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Robin McKinley has won many awards, including the Newbery Medal for The Hero and the Crown, a Newbery Honour for The Blue Sword and the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature for Sunshine.

She lives in Hampshire with her husband, author Peter Dickinson, two hellhounds nicknamed Chaos and Darkness, an 1897 Steinway upright named Rhodanthe, and increasing numbers of rose bushes wedged into three tiny gardens. The view out of her office window is her change-ringing bell tower and in the next village over is a paragon among horses whom Robin is so fortunate as to have permission to ride.

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First published in the USA by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2010

This edition published in Great Britain in Puffin Books 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-141-96945-9

CHAPTER 1

This had been a part of the treaty between the pegasi and the human invaders nearly a thousand years ago, shortly after humans had first struggled through the mountain passes beyond the wild lands and discovered a beautiful green country they knew immediately they wanted to live in.

The beautiful green country was at that time badly overrun by ladons and wyverns, taralians and norindours, which ate almost everything (including each other) but liked pegasi best. The pegasi were a peaceful people and no match, despite their greater intelligence, for the single-minded ferocity of their enemies, and over the years their numbers had declined. But they were tied to these mountains and valleys by particular qualities in the soil and the grasses that grew in the soil, which allowed their wings to grow strong enough to bear them in the air. They had ignored the situation as without remedy for some generations, but the current pegasus king knew he was looking at a very bleak future for his people when the first human soldiers straggled, gasping, through the Dravalu Pass and collapsed on the greensward under the Singing Yew, which was old even then.

They sat up quickly when seven pegasi circled the meadow above the pass and flew down to investigate. The journal of that company’s second commander still exists in the palace library: a small, worn, round-cornered, hand-bound book, slightly bowed to the shape of the pocket it was carried in. He reported the historic meeting:

We had but just come through thee final rocky gate, and had sett ourselves down in thee shade of a strange great tree, which had short soft spikes or needles all along its branches, and no leaves; when swift-moving shadows fled briefly between us and thee sunne, but against thee wind. We looked up in haste, for rocs are not unheard of, and I had raised my hand to give thee signal for thee archers to string their bows. We saw at once that these were no rocs, but still I held up my hand, for they were nothing else we knew either; and they clearly had seen us, and did approach.

But these creatures are nothing like rocs except they do also possess wings; they are like nothing I have ever seen, except perhaps by some great artist’s creative power. They are a little like horses, but yet far more fine than any horse, even a queen’s palfrey; they are a little like deer, except that deer are rough and clumsy beside them; and their wings are huge, huger than eagles’, and when thee lowering sunne struck through their primaries, for as they cantered toward us they left their wings unfurled, thee light was broken as if by prisms, and they were haloed in all thee colours of thee rainbow. Several of my folk came to their knees, as if we were in thee presence of gods; and while I told them to stand and be steadfast, I did tell them gently, for I understood their awe.

The pegasi were happy to make a treaty with the humans, who were the first possibility of rescue the pegasi had had, and the humans, dazzled by the pegasi’s beauty and serenity, were happy to make a treaty with them, for the right to share their mountainous land; the wide plateaus, which ran like lakes around the mountaintop islands, were lush and fertile, and many of the island crests were full of gems and ores.

The discussions as to the terms of the treaty had had to be held almost exclusively through the human magicians and the pegasi shamans, however, who were the only ones able to learn enough of the other’s language to understand and make themselves understood, and that was a check to enthusiasm on both sides. “Is it not, then, a language, as we understand language?” wrote the second commander, whose name was Viktur. “Does it encompass some invisible touch unavailable to humans, as a meeting of our hands in greeting, or a kiss between dear friends? What can we not grasp of it, and why cannot our magicians explain this lack to us?”

