Really really really big YAAAAY! Also HURRAH! Possibly an additional YIPPEEE!

 

Look what I found lurking behind the dustbin and which could have been sitting there for days (although I doubt it has been) because nobody put a card through my door saying that something had been left.  I should concentrate on being thankful that whoever the Cardless Delivery Person is did leave it, instead of making me jump through various fetching-from-the-post-office hoops. . . I am also thankful that it was in a waterproof mailing envelope since it was left behind the bins which is to say out in the rain as opposed to behind the water butt where there's a nice little roof.  All right.  Shutting up now.

            Isn't it BEAUTIFUL?  And since it's a 26th* and we haven't had champagne in at least 48 hours, Peter had already put a bottle in the refrigerator.

            I'm failing to get the embossing of the title to show up properly, but it is embossed, trust me.  And even the SPINE is gorgeous.  How terrific is that?**

 And partly in honour of the marvelousness that is having the finished book here and three-dimensionally splendid and glorious and all that, and partly because I've spent the evening writing another Guest Blog for some other lovely person who is willing to splash out about PEGASUS and I have no brain left for Days in the Life, I thought I'd give you the first few hundred words of Chapter Four, following on from the three-chapter excerpt available from the right-hand side bar of this very page. . . . 

* * *

Sylvi got through the first part of the ceremony somehow, and she knew she must have remembered what to do and to say, because her father was smiling at her and Danacor (drat him) looked relieved.  Thowara stood just behind Danacor's right shoulder, looking exquisite;  the flowers tucked among his primaries glittered like jewels.  She wanted to pinch him, just to dent his dignity a little, even though she knew it wouldn't've worked.  He would have looked at her gravely and in mild surprise.  Beyond Danacor and Thowara stood the rest of the family and their pegasi;  the queen, Sylvi's other two brothers, two of her uncles and three of her aunts.  Lrrianay was absent;  he would be escorting her pegasus into the Court in a little while.  What her father did have to bear him company was the Sword.

            The Sword was the greatest treasure of their house, and the most important symbol of their rule, for the Sword chose the ruler.  Balsin, who signed the treaty with the pegasi, had been carrying the Sword;  some histories claimed that it was the Sword that Argen wanted out of his country, not Balsin.  For some generations now the Sword had passed from parent to eldest child, but when Great-great-great-great-uncle Snumal had died without direct descendents, the Sword had chosen which cousin the crown should pass to.  Sylvie had never understood what happened when it passed—when the Sword had left Grinbad and come to Great—eight greats—uncle Rudolf, how did they know it had happened?

            She'd asked her father this several times and he'd only shaken his head, but recently she'd asked again and possibly because she was going to have to swear fealty to him and it on her twelfth birthday, he stopped mid head-shake, stared at nothing for a minute and finally said, "It's rather like a bad dream.  You can see it in your mind's eye, and it's so bright you think it will blind you.  You can't move, and it comes closer and closer and . . . there is the most extraordinary sensation when it finally touches you, somewhere between diving into icy water and banging your elbow really hard, and even though you've seen it nearly every day of your life—and you know you're in this fix because it's already accepted you—you know that it's the greatest treasure of your house and you're suddenly and shamingly afraid it will cut you because you, after all, eldest child of the reigning monarch or not, are not worthy of it.  But it doesn't cut you, and you feel almost sick with relief.  And then you seem to wake up, only it's still there."

            He stopped looking at nothing and looked at his daughter, and smiled, but it was a rather grim smile.  "And then you really feel sick, because you know what that's just happened means."  Her father, Sylvi knew, had been given the Sword in a quiet ceremony of transfer on his thirtieth birthday, when his mother retired, but the Sword had acknowledged him as heir in the great public ritual of acceptance ten years before.  "Afterward my mother said—"  He stopped.

            "What did Grandmother say?" Sylvi only barely remembered her father's mother, who had died when Sylvi was four years old:  a Sword-straight and Sword-thin old lady who looked desperately forbidding in her official retired-sovereign robes, but who somehow became benign and comforting (if a little bony) as soon as she picked tiny Sylvi up and smiled at her.

            The king looked at his daughter for another long minute and then said, "She said she felt twenty years younger and six inches taller." 

* * *

* Remember:  3rds and 26ths:  if we need to celebrate something, those are our days.

** And when I opened it at random, as one does, upon receipt of one's Brand Shiny First Advance Author Copy of New Book, it opened to the description of how pegasi are NOT flying horses.  Slightly unnervingly however it's on page 129 of the finished book as opposed to 128 of the bound galleys.  I am going to assume this does not mean there is something terribly, horribly wrong.