This was my cue. I could rush into the alcove and challenge Rumul while the council waited for news.
But I could not move from my crouch. My muscles had seized after the long climb, my toes were asleep. I watched the visitors land on the roof above and be escorted down to the tier. Only when Rumul emerged from his alcove, the council behind him, was I able to feel my feet once more.
Macal had returned to the Spire. He’d brought Beliak with him. And several traders. He must have told the trade council that Ezarit had been taken to the Spire.
Macal stepped forward, but Wik held up his hand and stopped his brother from speaking. One tan-robed trader, his hair beaded with glass like my mother’s once was, cleared his throat.
Rumul spoke before the trader could. “We did not summon you to the Spire.”
“We thought we heard horns,” the trader said. “Macal said we were summoned.” He was layering the truth. I could tell from the set of his jaw. Macal nodded in support. Met Rumul’s glare with raised eyebrows.
The trader looked over Rumul’s shoulder, eyes searching, perhaps for Ezarit.
Several thick-shouldered Singers climbed up the ladders from downtower. Rumul had called for reinforcements. Once they closed ranks around him, I would not be able to get close enough to challenge him. I would be captured. I racked my tired brain for ways to get around them. Then Ciel burst past me and ran to the assembled Singers.
“I saw her, Kirit, she’s in the novice’s tier! The traitor!”
The guards reacted by unfurling their wings and diving into the Gyre. The fastest way down.
Sellis’s voice came from the alcove. “I told you she wasn’t dead yet.”
My path cleared, I pushed past the traders, past Macal and Beliak.
“Hey! Hands off!”
“You pushed me.”
“I didn’t.”
I barely registered their confusion. Then I remembered. My cloak shielded me still.
Invisible, I made it all the way to the council members who had gathered in a gray crowd around Rumul.
Wik stood close to Rumul, arguing with him. Rumul watched him as a gryphon regarded its prey. The council was slowly backing away from Wik.
I pushed my way into the circle. “I challenge the Spire,” I said as loudly as I could.
Rumul and the council members turned left and right, searching for the speaker.
I pitched my voice so that the traders and Sellis and the carvers in the Gyre could hear me. “I demand to be allowed to fight as a Singer for the good of the city. I challenge you, Rumul.”
I reached up and grabbed the skymouth cloak with my bare hand. My fingertips burned as I pulled it away, more hair going with it. I let it drop to the ground and stood at the center of the council, just inches from Rumul.
Council Singers gasped and whispered. The traders looked shocked. Macal and Beliak folded their arms, blocking the alcove’s exit.
Rumul stared at me, then pointed to Wik. “Drop her into the enclosure as well.”
“No,” Wik said. “Once a challenge has been put forward by another Singer, it must play out.”
“Singer’s right,” several council members said. So there was dissent, even here.
Viridi, who days ago had held my hand to the city’s mystery, its very heart, stepped forward. “It is tradition,” she said. Several more council members shifted uncomfortably. They knew she spoke truth.
Another tradition was for Rumul to win in the Gyre. His face held the map of his wins. But the knife wound from his fight with Terrin had not healed easily. I had a chance.
“I challenge you, Rumul, and bid my life for my mother’s,” I shouted again. Loud enough to be heard in the tiers below. “I offer it for the good of the city.”
The morning song stopped. Singers and novitiates turned their eyes to the council tier. I heard the low grinding sound of a vent opening and felt the Gyre wind deepen and quicken.
Rumul’s jaw clenched. His tattoos curled and folded as his frown deepened. “You had such promise.”
I met his eyes. “I still do.”
He did not respond.
Sellis shoved a council member aside and pushed into the circle. She looked long at Rumul before she turned on me. “I take the challenge up in Rumul’s name. There will be no concession.”
“Singer’s right,” the same group of council members spoke again, joined by more who had stayed silent when I issued the challenge.
Wik groaned. Sellis was young and whole. She was an excellent fighter. I was tired from my climb, hungry from my days away from the Spire. Wik began to step forward, to take up my challenge for me. I would not allow it. I held up my hand and met Sellis’s eyes.
“I accept.”
Far below, enormous white wings edged the windbeaters’ tier. They began to move, creating eddies and whorls in the Gyre. The wind picked up.
Singers stepped back from us, gathering weapons for us to select. A rustle of silk and clatter of wing battens nearby nagged at the edges of my attention, but I refused to turn from Sellis’s glare. The challenge began now. Here. I would win, or she would. One of us would die.
Only when Rumul pulled her aside did I drop my gaze and look around me.
Wings surrounded me. Viridi, Beliak, and Macal held theirs out, straps ready for me to slip over my shoulders. Wik held a different pair. They were tea-stained, with a kestrel stamped on the silk. As familiar as home. My mother’s wings.
I reached out to touch them. Drew the straps over my shoulders and tightened the buckles.
“I would see her.”
Rumul started to argue my request, but Sellis whispered to him and his face changed. “Open the enclosure.”
They took me to the moon-window above the pit and I looked down on her, curled far below.
She peered up, unable to see who watched her.
“I cannot make the same choice you did,” I said. She sat up, listening. “But I understand why you made yours.”
“I wanted to know you would be safe,” she whispered. Her voice carried up the walls of the pit, and my ears helped it the rest of the way.
“There is no safety here,” I said. I turned so the council could hear my words as well as Ezarit. “The city must know what I know. Why should I die silent?”
She reached her hand up, towards me. I reached through the window, towards her. We were separated by the deep pit, but I could feel her there with me. A breeze cooled the stinging rash that had risen on my hands. I closed my eyes and imagined she wrapped her arms around me and held me until I stepped away. I walked from the alcove across the passageway to the council tier.
Without waiting on tradition, I leapt into the Gyre.
* * *
As I hurtled from the ledge, the windbeaters whipped the challenge winds higher. The churning gusts confused me. Some vents buoyed me up; others seemed to disappear from beneath me.
Heavier gusts began to rattle from far down the tower. The carvers grabbed their tools and pulled themselves from the walls. Singers and novices ran to the galleries to watch.
I locked my wings in fighting position. Reached into my sleeve and undid the sheath. Wrapped my fingers around the hilt of Wik’s glasstooth knife. I felt a small tentacle wrap my arm, then release it.
My throat closed. I had forgotten my small passenger. I had doomed the little skymouth too.
The windbeaters were my hope. If Civik had convinced enough of them that I was worth the risk, they would support me. If not, or if he was still convincing them, then I could fly right into a void and drop like a stone.
I could not know how well Sellis would fly these gusts, nor what she was armed with. That was the right of the challenged. My own knife — Wik’s knife — smelled acrid. Like skymouth skin.
Taking a tactic from Nat’s fight, I circled the Gyre and grabbed a carved post below the council balcony — the traditional launch point. If she chose that, I could get behind her.