Sylvi’s tutor, Ahathin, had brought Sylvi to the library while they were studying this portion of the annals. Ordinary people needed a sheaf of special permissions to look at anything half so old, frail and precious as the second commander’s journal; Ahathin, as the princess’ tutor, had merely made the request, and when the two of them appeared at the library door, the head librarian himself bowed, saying, “Princess, Worthy Magician,” and led them to the table where the journal already lay waiting for them—with an honour guard of the Queen’s Own Lightbearers standing on either side of the table. The queen was the library’s governor. Sylvi looked at them thoughtfully. They were wearing their swords, but they were also wearing hai, to indicate that they could not hear anything she and Ahathin said to each other. There were two kinds of hai: the ceremonial and the invested. The ceremonial ones just hung over your ears and looked silly; invested hai had been dedicated by a magician and really stopped the wearer’s hearing. You couldn’t tell by looking at them which kind they were. Sylvi had often wondered how hai-wearing guards were going to protect anything if they couldn’t hear anyone coming. Was there a protocol for when an honour guard wearing ceremonial hai could stop pretending they couldn’t hear?

Sylvi tried to concentrate on what she was reading. She liked reading better since Ahathin had become her tutor; she would still rather be outdoors with her hawk and her pony, but it was thrilling, in a creepy, echo-of-centuries way, to be looking at Viktur’s own journal. She was allowed to touch it only while wearing the gloves the librarian had given her, and there were furthermore these odd little wooden paddles for turning the pages. But she had—carefully, carefully—turned all the pages over, back to the very beginning, to look at Viktur’s signature on the flyleaf: Viktur, Gara of Stormdown, Captain of the White Fellowship, who do follow Balsin, Gara of Mereland, All Commander of His Companies. Most of the curly handwriting was still surprisingly black and sharp against the pale brown flyleaf. A tiny faded arrow, almost invisible, had been drawn just before Balsin, and the word King written in above, and the Gara of Mereland following had been struck out. “Gara?” said Sylvi.

“Lord,” said Ahathin. “A gara is below a prince and above a baron. It is a rank no longer much in use.”

“Then Viktur was pretty important,” said Sylvi. “Balsin was only a gara to begin with.”

“Viktur was important. Some commentators say that Balsin would not have made king if Viktur had not supported him—that perhaps Balsin would not have been able to put a strong enough company together to come this far through the wild lands, nor to drive our foes out of it once they arrived. That perhaps our country would not have been created, were it not for Viktur.”

“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.”

Ahathin nodded again. “Certainly the king knows. And the heir. I asked your father if I might show this to you.”

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?”

“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.”

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.

“Did we not both want this union very badly,” wrote the second commander, “such impedimenta as there manifestly are would have stopped us utterly and our company would be homeless again; and I am grateful hourly that thee pegasi want us, for already I love this sweet green land, and would not willingly leave it.”

This sweet green land was probably the most famous phrase of the second commander’s journal; it was one of those phrases everyone used, like sick as a denwirl owl or mad as a mudge. One of the first songs Sylvi had ever learnt to sing herself, when she was still so small she couldn’t say her rrr’s yet, was an old folk ballad about a wandering tinker whose refrain was: On the road to nowhere through this sweet green land. The second commander seemed almost to be standing at her elbow as she read the old phrase as he had put it down the first time.

Both sides at last declared themselves satisfied with the final draft of the treaty. “The pegasi ask for little,” wrote the second commander.

They wish their lives—and their Caves, which appear to bee thee chief manifestation of their recollection. But thee Caves lie many days’ journey farther into thee mountains that steeply rise from these lush and fruitful plateaus we humans desire; Gandam says he is middling sure human feet could not take us there besides, and we have not wings. Balsin laughs and says, Good: that he wants all human forces to bend themselves to thee palace he already has in his mind’s eye to build upon thee greatest of these plateaus. It is his own consort, Badilla, who has begun to measure thee landscape for this building; she was trained for such work in thee old countrie, although Balsin says he married her for her beauty. My own Sinsi says she wishes only to finish thee job of securing our new land from its enemies; that what she most wants is to see her belly growing too large for its battle leathers, and a safe place where our babies may play.

