tried to tell her, when he’d helped her with her speech: Stop making those great thumping human pauses. Someone could fall into one and disappear forever. Just speak it, don’t—I don’t know, don’t march it, like Fthoom coming down a corridor, thud thud thud.
She hadn’t known what he meant. She thought possibly she did now.
That morning Ebon was rattling the bushes at her before she had climbed out of her pond-bath. If you don’t want me to come in there after you, he said, hurry up. It’s late, and we have a long way to go.
She emerged from her little private glen still damp, crossly, rubbing her wet hair but already aware that the pegasi themselves were speaking aloud less since her father had left. This, presumably, was the usual pegasus way; they had spoken aloud more for her father’s sake, since humans were accustomed to mouth-language. Now that it was only herself, the human who could silent-speak to one of their own . . .
All alone. Her father had left her all alone—
She had washed out her clothes from the day before because she didn’t want to be dirty. She hadn’t seen a pegasus bathe, or swim, or even seen one wet, but they all gleamed, while she was almost hairless and faintly wrinkly—even the wrinkles across her knuckles,