extend that far, I think, but I’ve never been half that way, so I don’t know what it’s like there. Flying in snow is fun, except it’s kind of easy to get lost.
The mountains that marked the edge of the pegasi’s land rose up abruptly out of the plain on the human side of the boundary, but wandered and rambled on the pegasus side for a long way, losing very little height, or losing it for a while and gaining it again. With the exception of three peaks Sylvi could see a great distance away, they were not tremendously tall, but there were a lot of them, steep and ragged, and she was glad she wasn’t toiling up and down the crests and ridges and long crooked passes on foot. The plateaus that lay between were surprisingly level if irregularly shaped; some seemed only wild meadow but some of them were clearly cultivated. Occasionally she also saw small wooden roofs, like the pavilion at the edge of the first meadow which had held the banqueting tables—and the bedding—and the cooking utensils. But the shfeeah were all small; there were no towns and no houses, and she saw no pegasi other than those around her in the air.
Already her father seemed very far away—farther away than a few hours’ flying—and the palace, and her mother and brothers, Ahathin, Glarfin, Lucretia . . . everything about her life was half a dream. Either what was happening now was imaginary, or her previous life was; the two must be incompatible. But she was here now, suspended over nothing, flying with the pegasi, the sharp wind stinging her face. What was she going to believe?
When they banked, steadied and then pulled the ropes taut again over another meadow, her heart began to beat faster. The landing itself was, of course, perfect, but she found that she was stiff with cold, which made her stagger a little, although that wasn’t why her heart was beating in her throat. She looked around, half in anticipation, half in foreboding, for a dark cave mouth, but she didn’t see anything but the meadow itself, spangled with spring flowers, and another pavilion at one edge. She looked again at the flowers: lavender, violet, yellow, blue—they were also new and strange to her. Even the flowers were different in Rhiandomeer.
Most of the pegasi who had attended the banquet had left before Sylvi’s little band had taken to the air, and since then Sylvi had seen only those she flew with. But now pegasi began to appear from among the trees, as if they had been waiting there for their arrival—as they had on her first day here with her father. She looked round at them—she recognised several from the last two days—and unthinkingly looked round for her father too. When she stopped herself looking, the stopping was an almost-physical pain.
For a moment she wished she’d gone home with him—that she’d never come, that Ebon hadn’t moved the many heavens and the one earth, as only Ebon could, to invite her, to enable her invitation to be made—that she ’d never seen this country, with its strange flowers and leagues of silent empty landscape, and its ability to make her doubt everything she had known about herself up till two days ago. For a brief, awful moment she couldn’t move; she was a statue in an alien landscape, its unknown flowers clustering round her feet, another of the bizarre, useless gifts humans had pressed upon the pegasi, which t he pegasi were too polite to refuse.
Feeaha and Driibaa unfastened the safety ropes, and the drai dropped away. She made herself move: one step, two steps. This was what it was like being human: this was how you moved, your queerly tubular and attenuated body swaying upright above a mere two legs, your long awkward arms and big outlandish hands pointlessly hanging....
Sylvi pulled the blanket around her, to wear as a shawl, although the two pegasi who had carried the two small bundles of her baggage individually round their necks came to her and bowed to the ground, rubbing the ropes off over their ears with their own hands, and she could have found something of her own. But the pegasus blanket was marvellously soft and comforting, and she didn’t want to give it up. One pegasus was detaching something from the back of her drai—she suddenly remembered her curiosity when she’d felt it being fastened there, when she could not see