Andrea Höst: The Towers, the Moon

Did the princess have the option to not enter the challenge? Would it offend the Court of the Moon if she refused, or would she pay the price of her reputation for not leaving the room before midnight? She at least made no move to leap from her chair and dodge for the nearest exit, watching the approaching flyer as calmly as the Duke of Balance.

The man in the lion mask stepped in front of her, and Rian was as pleased as the crowd disappointed. This development put D’Argent within Rian’s reach, and at least suggested something of his personality.

Raising the hand decorated by sweet-singer in front of him, D’Argent bowed his head to it, and then more deeply to the King and Princess Heloise, before turning and leaping precipitately off the balcony to the crowds below, the long skirts of his coat billowing.

The sweet-singer riding Rian’s own hand piped two ascending notes, so pure and piercing that Rian shivered.

"Assemble with the chosen," the arbiter instructed. "You are to dance the song of the sweet-singers before each stage of the challenge."

"They’re calling the tune now, are they?" Rian murmured, considering the tiny creature firmly attached to her wrist. It watched her alertly in return. "And who pulls your strings?" Rian added in an undertone, then shrugged and joined the crowd.

Five hundred chosen. Rian knew the number because one of the members of the Gilded Tower playing organiser was counting half under her breath as the dancers were gently prodded into groups sorted by height. Toward the very centre of the crowd they rose to nine and ten feet tall, but at least a third of the dancers were human, and most of the Court members were in the seven-foot range.

Rian, unsurprisingly, found herself matched with other humans, and a single shorter Court member: barely six feet tall. The Court member, a woman with vividly blue wings wearing a peacock mask, gave them a centre for a well-known opening formation.

The Dance of Fives, as old as the Towers. The symbolism was obvious, and the woman of the Sky Tower seemed to relish situating herself as the Tower of Balance. Rian and the three others in the group placed their right hands on her shoulder, and waited as the last dancers shuffled into place. The whole room – audience, organisers, dancers – fell silent.

Song, the sweet-singers, pierced the air.

With a less familiar measure, Rian may have stumbled, but the Dance of Fives was something every child in France learned, and every visitor who wanted to dance beneath the Towers was taught. She moved automatically, and kept her step when wings flared in the groups around them. Even when her group’s centre dancer, lifted ceremoniously in the air, stretched her wings to their fullest and spun before dropping down, Rian kept dancing, breathing in time with the pure and perfectly synchronised piping of the sweet-singers.

It had the air of ritual. This was how the Dance of Fives was meant to be. The sweet-singers, the glimmer and flare of wings, the swirling leaps. Rian was mesmerised. Exhilarated. And, for the first time that night, aware of those around her as more than obstacles in the way of her goal. When peacock-mask swirled down, each layer of her fountain dress separated, and Rian watched, and felt the woman’s pleasure, and thought about the forfeits she might pay – or take. If Aerinndís were here…no, Rian did not want to court Aerinndís in a milieu such as this. But she very much wanted to dance with her.

The song ended, and Rian reminded herself of the one forfeit that was important that night. She looked around for a lion.

A single turn discovered a kingly half-mask almost directly behind her, close enough that the wearer might have heard her indrawn breath if excited murmurs had not risen to fill the space left empty by song. The crowd was already moving, and Rian shifted a little closer, studying worn leather, tracing tiny lines in the cracked silver paint. The Mask of Léon, without a doubt, worn by a man of middle height who looked young and fit and was presumably an actor calling himself Lionel D’Argent.

Had he taken the mask because of his name, or because he recognised it as the original? Would there be consequences even if she made him give it up?

Rian followed D’Argent silently, weighing up her chances of winning one of his ten-Tears during the challenge, and whether she needed to aim for two. If she failed to gain any, then she would need to find a chance to talk to him, and bargain. Given the busy pace of the challenge, there would be few opportunities.

The gold-winged organisers ushered the crowd inward, past what must be the main entrance to the hall, and beyond the vast broad shaft of the Gilded Tower. So they would play in the flatter central reaches, not the near-vertical outer edges of the dome? Good. Wingless humans were already at enough of a disadvantage.

Rian’s sweet-singer, chirruping softly, clambered up to her shoulder and tugged deftly at her veil. A single inky ten-Tear came away, and the sweet-singer pressed it to its stomach before launching itself into the growing cloud of similarly burdened fellows.

Rian looked away, and found herself in a forest. She blinked at spindly white trees growing directly from the floor – and walls and ceiling – of the corridor she had been funnelled toward. The trees were the same glowing white as the walls, and could well be elaborate sculpture, though so delicate they trembled and swayed with every breath or movement. The Towers and domes grew like living creatures, so perhaps these pale trees lived as well.

"Find the song, avoid the hunters!" the organisers were calling, and others around Rian were not slow to move – some shooting into the air, and others bounce-walking rapidly forward – and then checking when it became clear that there were few open spaces in this sky forest.

One of the flyers, though, made a pleased noise even as she banked and hovered, plucking from the trembling white leaves a long, dark droplet. The woman held it up to consider the image it held, that of the person the ten-Tear belonged to, and then attached it to her veil.

A single, distant note caught Rian’s attention. Her sweet-singer, waiting at a gathering point. Rian had to reach her sweet-singer within the time limit or pay a penalty. She also had to give up a ten-Tear to gain entry to the first gathering place, and would rather it wasn’t another of her own.

This part of the sky forest filled a maze of curling filigree tunnels, with Rian’s path constantly detouring through side-corridors. The Tears of the Night at least stood out clearly against the pale leaves and branches, and Rian found her first ten-Tear without any difficulty at all. She held it up, and saw a spindly man with red wings, wearing a Yue dragon mask. One of five hundred ten-Tears, and she would need a fine serving of luck to find D’Argent’s.

Spotting another ten-Tear high above, Rian hesitated. She could not reach that with a bound, and would need to pull herself up – not difficult in the gravity, but noisy.

A low growling, far behind, served to remind Rian of some of the obstacles in this hunt, and she decided to move quickly toward the call of her sweet-singer, missing an opportunity for another ten-Tear when a woman in a swan mask reached it first.

The woman then hastily stepped behind a tree and held herself as still as possible, and though she was far from hidden, the ruse was apparently sufficient to avoid the gargouille that galumphed directly past and captured Rian instead.

It did this with all the grinning enthusiasm fifteen feet of snake-dog could muster, coiling around her in an excess of triumph, and Rian could not help but give its flat-snouted head a pat, even as two of the la clochettes who had been riding it dove with a distinctly mocking cascade of sound, and lifted away one of the layers of Rian’s fountain dress as penalty.