Robin McKinley - Pegasus

Now what? Do I say thank you or genfwa? she thought. Oh, wasn’t there a thank you just for shamans? What . . . mlaaralalaam perhaps? Should she risk it? So she said all three, getting into a muddle about the aa ’s, and added some extra ff ’s again to ffffwifwif. To her surprise he unfolded one wing and touched the centre of her forehead with the tips of his primaries. And then he walked away.

Whew, said Ebon. That was worse than flying over the mountains with Guaffa and a boulder.

What just happened? Can he hear us?

Not now. I mean, yes, me anyway, but he won’t be listening. Shamans don’t listen unless they give you fair warning. But don’t talk to me if he’s talking to you!

But what happened?

I don’t know exactly. But he hasn’t been happy with you and your dad coming here. You particularly. Your dad didn’t get a Speaker here because he and my dad are bond-blood. If you can talk to the reigning monarch you don’t have to be able to talk to anyone else—that’s something out of one of the oldest chronicles, from before your first king, before the Alliance—I don’t know who else we’re supposed to be able to do silent-speech with, but it’s a really long time ago. And then you humans happened and you couldn’t talk to our sovereign but we were still allies, and this bonding thing was invented. Although before you and me they’d decided being able to talk to the sovereign was symbolic—but humans never come here so the rule never got used with you anyway. Some of the older ones, especially the shamans, who—who hold us together, you know? The shamans hold all of us together like those words they taught us hold the draia—they got really worried about the old rule with you coming here and they decided that our dads were going to count as being able to talk to each other, but what about you?

So it’s this big good thing that your dad doesn’t get a Speaker and then it’s this big uneasy thing that you’re going to have to have one because you can’t talk to the king even though the reasonyou’re here is that you can talk to the king’s fourth son. So to make the uneasiness go away you have the huge honour of Hibeehea as your Speaker. He’s scary but he’s not a bad old bird really and having decided to support your coming he said he’d be your Speaker. And it may be an even huger honour to you as a mere fourth child to have Hibeehea Srrrwa as your Speaker as it was for your dad not to have one, are you following me? And then you act like he’s superfluous. I didn’t teach you anything to say to my mum! You see?

I see.

She turned and looked for Hibeehea. She didn’t see him at once, and shouldn’t have been able to pick him out from the crowd of pegasi; in the torchlight, and tired as she was, the silky gleaming backs of the pegasi swirled together and began to look like some exquisite and impossible kind of marble. But perhaps he felt her looking for him, because there was suddenly a little space around him, and he turned and looked back at her. She crossed her hands over her breast again and gave him her deepest bow, even deeper than she’d offered the queen: the sort of bow that, when you’re tired and worried, you could easily not be able to get back out of, or you might even fall over, the sort of bow you shouldn’t risk making when it was important. She told herself that this was the best bow she had ever made, and felt herself come gracefully back to upright again in a way that even when she wasn’t tired and worried and a little frightened was rarely possible for her. But she was surrounded by pegasi, who were perhaps the most graceful creatures in the world, and she wanted, very badly, to make a good impression on one of them.

He couldn’t have known what a bow like that cost her, the graceless human princess. But in spite of the distance between them, and the uncertain light, she saw his ears briefly quirk, and the black shadow lines when he smiled at her, and while his return bow was only a lowering of the head, he held it down the length of time it took to take a long, slow breath. And then he nodded at her, and turned away.

There was food after that, but she was by then so tired she could barely eat, except to recognise that she didn’t recognise about half of what was offered to her. It all tasted good however—and she realised with the first bite that she was tremendously hungry, and was even willing to put off sleep a little longer to eat—and she ate and ate. She sat next to her father, but he spent more time looking around than he did eating, and when she looked at him he seemed so baffled and disoriented that she felt even more lost and far away from home....

And he was leaving her here alone. . . .

The banquet in her father’s honour was tomorrow, and the morning after that one human passenger in one drai would fly back to the palace. She looked at him again, and he caught her eye and smiled, and with the smile he was her father again, king of his country, visiting his friend, king of the pegasi.

But the day after tomorrow she would still be here, alone.

They had brought certain things from the human lands: grapes and melons from the king’s glasshouses, tender crumbly white rolls from the king’s kitchens, which the king and his daughter knew the pegasi liked. There was a whispery murmur of speech, which Sylvi was too tired to try to translate; she was too tired also to try and read the pegasi’s kinetic language; she did respond to the sign-language gestures of welcome and welcome, friend, that some of the pegasi had learnt to greet them.

Please feed me and go away, she thought. She hadn’t realised she’d thought it aloud till there was a tickly sensation across her ear, which was Ebon’s mane as he shook his head and laughed at her.

All you did was sit there, he said. Why are you so tired?

I sat very diligently, she said.

When she woke the next morning she couldn’t imagine where she was. She was lying on a mattress on the ground, which should have been cold and uncomfortable, but was not. It was a feather mattress, and as she slept, it had shaped itself under and curled itself around her like a friendly animal, or animals; she thought of the way her father’s dogs lay together in sinuous heaps. There was another, lighter feather mattress or feather-stuffed quilt over her, and pillows beneath her head, and sunlight dappling her face through leaves. She didn’t want this mysterious idyll to end, but as she turned her head she saw a bright rufous pegasus walk past, in the clear daylight beyond the tree shadows, and it all came back to her in a rush.

She sat up with a sigh, and thrust her feet out from under the coverlet. She’d somehow managed to get herself into her nightgown—she didn’t remember this at all—but she knew she needed a bath. She stood up, waveringly.

A pegasus she didn’t remember meeting before appeared almost as if by magic, briefly touched her cheek with a feather-hand, nodded and turned away from her, looking back over her shoulder to see if she would follow. She did, bemusedly stroking her cheek where the pegasus had touched her. The pegasus led her toward a sound of running water and then Ebon emerged from the darker tree-shadows.

Clear morning and clear sky to you all day, he said. And it looks like we might get them. You humans like privacy for bathing, don’t you? Straight through there, then, there’s a pool, and it’s yours while you’re here. Someone even thought of, uh, towels. When you’re done rattle the bushes and I’ll come for you.