Robin McKinley - Pegasus

Even Ebon could not fly very far carrying a passenger; they set down once, twice, maybe three times in a long night’s flying, to let him rest and stretch his wings: Sylvi had learnt where to rub and dig in her thumbs along his shoulders, especially the thick heavy muscles that were the beginning of his wings. Mmmmmmh , Ebon would say. Harder.

They discovered which villages had nervous dogs that barked at everything, and which villages had easier-natured dogs who, once they’d met you and sniffed you thoroughly, never bothered you again, except perhaps for petting. (Sylvi began to seek out dogs at the fêtes they went to, as a form of pre-emptive security—and she watched any accompanying palace dogs for their reactions to those they met.) They discovered which meadows were nice and flat for landing and taking off, and which had nasty hollows and hummocks that didn’t show up properly when there was only moonlight to steer by—and which, once or twice, had short-tempered bulls in them.

There were a few very alarming occasions when it had seemed that Ebon wasn’t going to be able to get aloft again with Sylvi’s weight on him. This had never quite happened, but the worst night was when he’d had to gallop down a road through a village. Not only did this make them conspicuous to any insomniac who might choose to look out a window at that moment or any light sleeper who might be awakened by an odd, not-quite-horse-sounding half thud, half patter of galloping hooves—and while Sylvi wore black clothing, she was still far too visible—and even with Ebon’s wings spread, the pounding was very hard on his legs as well as making too much noise. It was, furthermore, a bad road, with the worst of the ruts carelessly half filled with rocks and rubble. Ebon took no harm of it, but he did admit to being a little stiff the next day. About six months later they were invited to a fair at that village and Sylvi arranged for it to be pointed out that the road in and out of their village was in sad repair which should be remedied.

What had made them both extremely stiff—although Sylvi more than Ebon—for much of the first six or eight months of their adventures was learning to land. Sylvi’s mother had become seriously worried that her daughter had developed a strange bone or muscle disease which would explain why a twelve-year-old creaked out of bed some mornings like a little old lady. As an emergency measure Sylvi had considered deliberately falling off her pony, but in the first place, on top of the bruises she had already from (obligatory) falling off Ebon she could not face this with equanimity; also she guessed it might worry her mother more rather than less. She put up with being cross-examined by Nirakla nearly weekly, and prodded by a series of healers. . . . She balked at being prodded by magician-healers, but allowed Minial to touch her; Minial, like Nirakla, could find nothing wrong—beyond the bruises.

“Child, what are you doing to yourself?” said the queen. “If Lucretia—”

“It’s not Lucretia! Diamon says I’m not ready for Lucretia yet!”

“Or Diamon—”

“Diamon’s on my side! He’s not going to get me in trouble with you !”

The queen laughed.“Very well. But what is happening?” She ran her finger lightly along Sylvi’s purple forearm, and Sylvi bravely managed not to wince. Her bruises weren’t usually so conspicuous, but there’d been a lamentably ill-placed rock two nights ago in one of those lumpy fields. At least there hadn’t been a bull. “It’s true that physical stoicism is a very useful attribute in a soldier, but it’s not something I recommend practising in advance. The world will take care of it. And you’re not going to be a soldier anyway; you’re going to be a negotiator like your dad.”

There was a silence. Sylvi knew this silence; the queen wasn’t going to go away till she got an answer she found acceptable. Sylvi should have been prepared for this moment, but she wasn’t. Then she thought of something Ebon had said, the night of their binding. It wasn’t a very good excuse, but it was better than blaming anyone at the practise yards—or telling the truth. And it would help provide an excuse for the concomitant sleepiness. “I—I’ve been sleepwalking,” she said. “Since—since Fthoom.”

The queen let out a long sigh. If she hadn’t been a colonel of the Lightbearers, thought Sylvi, she ’d’ve drooped. “Oh, my dear. Well—”

Sylvi said hastily, “I never go far. I bump into something and wake up. But sometimes I bump kind of hard. And sometimes it’s hard to get back to sleep again.”

The queen looked at her and Sylvi stared back, trying to look like the king staring down a miscreant. The queen began to look a little amused. “And you’ll flatly refuse to agree to someone sleeping in your room with you, won’t you?”

“Yes,” said Sylvi in her kingliest manner.

“Well, I don’t blame you,” said the queen.“I’d refuse too. And there’s always someone outside your door—you know that, yes? Your father said you weren’t best pleased not to have been told. Very well. But if this goes on much longer we’ll have to think again. I could ask Nirakla if she has anything for sleepwalking.”

She didn’t, but she gave me some liniment that your shaman-healer gave her the recipe of—she said it was better than the stuff she’d always used before—you don’t have to rub so much. I thought that was pretty funny.

It’s for flying bruises, said Ebon. The first few years you’re flying you go through the stuff by the lakeful. Maybe some of us more than others. I was maybe one of the mores.

She and Ebon finally began getting this sorted out just before the queen made a real fuss, and the danger passed. The experience had a further interesting effect however. Sylvi had always had to fight for her time at the practise yards; everyone kept telling her to wait till she’d grown a little—even the queen, who had introduced her there in the first place. She was thirteen when she was finally allowed her first mounted lessons—and Diamon said that she fell off better than any student he’d ever had. “Anyone would think you’d been riding with the horse-dancers,” he said.

Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn’t be, even if it was somewhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary. The scrumped apples (they only stole a few) tasted better than the ones from the bowl in your study; the wind in your ears sang secrets it never whispered under the sun; even the dogs that came out wagging their tails were an adventure at night, and it wasn’t only because you were glad they weren’t barking at you. Everything was an adventure, at least when you could stop yourself thinking that you were defying your father’s ban.

Everything was an adventure at night, but not every adventure was a good one. There were the bulls, and the big snarling dogs, and once they saw a magician walking swiftly down a little side street and knocking on a door before he slipped inside. Sylvi had just time to wonder what a magician in his official robes was doing in a tiny country alley before panic swamped her thoughts and she and Ebon spun round and headed for the deepest dark they could find—which happened to be a barn, luckily dog-free; a few of the cows glanced at them, and returned to cud-chewing.

But the worst was the night that Ebon, gliding for a landing, suddenly changed his mind, lurched frantically in the air, nearly unseating Sylvi— Don’t fall off she heard—and clawed his way upward again while Sylvi clung on, slithering with every wingbeat and miserably aware that if he failed to get aloft again it would be her fault—but he banked clumsily as soon as they were clear of the ground and flew away faster than they’d ever gone. He didn’t stop till they were back over the Wall, and then he came down like a stone dropping, and when he fell on landing this time—neither of them had fallen on landing in months—it was a second or two before he got up again. Long enough for Sylvi to have taken a first running step toward him, shouting Ebon! in her mind and breathing his name aloud, as if mind-speech was not enough in this extremity.