The first song Sylvi could ever remember hearing was about the pegasi. Her nurse used to sing it to her when she was a baby, and would then “fly” her around the room. The tradition was that Viktur’s wife, Sinsi, had written it for their children, although no one knew for sure.

The treaty was written by human scribes and depicted or portrayed by some makers and devisers among the pegasi upon thick supple paper made by the pegasi:

Balsin would have it bee parchment, but thee pegasi demurred, that they did not use thee skins of beasts for such or any purpose, and proffered their finest made paper instead, which is very beautiful, with a gloss to it not unlike thee flank of a pegasus, and faint glints of colour from thee petals of flowers. Dorogin did not like this however, and said there was magic pressed into its fibres, but Gandam held his hands over it and said thee only magic was that of craftsmanship, and as Gandam was thee senior, Dorogin must needs give way; and Balsin looked at Gandam and nodded, and Dorogin looked as if he had swallowed a toad.

Sylvi gave a little hiccup of laughter; the toad wasn’t in the schoolroom copy of the annals either. But reading of Gandam in the beginning always made her sad, because of what happened to him after. She’d never liked Dorogin; he was one of those people who always wanted everything his way.

The signing of the treaty was interrupted by an incursion of their enemies, taralians tearing at them from the ground, ladons, wyverns and norindours soaring overhead to dive and slash from above: “It is a new sort of fighting we must learn,” wrote the second commander, “for we have but rarely known aerial enemies ere now.” But learn it they did; and drove off the attackers with arrows and spears, and any of the winged company who fell to the ground were dispatched with sword and brand.

“Balsin is the worthiest commander of this and perhaps any age, so I do believe,” wrote Viktur. “And it is my honour to serve him. But it has seemed to me in this battle that he is something almost more than human, and that none and nothing can stand against thee Sword he carries, which he won from its dark guardian many years ago, when he was but a young man, as if for this day.”

Balsin called for the treaty to be signed during a lull in the battle: “It will hearten us,” he said, which was another of those phrases the citizens of the country he founded were still saying almost a thousand years later. There was a seal that had been struck by Balsin’s great-grandson which the sovereign still used, which said It will hearten us around the edge, coiled around a heart with a sword through it, which Sylvi thought looked more disheartening, but it was used for things like trade agreements and mutual defence accords, so presumably it looked friendly to delegates and ambassadors.

And so a table was set up, and Balsin and Viktur and some of the most senior of the company commanders and their aides and adjutants and Gandam and Dorogin and another magician named Kond stood on one side, and the pegasus king, Fralialal, and several pegasi with him, stood on the other side, and the gleaming paper with the treaty written upon it lay between them. The pegasi had agreed to signing, once the concept had been explained to them; the treaty was also ratified by pegasus convention in an exchange of tokens. Viktur wrote,

Balsin had chosen thee opal he had long worne as not merely thee most valuable thing any of us carried—save perhaps thee Sword—but as thee greatest heirloom of his own family. Thee chain it did hang upon however was of a length for a human throat not that of a pegasus, and because Balsin knew of thee pegasi’s aversion to leather, we had had some dismay in how to make up thee difference, for our army was much blessed with spare straps but little else of that nature. My Sinsi it was who first unbound her hair and offered thee ribbon that had held it, which was of red silk, and perhaps not too low a thing for such a purpose; and then several more of our folk did thee same, both man and woman, and Gandam did plait them together and perhaps he did say some words over them, to make them more fine and stalwart.

Sinsi said ruefully, holding her long hair in both hands as thee wind tugged at it, I do not like leather strings in my hair, but it is that or that I shall cut it off; and as I did protest she laughed and said, then it must be thee leather, alas—and she then made a noise more suitable to a common soldier than a blood and commission bearer.

