Fran Wilde: Updraft

I was nearly to the council’s tier, but I could not move without them seeing the rope shake.

As I wavered about what to do next, my foot slipped. In my scramble to recover, the sewn-together hides began to slide from my head and shoulders. I could not hold them in place and still keep climbing.

With one hand, I managed to grab the trailing edge of the cloak I’d made from dead skymouth culls before it fell away completely. I hung, revealed, at the edge of the council tier. Air struck my skin where the hide had touched it, painful and raw.

With arms on fire from the climb, I slung the cloak over the tier edge and grabbed the nearest gallery railing. Pulled myself up and over it. I rested for a moment, a pile of oil-damp, foul-smelling girl, my cheek pressed against the young bone of the tier. My scalp burned. Some hair had torn away when the cloak slipped. The palms of my hands bled. The skin on my arms and face was red from contact with the hides. I pulled my lenses away from my face and down to my neck. I shooed off the pain as one of the carvers approached.

“All right, Singer?” she said, curious at my appearance. My lack of wings.

“Very,” I said with all the breath I had. “Special training for night flying,” I added.

She shrugged and went back to her work. Rumul may have had Singers searching for me, but he’d failed to inform the novices. My familiarity to the carvers, from many days of punishment as I had learned the Spire’s ways, was now another kind of invisibility. I approached the council unchallenged, dragging the cloak behind me.

The council huddled in Rumul’s alcove, crowding the space and spilling into the passageway.

Below, more voices began to sing. The morning ritual of The Rise had begun. Sound surrounded me: the story of the city and how the Singers saved it from ruin. In her enclosure beneath Rumul’s alcove, my mother might have been able to hear the singing as I had, once.

A shout from the rooftop broke the song’s rhythm. I crouched behind a spine as an older Singer climbed down from outside and rushed to Rumul’s chambers.

“Fliers approaching! A Magister and four others,” he said.

“Who summoned them?” Rumul’s voice rang clear over the song coming up from the tiers below.

The council broke its huddle. I hauled the stinking cloak back over my head. Obscured myself. Delequerriat , Rumul.

Several Singers began speaking at once. Over the tumult, I heard Wik say, “Let them land. Perhaps they have found Kirit.”

The other Singers murmured agreement.

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.