“Look forward to a long and fruitful dialogue,” said Ahathin helpfully.
“Yes—oh, yes—yes. And we—we three—pegasus, magician and p-princess, shall be as the sun, moon and stars, and all shall look upon us and find us—uh—wonderful.”
“A light upon their path,” said her mother, “and a thing of wonder. I hope you’ve memorised the binding better.” Her mother had heard her say it over just yesterday, but that had been sitting swinging her legs on a chair in the queen’s office, with no one else present, and no surprises.
“I—I think so,” said Sylvi, a little ashamed.“It’s just that it’s Ahathin. I’ve been so dread—” She stopped. He was still a magician, and she was being fearfully impolite. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“There are tales of much worse, my queen, my lady,” said Ahathin. “Razolon, who was king six hundred years ago, is said to have spoken but one word to his first Speaker: you! Whereupon he ran him through with his sword.”
“Why?” said Sylvi, fascinated.
“He believed—with some justice—that the magicians were plotting that he should not come to the throne. He was a rather—er—precocious twelve.”
“The occasion you might tell of,” said the queen, “which I believe you might remember for yourself, is when my husband’s second brother was bound. Do you know this story?” she said to Sylvi. Sylvi shook her head. “Well, ask your uncle some time to tell it to you. The version I heard is that there had been an episode of the throwing-up sickness, and that the youngest prince was the worst affected, but it was such a terrible omen to put off a binding they decided to go through with it. And when his Speaker arrived, your uncle bowed and—threw up all over his Speaker’s shoes. But I believe the ritual of binding went perfectly.”
“It did,” said Ahathin. “I was one of the incense-bearers. Although the curious informality of the newly-assigned Speaker-to-the-Bound’s footgear was somewhat remarked upon.”
The queen laughed. “And thirty years later, Mindo is good friends with Ned, I believe, although he is rarely needed to Speak. We will therefore take the present informality as a good omen—you feel welcomed by your princess, I hope?”
“I do indeed, your grace.”
“Good.” The queen frowned at Sylvi. “And now we must go, or we’ll be late.”
CHAPTER 4
Sylvi got through the first part of the ceremony somehow, and she knew she must have remembered what to do and to say, because her father was smiling at her and Danacor (drat him) looked relieved. Thowara stood just behind Danacor’s right shoulder, looking exquisite; the flowers tucked among his primaries glittered like jewels. She wanted to pinch him, just to dent his dignity a little, even though she knew it wouldn’t’ve worked. He would have looked at her gravely and in mild surprise. Beyond Danacor and Thowara stood the rest of the family and their pegasi; the queen, Sylvi’s other two brothers, two of her uncles and three of her aunts. Lrrianay was absent; he would be escorting her pegasus into the Court in a little while. What her father did have to bear him company was the Sword.
The Sword was the greatest treasure of their house, and the most important symbol of their rule, for the Sword chose the ruler. Balsin, who signed the treaty with the pegasi, had been carrying the Sword; some histories claimed that it was the Sword that Argen wanted out of his country, not Balsin. For some generations now the Sword had passed from parent to eldest child, but when Great-great-great-great-uncle Snumal had died without direct descendents, the Sword had chosen which cousin the crown should pass to. Sylvi had never understood what happened when it passed—when the Sword had left Grinbad and come to Great—eight greats—uncle Rudolf, how did they know it had happened?
She’d asked her father this several times and he’d only shaken his head, but recently she’d asked again and possibly because she was going to have to swear fealty to him and it on her twelfth birthday, he stopped mid head-shake, stared at nothing for a minute and finally said, “It’s rather like a bad dream. You can see it in your mind’s eye, and it’s so bright you think it will blind you. You can’t move, and it comes closer and closer and ... there is the most extraordinary sensation when it finally touches you, somewhere between diving into icy water and banging your elbow really hard, and even though you’ve seen it nearly every day of your life—and you know you’re in this fix because it’s already accepted you—you know that it’s the greatest treasure of your house and you’re suddenly and shamingly afraid it will cut you because you, after all, eldest child of the reigning monarch or not, are not worthy of it. But it doesn’t cut you, and you feel almost sick with relief. And then you seem to wake up, only it’s still there.”
He stopped looking at nothing and looked at his daughter, and smiled, but it was a rather grim smile. “And then you really feel sick, because you know what that’s just happened means.” Her father, Sylvi knew, had been given the Sword in a quiet ceremony of transfer on his thirtieth birthday, when his mother retired, but the Sword had acknowledged him as heir in the great public ritual of acceptance ten years before. “Afterward my mother said—” He stopped.
“What did Grandmother say?” Sylvi only barely remembered her father’s mother, who had died when Sylvi was four years old: a Sword-straight and Sword-thin old lady who looked desperately forbidding in her official retired-sovereign robes, but who somehow became benign and comforting (if a little bony) as soon as she picked tiny Sylvi up and smiled at her.
The king looked at his daughter for another long minute and then said, “She said she felt twenty years younger and six inches taller.”
Sylvi shivered.
“You get used to it,” said the king. “You have to. And you’re trained for it. Well—we’ve been trained for it, some generations now. I’ve often wondered how one of those unexpected battlefield transfers happens—how whoever the Sword has gone to copes. It’s shocking and disorienting enough when it happens in the Little Court. Fortunately it doesn’t happen that way very often. And you, my dear, do not need to worry: Danacor is very healthy and very responsible. And you have two more brothers to spare.”
Danacor’s sense of responsibility was such a family joke (as Sylvi had told her cousins, especially Faadra, who was inclined to be sweet on him) that when Sylvi asked her oldest brother what being accepted was like, she was not prepared for the king’s heir to look hunted, and reply immediately, “Like the worst dressing-down you’ve ever had, and a little bit over, except the Sword doesn’t talk, of course—it sort of looks at you.” He fell silent and stared into space just as his father had. “You come out of it thinking that you’d be better off asking one of the magicians to turn you into a rat and get it over with, and then you look around and everyone’s cheering and you can’t imagine what’s going on.”