But at thee ceremonie thee pegasus queen did come to her, and to those others who had given up their hair-ribbons, and offered to them instead ribbons of shining filaments in plaits so daintily coloured that our dull human eyes saw them change hue as thee light upon them did change; and Sinsi and thee others did twist them through their hair, and were happy indeed. One of these would truly have been token enough, but thee pegasus king set something else round our Balsin’s neck—although when I say thee king did, in truth there were three, for while their wings are powerful beyond our imagining, thee hands of thee pegasi are but tiny claws at thee leading bend of thee wing where some birds do seem to have thumbe and first finger, and these hands have little strength nor flexibility; it is a wonder thee pegasi do with them as much as they do, for their weaving is a wonder and an astonishment.

Thee thing thee king gave was little to behold at thee first: a plain brown cord strung with large wooden beads of a paler brown. We understood by then however that thee pegasi by choice lead simple lives and I think none of us feared that thee pegasi sought to insult us, or did not honour thee treaty; perhaps thee beads were made of a wood significant to them, as Gandam wears an ear-ring that looks like rusty iron.

As Balsin had had some trouble making up thee length of chain for thee neck of a pegasus, thee pegasi had perhaps ill judged thee smallness of thee human throat, and thee necklace of beads lay more upon Balsin’s stomach than his breast. He looked down at thee beads as if mildly puzzled, and I, standing near, thought only that he wondered at thee plainness of thee gift; but then he held his hand in such a way as to forbear thee sunlight which did fall upon them, and I caught my breath for then I saw thee marvel of them: these beads do shine with their own light, as if they were scooped out of thee margin of thee sunne—or rather of thee moon, for it is a soft and kindly light.

All of this was in Sylvi’s school-book copy of the annals—as the necklace, the treaty and the Sword hung upon the wall of the Great Hall of the palace—but she read on. She couldn’t remember ever not knowing the story of the treaty and the Alliance; by the time she could read about it for herself it was already familiar, as were the Sword and the tokens in her life outside the schoolroom. But books from a printing press were in anonymous black type and bound in plain fabric and board; this little leather-bound book, soft and slippery with use and age, and the extra effort needed to decipher the second commander’s handwriting—and his occasionally curious spelling—made her feel as if she were reading the story for the first time.

She remembered Ahathin standing, and the guards. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking up. “It’s different, reading it here. I’ll stop now.”

He blinked at her, amused. “As the Lady Sylviianel wills. Er—if the Lady Sylviianel permits, I will leave her to consult with the librarian on another matter.”

Sylvi looked at the guards, who were staring expressionlessly over her head. She wasn’t going to get them to sit down. “You couldn’t take them with you?”

Sylvi sighed. “Then the Lady Sylviianel grants the Worthy Magician’s request.” And she went back to the second commander’s journal.

Then was thee signing.

Thee pegasus king signed first: with thee inked tips of his first three primaries, which do make a graceful, precise arc across thee bottom of thee page, like thee brushstrokes of a master painter. Afterward he raised his wing, and thee black ink had bledde farther into thee pale feathers, for he is of a creamy golden colour, and he held this up as if thee stain were itself an emblem of our Alliance, while thee gold-bound opal that was Balsin’s token gleamed at his breast.

There was a mural in the Great Hall, next to the treaty itself and opposite the wall where the Sword hung, of King Fralialal holding his black-edged wing up over the paper he has just signed. The human figures, the other pegasi, the landscape and all else fade into the background: only the pale gold pegasus, the stain on his wing, and the shining whiteness of the treaty stand out—and of these it is the wing that draws the human onlooker’s eye, that makes the wingless human shoulder blades itch. At night, by candle- and lamplight, it was easy to imagine that his one raised foreleg was in preparation for stepping down off the wall. When Sylvi was younger, and more all-encompassingly awed of the Great Hall, she had got so far as to hear the sound his hoofs made as he took his first steps on the floor—and the rustle of his wings.

