Sylvi had some trouble with “sculptor,” although she heard the word clearly enough and she knew a little about the Caves: it was one of the things you learnt about the pegasi, with the Alliance and the gesture-language. The Caves had been there when the pegasi came, so long ago that even the pegasi only had myths about their origins; but, while extensive, they had been much smaller and far less beautiful. Thousands of years of pegasus sculptors, rubbing and smoothing and chipping and carving, using such small tools as their frail feather-hands could hold, and the Caves were—so beautiful you can’t really stay there long, you want to jump out of your skin and run for it. They’re perfect, you know, even though they’re not finished—will never be finished—it’s part of their perfection, that it goes on and on into the future and you’ll never see it, that us little short-lived mortals create perfection by not being there long, although we keep coming, us and our sons and daughters and their sons and daughters and so on.... Sorry. I’m sounding like a grown-up.
But the sculptors themselves don’t stay inside long—a few weeks or months—and then they come out and join us in the fields for a while, although they mostly don’t like to go far. “Remember how to not fly,” is the proverb: remember how to walk. They come out and join us in the fields. And teach their beginning apprentices sculpting on the pillars of the shfeeah. The Caves knock your Courts hollow, although this one’s pretty nice, he added, looking round consideringly. But it’s only barely just been built.
Sylvi, fascinated, forbore to say that the Outer Court was one of the oldest bits of the palace, over seven hundred years old.
You can see it too clearly, Ebon went on, where it begins and ends, your Court. It’s different in the Caves. The chambers and corridors all open out of each other and weave back and forth like the king’s plaits on coronation day. Very very occasionally, an old sculptor may ask for a decision to rub through a wall—the other sculptors have to agree, and the monarch and the decision-making shamans. It doesn’t happen often. And it becomes a permanent day on our calendar, the day that someone brushes the thin-made place on a wall and suddenly there’s a hole there, even if it took years to scratch open and it will be years more before the hole is big enough to climb through and see what’s on the other side. I was born on Damonay—the day three hundred and twenty-six years before that they had made a hole in Damonay chamber. Ambernia chamber, which is the one they let out of darkness, is all red stone and considered one of the most beautiful in all the Caves, so being born on Damonay is lucky.
Do humans ever go there? To your Caves?
Ebon looked at her, puzzled: head low, chin pulled in, one ear half back. Not that I know of. Humans don’t come to us. We come to you. The Caves aren’t a human sort of thing. He paused and—this was a frown, Sylvi thought: both ears half back, head raised again but held rather stiffly to one side. I ... I don’t know. They ... they wouldn’t fit around you, somehow. And it’s in the treaty that we’re supposed to come to you.
Sylvi was human enough, and princess enough, to know what that meant in human terms. Don’t you—mind? Mind always coming to us?
Ebon shrugged again—she was sure, now, that it was a pegasus shrug. What’s to mind? That we keep our quiet and our privacy? That we don’t have to worry about providing dead flesh for you to eat? And chairs? I would not be your father, the human king, to have the winning of that old war carried on my back, and on the backs of all the kings and queens after me, until the end of humans and pegasi—and the winning of any other wars. We are free, we pegasi, thanks to you. We are glad to honour you in this way if it pleases you—if it means you’ll go on carrying the burden for both of us. In what Sylvi was already learning was a typical Ebon manner, he added, Mind you, I wouldn’t want to be my dad either—he still has to listen to all the bickering when someone feels left out of some decision—and he has to listen to people like Gaaloo go on and on because usually there’s about six important words in what Gaaloo says that nobody else thinks of and since my dad’s king, he’d better hear them.
Sylvi sat up in bed. Something had moved very quickly between the window and the stars; something not only swift but large. There—there it was again, higher than the first time—no, gone again; no, not gone; it had banked and turned and—
Ebon folded his wings at the last minute, to fit through the window, and landed, therefore, rather abruptly and rather hard; his knees buckled and he rolled right over, wrapped in his wings, but making surprisingly little noise for all of that. Sylvi was out of bed and kneeling beside him before he scrambled to his feet again. Ow, he said. There must be a better way. Can’t you sleep somewhere with bigger windows?
Are you all right?
He walked once around the room, lifting his legs gingerly. Yes. Don’t worry. We’re taught to fall and roll like that when we’re babies and first learning to fly. They taught me really emphatically because I’ve always been too big. There were a lot of these doomsayers when I was a baby proclaiming that I’d be too big to fly. Ha. But you don’t break anything if you roll. Are you ready to go?
Sylvi, still confused by his sudden entrance, was nonplussed. Go where?
Out, said Ebon mysteriously. Can you get down to the ground without waking anybody up?
Yes, of course, she said. She’d crept down the two stories of wall from her bedroom many times, clinging to the knobbly, weatherworn stone heads of her ancestors—with useful little ridges for her feet where their necks ended—and to the heavy vronidia vine, which seemed to grow just enough bigger every year to go on bearing her weight. There were some nights, when the wind was singing to her and the sky went on forever, she couldn’t stay indoors.
Come on then. He tucked his forelegs to leap over the balustrade like a pony over a fence, but as he jumped his wings sprang out and he soared up, not down, and then turned once or twice (showing off, she thought), before he sailed gracefully down to earth—landing so lightly he made no sound at all. Because of the no-flying-in-mixed-company convention, she didn’t see pegasi flying all that often, except from a distance, and had never had one land so near her. She put her leg over the balustrade, felt around with her foot for Great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Neville’s nose, and began climbing.
Ebon was dancing with impatience by the time she reached the ground. Come on, he said, and led the way quickly through the gardens; she had to trot to keep up with him, and he was very hard to see in the dark, especially as he led her away from the more open flower-beds and into the winding, yew- and cypress-lined paths that surrounded them. In their shadow he disappeared entirely, except for the sparkle of his eye when he turned his head to check that she was still following him, and the just-discernible shimmer of motion as he passed from one shadow to the next. She noticed that he had his wings unfolded from his sides, although they were no more than a quarter spread; there wasn’t space between the trees.