Robin McKinley - Pegasus

“ No ,” said Sylvi with loathing. There was a pile of blank paper in a corner of her table. She flicked the edge of the pile with her finger: it was beautiful, in its way, hard and crisp and shiny. The pegasi’s softer, duller paper was meant chiefly to take paint, not ink. She had seen several shamans’ sigils: Ebon said that how the paint bled into the paper told you how strong the charm would be, and also something about how it would do its work. I can read a few of the easy ones, what they’re for, Ebon said. But that’s all. I can’t tell you whether it’s a good one or not. It’s one of the things you learn if you’re a shaman’s apprentice. Like this one is for a good harvest. But it could be a good harvest that’s full of weeds that we’ll have to pick out. Sigils for rain are tricky, for example, because you want a nice steady medium rain, not like the rain-spirits overturning the sky-bowl so all the rain falls on you at once.

“I recommend you do so,” said Ahathin. “I wish to be able to tell your father before the festivities for your birthday when he can expect to see it.”

Could she write about the shamans’ sigils? She could at least write about watching them make their paper. Her outstretched arm revealed Niahi’s bracelet below the end of her sleeve. She could write about meeting Ebon’s little sister. She could write about how the pegasi made yelloni for each other, but for ears and ankles. She could not write that Niahi had decided that human wrists were best. She could not write that Niahi had said anything to her at all.

She had spoken to no pegasus since Ebon left. When she saw one in a corridor or in one of the gardens, they bowed to each other but did not stop. In human groups . . . the humans were always making so much mouth noise it was hard to think.

She looked at Ahathin and could think of nothing to say, no loud human words. But even the silence in the human world lay differently than silence with the pegasi.

“The king has faith in his daughter’s intelligence and perception, and so do I,” said Ahathin.

“You mean, be careful what I put in my report.”

“Remember that your report may be read by anyone who goes to the library and asks to see it.”

“Which might include Fthoom.”

“Which will undoubtedly include Fthoom.”

“Will you help me?” she said sadly.

“I will certainly help you, if you wish it.”

“You mean you are a magician too.”

“I am indeed a magician too. But my similarity to Fthoom ends there, as I would most humbly beg the lady Sylviianel to remember.”

She thought of the Hall of Magicians, where he could go and she could not. She thought of Redfora; she thought of the fact that Ahathin was one of her oldest friends. She let her mind drift . . . and for a moment she was standing in the little valley with an army behind her, and the king of the pegasi was sweeping his wingtip across the bottom of a long piece of soft white paper: she could hear a faint rustling as some human hand shifted its grip. And the two magicians with the human king looked up. She remembered the one—the one whose smile, back in the Caves, said, It is too late. It is done.

But the second one looked at her now and in his eyes she read, Try. “I believe you,” she said aloud. “And I would be grateful for your help.”

“It shall be my last official act as your tutor,” said Ahathin. “I thank you for that.”

At night—especially on the three quiet clear nights that would have been perfect for flying—she told herself that there had been many perfect flying nights they had not gone flying because Ebon wasn’t there. There had been many weeks when Ebon had been at home among the pegasi, having lessons from his master, teasing his little sister, being bored by council meetings—not with her at the palace, among the humans. This had not seemed strange to her then. But that was then, she thought. That was before I visited their country, and their Caves.

She had after all told no one, not even her father, that she had spoken to other pegasi in Rhiandomeer—pegasi other than Ebon. It turned out that it was easy—miserably, painfully easy—not to tell anyone. It was not only that no one asked directly—who was going to say to her, “Did you find, in Rhiandomeer, that you could speak to the rest of the pegasi too? That for you almost a thousand years of the way things are were nothing at all?” She had not thought of this clearly; she had been too busy bracing herself to lie. She had been, before she was brought back to the human world, so full of her experience of the pegasi, it had seemed to her that anyone who met her might read the truth of it, somehow, off her face, her bearing, as visible as a siraga around her shoulders.

Instead there was a new, curious distance, an awkwardness, between her and—everyone. She had thought everyone would be longing to hear about her visit, the adventure that no one else had had before. And perhaps they were. But no one asked. Even Ahathin, helping her organise her thoughts and her notes into a presentation she could give to her father and the senate, asked her no questions except about what she had already volunteered, already written down. She wanted to ask him, Do you think the pegasi shamans’ magic is antithetical to human magicians’ magic? Would you go to Rhiandomeer if you had the chance? Do you think it would make you confused or sick or powerless? Have the magicians ever discussed this barrier between humans and pegasi? Do they know why so few shamans come here, and why they never stay long? Is there a special group within some magicians’ guild that studies the situation, like Fthoom looking for stories of friendship between human and pegasus? Has it taken you over eight hundred years to reach no conclusions?

She wasn’t even sure she could, here, in the human country, speak to pegasi, any more than Hibeehea could speak to humans, here. The air, like the silence, lay against you differently here, and she put her hand to her cheek as if to brush back a veil. The difference did not seem to make her ill, as it made the pegasus shamans, but it made her feel as if she had not come home after all—as if some of her had not come home, the part that understood sky views and sky holds, the part that found human noise and human sitting-down banquets normal.

She had dreaded what her father might ask her about speaking to the pegasi: she dreaded it because of the look in Dorogin’s eyes, because of Hibeehea’s advice, because she did not want to think about why she knew in her bones it was good advice. Lrrianay, on that first incredible night when she had begun speaking to the other pegasi, had told her what the two kings hoped, and her father had noticed that her speech at the banquet had already become more fluent after only a day among the pegasi in their own country. She dreaded almost anything he might now ask her about her journey, but he asked her nothing at all. The morning he and she had seen the doorathbaa pegasi who had brought her back leave to fly home to their country—the morning she had had to hold on to her father to keep herself standing as she watched Ebon vanish—he had said to her afterward, “I’m sorry, young one, that it’s so hard. But I’m glad to have you back.”

But he said nothing more, that day or the following days. And she never seemed to see him except in some councillor’s company, or among a group of senators—or with Fazuur and Lrrianay. She could have asked to see him alone, but she didn’t. She wondered if he thought she was avoiding him. She wondered if he was avoiding her. It was so easy to avoid someone, here at the palace, with all the bustling, clattering humans, all the comings and goings, all the meetings, all the discussions, all the messages, all the different groups of people concerned about different things and insisting on the greater importance of whatever their subject, their charge, their preoccupation was.... She had never realised before that it was too much. But it hadn’t been too much, before. Before Rhiandomeer and its birdsong, rustling-tree silences, the hum of the pegasi; before the taste of her porridge, of fwhfwhfwha, of the llyri grass. Before the Caves. Before ssshuuwuushuu.