Our leader had chosen to mark his witness second, as it is thee pegasi who welcome us to their land, and their king did offer ours—whom I must now learn to call king, for thee first king of our new land is he—one of his own feathers for this purpose, once he understood that we use quills to hold ink: and it was of great interest to all us humans who watched, thee elegant way thee pegasus king drew his bent wing through his teeth and plucked out a feather as gracefully as a dancer moves through a dance, or a warrior draws a sword from its sheath. We cannot refrain from looking stiff and clumsy beside thee pegasi, and I saw at last thee wisdom of our king in declaring that we should attend thee signing of thee treaty in our armour and with our swords at our sides, despite thee look of peril and chanciness this gives us, and all of us well aware of thee scouts posted all round us, for these appurtenances of war gave us dignity where we had no beauty.

But as our king bent down to sign this first and needful manifestation of his kingship, a breeze arose, and ruffled thee hair of thee humans and thee manes of thee pegasi, and blew across thee slender cut tip of thee feather penne, and thee finest spray of ink fanned over thee bright, exquisite paper, crossing thee pegasus king’s signature with a maculate crescent as beautiful as we are not, as if thee local wind gods were blessing our compact. Our king laughed, and said, quietly, that only those of us standing close enough to see what had happened could hear him, It is a pity to spoil it as we ourselves spoil thee panorama, and then bent again and signed, neatly, where thee keystone of thee arch would be, were it of stones and not ink-spots. His is not commonly a tidy signature, and thee story has gone round that he signed against his will; but it is not that and I have countered thee tale wherever I have heard it. And indeed, loyal friend as I have ever been to Balsin from thee days when we were keeping thee king’s peace in thee backmost of beyond with three soldiers and a lame dog, I never liked our king so well as I did at that moment, for I understood that he too understood that to save their lives, thee pegasi have invited uncouth ruffians to dine at their high table, off their finest damask, with golden goblets and plates of silver.

Sylvi, at this point in the story, who often felt like an uncouth ruffian on those occasions when she was commanded to put on her princess manners and her princess dress and sit at court or table with her parents, always felt a pang for those first humans learning to live beside the pegasi. She sighed and stretched and pushed herself away from the table and its slight, precious burden. She didn’t want to read any more; after this there was too much war, and Gandam began to go mad. She very, very carefully closed the little book, and looked round for her worthy magician.

CHAPTER 2

Eight hundred years before, the pegasi marched (and flew) with their new allies to engage the forces assembled against them, but they were not much good at fighting. They are astonishingly nimble in the air and can splinter an enemy’s wing with a well-aimed kick, and a blow from a pegasus wing can break a norindour’s back; but they are too small and too lightweight for close work. And, as Balsin said after the first battle, while no one could doubt their courage, they aren’t devious enough. It was the human swords and spears, arrows and maces, with help from human magicians’ wiles, which won the war. The ladons and wyverns were killed or driven right away, and those who fled perhaps went in search of their larger and even more dangerous cousins, the dragons; if so it was a long search, for they were not seen again for generations. A few taralians and norindours fled into the wild lands beyond what Balsin declared were his kingdom’s boundaries, and there they were allowed to remain, so long as they caused no trouble beyond the theft of an occasional sheep; although the striped pelt of an unusually large taralian was a highly-regarded heirloom in a number of baronial families, and the sharply-bent wings of the norindour appeared on a number of family crests, as indicating courage and ferocity in all forms of struggle and combat.

While this was not in the original treaty, the humans’ superiority at warfare came slowly to be reflected in all relations between the two species, but the pegasi, mild and courteous, never gave any indication that they resented this. By Sylvi’s day, the ruler of the pegasi had for many generations been expected to do ritualised homage to the ruler of the humans on feast days, and to attend the royal court, with a suitable entourage of attendant pegasi, often enough to be seen as a regular presence. Some human rulers were greater sticklers about frequency than others, just as some pegasi rulers appeared to enjoy the visits, or appeared not to, more than others. But it was quickly noted that the more often the pegasi visited the human palace, and the more of them who did so, and the longer they stayed, the more the country ruled by the human monarch appeared to thrive.

