Perhaps someday I’d leave Densira and become a trader for a more central tower. Perhaps I’d return and place a bet on Nat’s wingfighting team. All I had to do was pass wingtest with full marks.
At the back of my mind, a new thought rose. I cared about one thing more than flying the city: escaping the net the Singer had set for me.
I hummed a Law, trying to get Nat to test me. He finally responded. “That’s Kamik. No going against the decision of the Singers, the council, and your tower.” He was right. “Fine. What about this one?” He sang a soft, low tune, almost a whisper.
“Nat, that’s awful.” He’d sung the dirge for someone lost to a skymouth. He’d sung me my father’s death. And almost my own as well. I didn’t have to stay out here for that. I grabbed fistfuls of my robe and prepared to sweep dramatically back into Elna’s quarters and bed.
“I’m sorry.” He ducked his head. His voice grew deeper when he was nervous. “That wasn’t funny.” He grabbed one of my sleeves and tugged at it, as he’d done when we were children. His hand caught my arm and squeezed. “Really. Sorry.”
I didn’t pull away; he didn’t let go. Like old times again. His hand was cool as the night air. He stood a full shoulder taller than me now, and his arms had become thickly muscled. Mine had gone the other way, wire and sinew. It was the way we flew. I focused on speed, and he tried to work with the bow. To shoot from the wing, he had to hook his straps from the elbow and glide, then aim and shoot. He’d been practicing.
Stars speckled the darkening sky. One raced across the night, fire-backed. “Look up,” I whispered. Too late. It winked out of sight. I touched my eyelid, then pointed skyward. Even a falling star deserved respect. We saw where its spirit went, not its body.
Nat released my arm and we sat apart together in the shadow of Elna’s blackberry vines. The leaves smelled sharp in the cool. He eyed me.
“You’re still worried.”
That was an understatement. I was terrified. “It’s those old wings. Liras Viit did a good job mending them, but they’re not as wide as the new ones. And I’ve grown some.” I steered away from additional what-ifs, other, more secret, worries.
Most of our class had broken in their new wings in the past few weeks. Wings that were built to carry adults, strung tight enough to execute complex turns. The past few days of Florian’s class had likely been filled with wild turns, as new wings reacted slightly differently to students’ old habits.
I didn’t want to admit that Ezarit was right, at least about the new wings. I’d fly more confidently on the old ones, because I hadn’t practiced with the new. I hoped so, at least.
I wished I’d never gone out on that balcony during the migration. Wished I could undo that morning the way Elna unraveled a ripped cloth to mend it again.
“You won’t be the only one on well-worn wings, Kirit.” Nat used adult wings already. He hadn’t said anything, but I knew they were a pair that had belonged to his father, long ago.
“How many times have you flown on those?”
“A lot. Not far, not breaking any Laws. But I’ve been flying with them for moons.”
I’d been too wrapped up in my own concerns about Ezarit’s trade run, the new quarters. I tried to picture what his wings looked like in the air and couldn’t.
“Look on the bright side,” Nat added. “You won’t have to patch your new wings up after the test. Or worry about them getting ripped during Group flight. That’s lucky.” He flicked rotten blackberries off the balcony. “I heard Viit’s sons are flying tomorrow. That will be exciting.”
“Did Dojha or Sidra say who else would Magister the tests?” Our own Magister Florian, of course. But teachers were not allowed to judge the merits of anyone from their own tower.
Nat shrugged. “The usual, plus one new Magister for Mondarath. And Dix from Wirra. Since Magister Granth is still sick.”
I tensed. Dix. Ezarit’s former rival. Or Father’s old friend. I was never sure, and Ezarit wouldn’t discuss it.
“I should study some more. I need to get everything right if Magister Dix is testing.”
“She can’t be as bad as your mother makes it sound.” Nat turned the bone chips over in his hands again, distracted.
“I’m not willing to risk it. I have to do well. Dix can’t stand my mother, or me.” Before the migration, before she’d flown, Ezarit had lit a small banner for Magister Granth’s health, hoping that his coughing disease would pass and I wouldn’t be in Dix’s path. “She holds a grudge.”
“You can’t think she’d pull anything in front of the Singers?”
I swallowed. I didn’t know. Dix. Old wings. My rough singing voice. And Singer Wik.
“It will be all right, Kirit.” Nat sat down beside me. “We’ll figure it out. And these too.” He fingered the chips. “Whatever they’re for.”
“Why are you so interested in those, when you should be as worried as me?”
“They were my dad’s.” Nat rattled the blue skein. “What if they’re connected to why he was thrown down? Or with something else about the city? Why Lith fell?”
I listened as his excitement grew. Nat had asked questions and spouted theories since we were little. Why there were skymouths. How the Singers stayed fed when they didn’t grow anything. Why the city roared. What had happened to Naton.
“I’ll take a closer look at them with you, after the wingtest. We can talk to Tobiat again too.”
“If these are Singers’ things, the Spire will want them back. Maybe Tobiat stole them from Naton, and that’s why my dad was thrown down.” I tensed at the mention of Singers, but Nat didn’t notice. He turned the chips over once more, then put them back into a fold of his robe, musing. “Maybe we can trade the skein to the Singers for answers.” He tied the chips securely in his robe, then looked at me. His brow furrowed in concern. “You’re still worried. I’ll help you study, if you want.”
We sang softly through the short night and the early predawn, first Laws, then calculations and strategies for flying in a group of strangers. The hardest part of going beyond your own towers without a Magister in the lead was gliding from tower to tower without getting tangled, or worse, with strangers who were moving from place to place. We dozed on the balcony, wings by our sides, and woke to find that the moon had fallen again.
We had barely rested and were stiff from sitting on the bare floor.
“Nat, we’re goners,” I said. “We’ll fail for sure.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t at least. Then I’ll put in a good word for you next year.”
His bravado now and his temper the night before suddenly seemed much clearer to me. He was as afraid as I was. Tired of being the lowest on the tower. He wanted his future as much as I wanted mine. For the first time in a long time, I stepped outside myself and saw him, saw how much he’d changed.
I leaned into his shoulder, and he leaned back. “We’ll both rise.”
The sun had edged over the clouds and Elna had only just emerged from behind the sleeping screens when we came back in.
“I hope you didn’t sleep on the balcony,” she grumbled.
“Not at all,” Nat lied. “Just checking the wind for today.”
5. WINGTEST
Four bone horns sounded short, bright notes across the morning: one each from Densira, Viit, Wirra, and Mondarath.
First warning. If our feet weren’t on the testing plinth by the fifth warning, we would not wingtest until Allsuns.