“Stormdown and Mereland—they’re here.”
“ The original Stormdown and Mereland are in Tinadin, which is Winwarren now, where Balsin and Viktur originally were from. They’d won a famous victory for their king—who now wanted to be rid of them before Balsin started having fancies about being king of Tinadin. Everyone is very clear that Balsin was very ambitious; and, of course, he had the Sword. It was apparently worth it to their king—whose name was Argen or possibly Argun—to lose half his army to be rid of Balsin. Argen married the daughter of the king Balsin defeated, so presumably he thought he could afford it.”
Sylvi cautiously turned the pages back to Viktur’s first sight of the pegasi, and then on to the second marker. There was something that looked like the remains of a grubby fingerprint on one corner of the page she was looking at, and what might be a bloodstain on the bottom edge of the little book.“. . . and why cannot our magicians explain this lack to us?” She stopped, startled, and reread the entire sentence, and then looked up at Ahathin. “That’s not—I haven’t seen that before, that last,” and gingerly she touched the brittle old page. Even through the thin glove she could feel the roughness of the paper: modern paper was smooth—paper-making was one of the things the pegasi had taught their allies, and for special occasions or particularly important records, pegasus-made paper was still preferred.
Mostly she did her studying in the room off her bedroom in the main part of the palace, where she now spent several (long) hours every day with Ahathin. The copy of the First Annals she was reading was the copy several generations of royal children had read, and included several games of tic-tac-toe on the end papers, imperfectly erased, played by her next-elder and next-next-elder brothers, who were only eleven months apart in age, and a poem her father had written about an owl when he had been a few years younger than she was now. (It began: The Owl flys at night. To give the mice a fright. It soars and swoops. The mice go oops.) Her eldest brother, and heir to the throne, had never written in his school-books.
She looked up at Ahathin, who stood beside her. There was only one chair at the table. She wanted to stand up herself, or drag another chair from another table so that Ahathin could sit down, but she knew she mustn’t. The single chair and the presence of the honour guard with their hai meant that this was a formal occasion. Princesses sat down. Lesser mortals did not. This included tutors—even tutors who were also magicians, and members of the Guild of Magicians. She didn’t like formal occasions. They made her feel even smaller and mousier than she usually felt.
She also didn’t like it that the familiar, beat-up—almost friendly, if a school-book was ever friendly—copy of the annals that she knew had a missing phrase; she didn’t like it that Ahathin was making such a fuss about her reading the missing phrase. She especially didn’t like it when her own binding was so near—her binding to her pegasus.
Ahathin was small and round and almost bald and wore spectacles and a harmless expression, but he was still a magician. He looked no less small, round and harmless than he ever had right now as she stared at him, but for the first time she thought: Looking harmless is his disguise.
She had known Ahathin all her life. She could remember him sitting on the floor to play with her when she was tiny—she could remember looking dubiously at her first set of speaking tiles, with human letters and words on one side and the gestures you were supposed to use with the pegasi on the other, and Ahathin patiently explaining them to her. She’d learnt to sign “hello, friend” from Ahathin.
She’d known him all her life, and suddenly she didn’t know him at all. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat, but it stayed where it was.
Ahathin nodded. “It’s not in any of the copies of the annals I’ve looked in—there are quite a few.”
“Why?”
At his most harmless, he said mildly, “I don’t know.”
She looked back at the journal. “Does my father know? Does Danacor?”
Ahathin nodded again. “Certainly the king knows. And the heir. I asked your father if I might show this to you.”
“Why?”
Ahathin said nothing. This meant he wanted her to answer her own question. But sometimes, if she said something unexpected, she got an unexpected response. “Why can’t magicians explain what it is about the pegasi language that the rest of us can’t learn it?”
Ahathin nodded as if this were an acceptable question.“It is a curious skill, speaking to pegasi, and not even all magicians can do it—do you know this?”
Fascinated, Sylvi shook her head.
“We are well into our apprenticeship before it is taught at all, and many of us will already have been sent home to be carpenters or shepherds, for we will not make magicians. And indeed there is little enough of teaching about it, to begin with. Imagine learning to swim by being thrown into a lake in perfect darkness, never having seen water before. Those who do not drown are then taught; the best of them may then go on to become Speakers. But that is the moment when as many as half of us are sent away, although by that time an apprentice has learnt enough that if he—or she—wishes he can set up as a village spell-caster somewhere.”
Imagine learning to swim by being thrown into a lake in perfect darkness, never having seen water before. “But the pegasi—they—they are so light. They—they fly. Drowning in a dark sea—I—it doesn’t sound like anything to do with pegasi.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Ahathin. “It does not at all.”
Sylvi knew the rest of the official story of the making of the treaty. She was obliged to be able to parrot a brief accurate version of it as part of her training as daughter of the king. She was obliged to be able to parrot a number of historical titbits on command (although why this was considered a necessary attribute in a princess she had no idea, her father sprang questions at her occasionally so that she did need to was not in doubt) but this was one of the few of her history lessons that were live pictures in her head instead of dry words in her memory.
The first beginnings of the treaty had been almost insurmountably difficult; not only was there the obstacle of their spoken languages, of which neither side could learn the other’s, but the pegasi did not have an alphabet as humans understood it. Instead they had a complex and demanding art form of which various kinds of marks on paper were only a part.... The human magicians translated its name into human sounds as ssshasssha and said it meant “recollection,” and that it appeared to include or address all the senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, feeling—although how this was accomplished the magicians were uncertain. There were pegasus bards and story-tellers in some manner, presumably, as there were human bards and story-tellers; there were also pegasi . . . they didn’t know. This was the first time the humans heard about the Caves, and the sculptors; but none of this assisted the drawing up of a document that humans understood as legal and binding.