Balsin does strongly hold that we do hold our sweet green land by favour and sanction of thee pegasi, and as it is, so far as we do know, thee only land that do so hold pegasi, in some manner and disposition do thee pegasi hold thee land. Gandam agreed to this with great solemnity and declared that Balsin showed great wisdom for a warrior-king; and Balsin laughed and said that Gandam was an old worrymonger and that magicians see spears when warrior-kings see blades of grass. Gandam, who commonly did laugh at Balsin’s teasing did not in this instance but said instead, king, this land is beautiful but strange and we as yet understand it little; and forget not thee story of thee six blind men and thee Oliphant. Then did Balsin understand that Gandam spoke in all seriousness, and said, very well, I shall make it easy for those who come after us to remember that we hold our mandate from thee pegasi: and he with Badilla did create thee emblem of thee crowned pegasus which do appear upon thee banner that do goe with him on every occasion when thee king do ride out over his lands, in war or in peace, and which withal appears at thee peak of the arch into thee Great Hall where hangs thee Sword, and in divers places about thee palace.

But Balsin’s coat of arms showed only the Sword and the palace and the Singing Yew.

Furthermore the human sovereign, and certain of the sovereign’s extended family, were each assigned an individual pegasus, as a kind of ceremonial companion, as if such blunt discrete pairings might ease or soften the lack of communication between the two peoples. Most of these couples saw, and expected to see, each other rarely: those humans who did not live within the Wall might not see their pegasi from one year to the next. For the sovereign’s immediate family it was different: those pegasi were often at the palace, and something like a relationship sometimes grew up between human and pegasus. There was genuine friendship between Sylvi’s father and his pegasus, who was the king of his people, and, it was said, they could almost understand each other, even without the services of the human king’s Speaker.

Some form of Speaker—of translator—had been obviously necessary from the beginning; the human magicians and pegasus shamans were the only ones who could speak across the species boundary at all. Even the sign-language, as it was developed, was unreliable and prone to misinterpretation, because of the enormous differences in anatomy between the two peoples. At first it had merely been that anyone on either side who seemed to have some talent for it learnt what they could, and the numbers of magicians and shamans were about equal. But the magicians seemed slowly to take the charge over, echoing—or perhaps going some way to causing—the tendency that in all things the humans should be superior and the pegasi should defer. The idea of the bound pairs had been Gandam’s; the idea of the Speakers, magicians specially trained to enable what communication there was between human and pegasus, was Dorogin’s. It had been Dorogin’s idea also that the sovereign, the sovereign’s consort and the sovereign’s children should each have an individual Speaker as each was bound to a pegasus.

The binding was done when both human and pegasus were children; when possible the human ruler’s children were assigned the pegasus ruler’s children. This was supposed to promote friendship between the two races, although the children did not always cooperate.

The royal human child and its pegasus were introduced to each other for the first time on the human child’s twelfth birthday. At this time several of the royal magicians would create a spell of binding between the two which was supposed to enable them some communication with each other. The spell of binding was specific, between that one human child and that one pegasus child; occasionally it worked, and there was a real connection between the two—emotional if mostly wordless—and more often it did not. Who beyond the immediate royal family was selected to be bound to a pegasus was an erratic process; the children of anyone who had grown close to or performed a significant service to the sovereign might be added to the list as the children of third or fourth cousins who never came to the palace might drop off it. It was the greatest honour of the human sovereign’s court for someone’s child to be nominated for binding, but it was a slightly tricky honour, because it bound the child to the sovereign and court life as well.

When a royal marriage could be predicted sufficiently in advance, the future consort might be bound to a member of the pegasus royal family, but these forecasts had a habit of going wrong. What often happened was that some adult human became a member of a royal or noble family by marriage, and thereupon was assigned a pegasus; but while the binding spell was just as punctiliously made, there were no records that these late pairings ever learnt to empathise, or to communicate beyond the few words of gesture-language common to anyone who cared to learn them. One of Sylvi’s uncles, brother-in-law to the king, was famous for saying that he had more fellow feeling for his boots, which were comfortable, protected his feet and didn’t make him feel like a hulking clumsy oaf.

