Robin McKinley - Pegasus

She had dreaded the occasion even more since she found out that she and Ebon would have to enter the Hall immediately behind, and at the same time as, the two kings, her father and Lrrianay. As mere fourth children they should have come in either earlier or later, with a minimum of fuss, and would ordinarily have been given places less prominent than the king’s chief ministers and the highest-ranking senator and blood present. Or than whatever unfortunate person or group of people was the centre of attention.

But she and Ebon were the centre of attention. She and Ebon and Fthoom.

It was not the noise that struck at her the worst when she came through the door behind her father. It was the tension. It was like walking into glue; she had to stop herself from struggling to escape, wrenching herself backwards, wiping at her face with her hands as if something thick and sticky and clinging were smothering her. She thought Ebon had shivered very slightly when he’d come through the door at her shoulder. She wanted to say something to him—anything—just to hear him answer her, but even their silent speech felt unsafe.

That Ahathin and three footmen flanked them as they entered made it worse, not better: that Glarfin bowed her to her chair and another footman bowed Ebon to his place beside her made it worse, not better, even though she knew that her father was saying, This is my daughter, this is the pegasus king’s son bound to her, and you will do well to remember it in king-language, a language of gesture as clear as any tail-lashing and wing-rousing.

Fthoom was there already. Sylvi had hoped that his bare head would diminish him as it had four years ago, but it did not. He was wearing a different cloak, and while it stood out around him as the old one had, the collar had been redesigned, and was heavily embroidered with the public symbols of the magician’s art. It was worse—again it was worse, Sylvi thought, that he should look so potent and compelling without his magician’s spiral. This was a collar to complement bareheadedness, to make a new fashion in magicianry. None of the other magicians present were wearing spirals; Gornchern and Topo always did, on any and all occasions. But they were bareheaded today. Fahlraken was wearing a single low coil, as he usually did; Andovan was always bareheaded; they stood near the back, together, looking grim.

Immediately in front of the dais stood a young magician she had not seen before, dressed in the long blue robe of a bearer, with the silver chain of truth witnessed round his neck. In his arms he carried a long thin object that might have been a scroll wrapped in a light fabric. He was standing near her chair, and she could see that the fabric was stamped and woven with protective sigils. These caught at her eyes like a hand grasping her arm. She found herself thinking of a great tawny roc, and a red pegasus, and a human with a spear and a sword.

She turned away from Fthoom, from the bearer, from everyone, glad of the excuse not only not to face any magicians for a moment, but to remind herself she could and, at this moment, as she entered the Little Hall and settled herself in her place, should. In formal Court, as this was, you did not turn your back on your betters. She was reminding herself and all the Court that she was a princess, and Fthoom was only a magician. With the roc of her vision still tugging at her attention she thought suddenly of the rocs and taralians and norindours, the ladons and the wyverns of Garren’s report, and their leagues of dark tunnels and unknown exits—and hoped that Danny and Garren and Farley always had good eyes and good swords at their backs. For a moment her own eyes were dazzled blue, not the midnight blue of the bearer’s robe, but as if Danacor stood in front of her, and unsheathed the Sword: but at least the blue flare banished the tawny roc.

She climbed the three steps to her chair, and then she had to turn round again and sit down, and face Fthoom. She was still taller than he, even sitting, on the king’s dais, and her head was level with Ebon’s, who was standing at her side. Ebon looked at her once—an unreadable, unfathomable, silent look—and then faced out, inscrutable as a black statue of a pegasus. She hoped her own face was as expressionless. Ahathin, with the faintest tock of Speaker sticks, took his place beside Ebon.

A herald announced that the Court was present on this day of six sixes after the vertex of spring at the request of the magician Fthoom and the sanction of the king; and herewith it begins.

Fthoom stepped forward, his cloak rustling. “My kings,” he said, and knelt, in precisely his old unmindful gesture. Rising to his feet again he plunged into speech, eager as a child at a party. His eyes glittered—like jewels in sunlight, not like human eyes at all. “My kings,” he said again.“I have done as my king bade me, and studied the records in the royal libraries for all mention of friendship between pegasus and human beyond the binding defined in the Treaty of Alliance. Years this work has taken me, as you know, for there have been many records to study and many reports to consider and weigh; and my work was the harder in that most of those chronicles which dealt specifically with such relationships did not tell plainly of their outcome. I had to use all my skill—all my skill and all my helpers’ skill—to extrapolate what lay hidden: and still no clear picture emerged.”

Which is to say that you found no support at all for your hateful theory and you were working away like anything to think of ways to discredit what you did find, thought Sylvi—and she thought this louder than she realised, for there was a silent hum of agreement from Ebon. But this gave her no comfort; Fthoom had not demanded an audience to declare defeat.

She felt a sense of dread as strong as if Fthoom were to announce a tawny roc waiting for them, now, this minute, in the Great Court.

“Until, but a few months ago, I had a dream. While I have also been suspended from my position in the Guild of Magicians, I have not lost my expertise.”

Sylvi, listening hard, thought that for the first time his voice sounded a little too emphatic, and thought, something good may yet come of this, if his power in that guild has been shaken. She wanted to look at her father, but she didn’t dare; and she also knew that he, of everyone in the Court that day, would never allow anything to be read on his face.

“I had a dream, and I knew at once that it was an important dream. In this dream I saw myself in a far corner of one of the libraries—the farthest oldest corner of our king’s great library—a corner where such fragments of text as have little worth are stored. And in a corner of this corner I laid my hand upon a stone, and found that it was loose in the wall, and drew it out, and found a parchment roll in the dark hollow behind it, old and brown and fragile.”

Sylvi wanted to shout, I don’t believe you! I don’t believe you! It’s a trick! What you say you found—if you found anything—you put there for yourself to find!

The young bearer shifted his position and a breath of alien air fanned across Sylvi’s face with a smell of hot metal and blood.

“My dream, as you will have guessed, spoke truly. I went to the corner of the library, and I found that stone—but it was not loose in the wall, and had I not spells to loosen it, it would remain there still, and its secret dark behind it; and had I not had the dream I would not have recognised the stone that I needed to loosen. This stone has the ancient symbol for lightning etched upon it, as guard and ward; but it itself had been warded, that no one might see there was something there defended, for whoever hid this thing badly wanted none to find it. And had I—I—not been so absorbed—consumed—by my desire to fulfil my obligation to my king that even my dreaming self did continue the search on planes of being and perception I cannot reach awake, I too might have passed it by. As it was I spoke certain subtle words of power, and I drew the lightning-blazed stone out, and there I found the parchment roll.”