Fran Wilde - Updraft

“Tobiat?” I said in my softest voice. “We have to clean four tiers, fast, or we’ll never be allowed to leave.”

He looked at me. “Leave?”

“Yes, we’ll leave when it’s clean.”

The hermit reached out a claw and hooked a finger around one of my cleaning rags. He lifted it gingerly and dipped it in the bucket we’d been using to hold rainwater. So he knew how to do it. Soon he was heaving trash over the edge of the balcony with us, yelling, “Good-bye, good-bye!”

The sun had dipped towards the clouds when the ladder clattered against the tier, finally. Tobiat disappeared. I looked around. The space was clean, but it had taken all day. Three more tiers to finish by the wingtest felt impossible.

A stone fruit pit bounced off my shoulder and rolled across the balcony. I chased it down before it could stick to the newly cleaned tier. Sidra and Dojha from uptower circled and swooped just out of my throwing range.

Once Ezarit and I moved uptower, Sidra had become coldly polite in flight class. She’d grown much warmer to Nat. Since Allsuns, he’d found himself at the center of a swirl of brightly colored wings. He looked amused to see them here.

“Does stink down here,” Sidra said. “You were right, Dojha. So far downtower, we’re bound to get hit with a bucket’s worth of foul if we stay too long.”

Dojha blushed. “We wanted to see if you two needed anything from flight.”

“Since you’re going to miss the last classes before the wingtest,” Sidra added.

Sidra’s wings shone with decorative thread. Between batten sections, panels had been dyed the color of flowers: red, blue, purple. Hard to miss. Sidra caught me sizing up her colors and grinned at me.

“My father says you got off easy.” She sounded like our Magister, strict. Scolding. “Lawsbreaking. Bringing shame on the tower just before Allmoons. The guard said you were playing with lenses on your balcony when it came. Did it run away because you sang to it?”

Sidra had the prettiest voice in flight. When she sang Laws, everyone remembered the words. I was not so lucky.

I pulled back into the shadow of the tier and held my mouth shut tight.

Dojha turned her head sideways as an updraft brushed her wingtips. “Let’s go, Sidra. Dinner.”

“Right,” Sidra said. “See you at wingtest, I hope.” She waved to Nat, and I bristled. Then they were gone.

Nat gathered our buckets and rags. The back of his neck was bright red.

I reached for the ladder, but Tobiat rushed up, nearly bumping me off the ledge. “Payment,” he said, and held out his hand.

“We can’t pay you. We don’t have anything,” Nat said, frustrated.

But Tobiat’s hand wasn’t empty.

“Look, Nat.”

Tobiat held a pile of bone chips, as filthy as his hands. Nat lifted one, and the rest came with it. They were strung together like a necklace.

“More Laws,” Nat said. His eyes went flat, and his voice with them. “Thanks for nothing, Tobiat.” But he stuffed the stinking thing in his robe so that Tobiat would let his arm go. Once he did, Tobiat bobbed his head and muttered to himself. He receded back into the gloom.

As we prepared to climb the ladder back to Elna’s, I heard Tobiat shout, “Leave!”

* * *

That night, I huddled in the sitting area. Elna had borrowed screens to make a guest space, but it was still breezy. The fire had gone out. Elna’s own sleeping screens, hand-me-downs from my mother, muffled her soft snores. Day after tomorrow was the wingtest. If there was the slightest chance we’d be allowed to take it, I would be ready. No time to sleep.

When two fliers are on the same plane and at risk of collision, the flier with more maneuverability must give way. Traditionally, this is the flier with the wind coming over their right wing.

Tradition. There was a rule for that too. Traditions meant everyone knew what to do, and did it. Laws were tradition, strengthened to avoid angering the city.

After a while, I’d recited everything I could remember from Magister Florian’s instruction, jealous that our flight group had two extra days to practice with him. That they knew they’d be able to wingtest. I’d never felt so angry at my tower in my whole life. Nor at myself.

“Kirit,” Nat whispered.

It took me a while to answer. “What?”

He scooted into my space, his hair sleep-tossed. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked at his hands. He toyed with old message chips, rubbing them together so they squealed.

“That’s a horrible sound,” I said. Then I pressed my lips together. We used to talk about everything. Then I rose and he pulled away, and now? I wanted to tell him everything, and now I couldn’t. The Singer’s fiat forbade me. I held my fears in my mouth. I swallowed what I would have once told him about how it felt to scream down a skymouth or argue with a Singer. I waited for him to speak.

“Tell me what it looked like, at least?”

“The skymouth?”

He nodded, eager to hear.

I could give him that. But where would it lead? To have the whole story pulled from me like a silk ribbon off a package, until I was emptied and Nat was tied up in it. No.

He cleared his throat and tried again. “All right. What if I go first?”

Hope rose, tickling the corners of my mouth, as I realized he wanted to fix things, a little.

“You have to see these,” he said. He wasn’t playing with any old message chips from a kavik. He’d been fingering the strand of chips Tobiat gave him. He’d cleaned them up, so that we could see the rope binding them was frayed blue silk. Much finer than the chips we tied to message birds. Or any Laws chips. The pieces of bone were thicker too. This strand was never intended to be sent by wing.

I looked at the scratches on the chips. The carving included tiny holes, careful etchings. Carvings within carvings. “What is this?”

“I’m not sure,” Nat said. “Look.” He wiped away a spot of mold on the back of a chip. The scratches took on shape and substance. “It’s like a tower map. Each chip is a tier. And there are symbols on the other side. I can’t make them out.”

“What do you mean? You can read chips as well as I can.”

“Look,” he said again. And he was right. The symbols weren’t made up of forms I knew. These were arabesque curls and sharp cuts. Odd angles. Tobiat had given us something very strange indeed.

I whispered without thinking, “Some of it looks like the marks on that Singer’s face.” Suddenly, I wanted to go back to worrying about the wingtest.

Nat watched me carefully. “Tell me about them?”

“I want to study.” I said it as casually as I could. If I’d had feathers like his whipperling, they’d have been raked around my collar.

“Why? This is so much better — secret Singer messages, diagrams. Besides, if we do finish cleaning and you get to wingtest, you’ll be great at Laws. You know them all.”

If my voice didn’t trip me up. If we could wingtest. Too many ifs.

I didn’t want to talk about ifs. I couldn’t talk about the skymouth. “You think the tower on those chips is Densira or Mondarath?” I asked, trying to think of anything that would swing Nat’s attention.

“It might be a tower far away.” Nat looked out into the dark. “Why?”

“Because if you get your wingmark,” I said, “you can fly the city until you find it. Without a Magister at your side.”

He paled. “If I don’t, I’ll be stuck here until next Allsuns. No wingmark, no flying past this quadrant. No apprenticeship or wingfights or anything.”

Nat loved his mysteries and his conspiracies, but he loved flying more. I’d caught him. Worse, if he didn’t pass with full marks, he wouldn’t get a good apprenticeship because of Naton’s Lawsbreaks. Nat and Elna would sink farther on the tower. And they didn’t have far to go.