The usual ritual and binding spell were delayed, however, till the human child’s twelfth birthday because it was a strong spell and might be too great a burden for anyone younger. Very occasionally the human child nonetheless became sick or ill, or fainted, and had to be carried away, and missed the banquet afterward, although there was a folk-tale that these bindings were often the most successful. While there was no record of any pegasus being made ill by the human binding magic, pegasus children were never bound before they were better than half grown—and, crucially, capable of the long flight from the pegasus country to the human palace. The pegasi’s life span was slightly longer than human, but they came to their full growth slightly sooner. It sometimes happened that there was no suitable pegasus for an eligible twelve-year-old human; usually some slightly less suitable pegasus was found in these cases, because of the likelihood that if the binding was put off more than a year or two there was no hope of its becoming a strong one. And, perhaps because of the continuing weakness of shared language, this shared empathy was greatly desired for the good of the Alliance.

It was several generations before Dorogin’s idea of the individual Speakers became traditional, but for many generations now every important bound pair had had a magician assigned when they were bound, to aid their connection. The magician neither took part in the binding ceremony nor was officially presented, because the need for such a facilitator was considered shameful, a proof of continued failure of one of the pivotal aspects of the Alliance the human domain was built on. The guild of Speaker magicians was however the most revered of all the magicians’ guilds—and the most inscrutable. Among the Speakers themselves the posting to a royal pair was hotly sought after.

Sylvi was the fourth child of the king and the first girl, and while her parents had been glad to see her, with three older brothers, she was not considered important to the country’s welfare. She was pleased about this, as soon as she was old enough to begin to understand what it meant, because she was much more interested in horses and dogs and hawks and stealing sweetmeats when the cook’s back was turned than she was in being a princess. She had a vague notion that there were lots of available horses and dogs and hawks—and sweetmeats—partly on account of her being a princess, but she believed that the connection was not all that close (her cousins, who didn’t live at the palace, had lots of horses and dogs and hawks and sweetmeats too), and that being king chiefly meant that her father looked tired all the time and was always either talking to or reading something from someone who wanted something from him.

Her cousins’ fathers weren’t quite so always reading and talking. Her favourite uncle—the one who had more in common with his boots than his pegasus—was a farmer, and while, he said, he mostly told other people what to do, sometimes he harnessed up a pair of his own horses and ploughed one of his own fields. “So I’ll remember what I’m asking,” he said. He and his wife, one of the queen’s sisters, had each a bound pegasus, but they usually only saw them on trips to the palace: “Can you imagine a Speakers’ Guild magician living on a farm?” But both pegasi occasionally visited. “It’s a funny thing, the animals like ’em,” said her uncle, whose name was Rulf. “They always insist on sleeping outside—we’ve got a perfectly good room at the end of the house with doors that open out under that big old oak tree. But they sleep outdoors. In bad weather they may sleep in the barn. And wherever they are, the animals drift that way. The cows and the horses are all at whatever end of their pasture to be nearer the pegasi, and the outside dogs are usually curled up with them, like the house dogs sleep on our bed.”

He told all that part of the story easily and often; but once, when he and his family were visiting the palace, and he and Sylvi had been riding through the park together by themselves, a flight of pegasi came over them. The palace horses were all very accustomed to this, and Sylvi’s pony only raised his head and looked—longingly, Sylvi always thought, as she longingly looked as well—and the king’s hounds accompanying her stopped chasing rabbit smells and sat down, and Sylvi was sure she heard a tiny whine as they too stared up. But Rulf’s horse reared and bounced and neighed and it was a moment before Rulf managed to quiet him again.

“It’s a mixed blessing, though, seeing ’em flying, isn’t it?” he said to his niece. “First time Hon”—his eldest son—“saw ours coming in at home, the sunset was behind ’em, the sky purple and blue and red and gold, and their wings going on forever, the way they do, gold and red like the sky, and their necks arched and their legs all held up fancy as a dancer’s and their manes and tails finer than the lace your dad had for his coronation robe—Hon was just on a year old, and he burst into tears, cried and cried and cried, and wouldn’t stop. Never cried, Hon. Never afraid of anything. Never cried. Cried, seeing pegasi flying for the first time.” Rulf’s horse gave a last forlorn little whicker.

At the palace the pegasi had their own private annex in their own private grove of trees—and with their own private and exclusive latrine; pegasus dung was much prized by the royal gardeners. The annex was merely one long narrow room with three walls and a bit of framing on the fourth; trees served to screen the fact that the long fourth wall of the annex was almost entirely absent. The trees also served as a windbreak, although the annex was in the lee of the palace. Sylvi had never seen the annex—humans did not trespass there without a good reason—but she had said to her father, “Don’t they get cold?”

Her father smiled. “Feathers are very warm. You sleep in a feather-bed: imagine you could wrap it around you like giving yourself a hug.”

The king rarely had time to ride out with his dogs and his hawks, and he rarely ate sweetmeats. He had told his daughter (she had asked) that he didn’t much care for them, though he remembered he’d liked them when he was younger. Sylvi was glad she’d never be king and lose her taste for sweetmeats. The king admitted that he would ride out oftener with his dogs, his hawks and his daughter, if he were able to, but he was not. Here he looked at the pile of paper on his desk, and sighed; as if the sigh were a signal, a dog or three materialised from in or behind or under some piece of furniture, and laid their heads on his knees.

The queen had given Sylvi her first riding lessons, had put the first elderly and benign hawk on her fist, had consulted with Diamon, the master-at-arms, about her first practise sword and her first little bow. The queen, before she was queen, had been colonel of her own regiment of Lightbearers; she had spent several years killing taralians, plus a few norindours and the occasional rare ladon, in the west in and around Orthumber and Stormdown, and had been known as something of a firebrand. She still took charge of a practise class occasionally when the master-at-arms was short-handed. The queen’s classes were always very popular because she had a habit of organising her students into a serviceable unit and taking them out to do some work: this might be anything from rescuing half a village stranded by a mudslide to hunting taralian or ornbear, and even when it was hard, dirty and boring—or hard, dirty, boring and dangerous—the students came back smiling and gratified.

Sylvi had been present one evening when Burn, one of the master-at-arms’ agents, asked to speak to the queen. That day the queen had taken her class quite a distance into the countryside in response to a report from a village of several sightings of a taralian; they’d found the taralian, dispatched it, and ridden home again, although they’d been gone twelve hours and everyone but the queen was reeling in the saddle (said the horsegirl who’d been sent with the message that the queen would be late for supper) by the time they dismounted in the horseyard. The queen was in the middle of explaining that she had wanted to be sure everyone was safe and sound, including the horses, and that no bruised soles or incipient saddle sores were overlooked because the humans were too tired to focus their eyes. “Children,” she said fondly. “They’re a sharp group, though; it would be worth trying to keep them together, and perhaps move them on a bit, especially since it looks like—”

At that moment Burn had been announced. After asking if he might speak to the queen alone and being told that she was tired and wanted her supper and that she was sure he could say whatever it was to the king as well as herself, he hemmed and blithered, and it became plain that what he was not happy about was the queen’s choice of a practical exercise. After a few minutes of failing to find a tactful way of saying what he wanted to say, he finally declared that it was perhaps unwise to put a group of second-years into the peril of taralian hunting, which was a more suitable activity for seasoned soldiers….

The queen said, “Burn, I forgive your shocking impertinence because I appreciate that you are concerned about your youngsters, but do you really suppose that a seasoned soldier such as myself cannot see the strengths and weaknesses of the troop she leads in the first half hour of their company? Not to mention that I’ve crossed swords with most of them in the practise yards. Ask one of them when I announced that we were going to look for that taralian. I suggest you go and ask right now.”

Burn, looking rather grey, left hastily. “Fool,” said the queen grimly, as soon as the door had closed behind him. “Is he the best Diamon can find? It will not do our young soldiers any favours to report to a clucking hen. How does Burn suppose seasoned soldiers happen? Magic?”

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2