Fran Wilde - Updraft

He tried to play it off. “You worry too much,” he mumbled.

“We have three tiers to clean tomorrow,” I said. “That’s worry enough. I’m afraid we’re not going to finish in time, even if Tobiat’s was the worst by far.” A few days ago, my biggest worry about the wingtest had been to do well enough that my mother would beg to have me as her apprentice. Now I needed my wingmark to stay clear of the Singer’s clutches. And I’d started to fear the lengths the Singer was willing to go to in order to set me up to fail.

The last few days of flight training had focused on sweeps, rolls, and defensive gliding, and I needed work in that area. Magister Florian’s recitations and songs were filled with important angles and calculations. We’d missed plenty of last-minute secrets while we were downtower with our buckets.

I hoped Nat shared my worries. “We could study together?” But he’d already retreated to his mat.

So I curled back up on my own mat and tried to recite more right-of-way rules. I practiced the singsong Laws. Easy to sing, easy to remember. Less carving required to pass them on. The rhythms were memorable; the repetition made me drowsy.

My eyes snapped open at movement by my side. Elna was bent over me, furious.

“Where did you get this?”

I scrambled off my sleeping mat and stood, blearily, as she shook the blue silk cord with the strange bone chips at me. Nat was nowhere to be seen.

“Tobiat gave it to Nat!”

I’d never seen Elna this angry. “He did, did he? You’re an innocent bystander again?”

A chill ran up my back. Yesterday, Elna had thought I was a skytouched blessing. Now she sounded like she agreed with the councilman.

“You can’t leave well enough alone, can you, Kirit? Always have to make a mess.”

I reeled on my feet. Was I dreaming? Elna loved me. The bone chips dangled and rattled in her hand. That’s what had changed.

“I don’t even know what they mean,” I protested.

Elna ran her fingers along the age-smoothed bone chips. Her chin quivered. She threw the braided skein of chips on the floor and turned from me. “Leave those things be.” She pointed at Tobiat’s chips. Her voice broke like a wild whipperling’s tethered for the first time to a training line. She began singing Laws. Pointedly. The ones about trespass and betrayal.

I struggled to pull myself from my sleep fog and find the words that would loosen her anger. “Elna, no,” was all that came out. A child’s whisper. “Please.” I picked up the chips. “Tell me what they are?”

The chips turned to ice in my hand.

And I jerked awake screaming, sprawled on the warm bone floor beside my mat.

The real Elna was at my side moments later. Elna who loved me, who had always been there, her hand gentle on my back. She hushed me softly and began to hum a baby’s song about Allmoons and Nightwings, like I was a child again.

“Sing The Rise,” I murmured, my eyes drooping.

She shifted to the song of salvation. The story of how the city nearly died in the clouds and how the people saved it. In my mother’s quarters, Elna’s voice had been tight and formal. Here, she sang from the belly.

The Rise began as a children’s song, with verses added as we learned to read carvings and to listen to the city sing at Allsuns and Allmoons. She began it low and soft: “ Far down below the clouds, oh, the city did rise.… ” She grew surer of herself, even as she kept her voice quiet. She let the notes wash over her. The towers of the city grew in my imagination, in time with the music. Elna glowed when she sang. She repeated the chorus again: “ The clouds fell away, and the people were saved. Oh, the city did rise, ” and I could see her as she might have been, before Nat’s father died. Before she gave up teaching. Before Ezarit paid her to watch me and to be my mother too.

My body relaxed as the song wove the air. Elna loved me. The thought was a balm. Then another thought, as I fell into sleep, weighed me down. The next line of The Rise praised the Singers for saving the city.

The wingtest would decide my fate, if I could get there. In two days’ time, I would be taken to the Spire by the guardians of the city or I would fly free on my own wings.

* * *

In the morning, a shadow drifted past the open balcony doors. I sipped chicory, and Nat worked over a bowl of dried berries. The bone chips sat on the table between us.

Elna passed us on her way to the midtower market. She’d tied a satchel of finished mending to her side. I stuffed the skein of chips into my sleeve before she saw it.

“Tobiat didn’t get in your way yesterday?” she asked, gripping the ladder tight with both hands.

Nat shook his head. “He helped a bit.”

She smiled. “I’ve found him more helpful when I’ve treated him with respect.”

She began her climb. We watched until her feet disappeared.

Nat took mash to his whipperling. He returned quickly. “Maalik’s not here.” He grumbled that if someone wanted to send messages using his bird, they needed to ask him first. Then he began rummaging in Elna’s storage baskets for more rags.

“Kirit, look.” Nat had unstacked several baskets by the inside wall. As with everyone’s quarters, the center wall supported the tower. It grew first on each tier and thickened with each year until, on the lowest parts of the tower we could reach, only a few meters of space remained in what were once huge rooms. Barely enough space to land on, if you listened to the scavengers.

The baskets contained things Elna wasn’t ready to toss. Nat held a scrap of robe, creased like it had been balled up for a decade or more. I spread it out — two handspans of blue silk striped with dove gray, very faded. A piece of a Magister’s cloak. “Elna’s?”

“Yes.”

“Why did she stop?”

“I think they wouldn’t let her teach, after. She never talks about it.” He spun on his heel and headed back into the dark. I heard him rummaging. In my hand, the skein of knotted silk cord and bone chips rattled. Some of the chips were shaped like tears and teeth, all were nearly white, flat, and practically soft to the touch. They’d been handled often. The marks and symbols seemed to have been made using traditional tools: bone scrapers, bone needles, and bone chisels. Only the small holes drilled all the way through had crisp edges, perhaps made with one of the few metal drills that remained in the city. Those were the province of the bridge builders, the artifexes. Like Naton had been.

The discarded robe in the rag bag and the bone chips in my hand made me wonder. I fought the urge. Couldn’t risk thinking too hard about the Singers.

But Nat lifted the chips and hefted them. “My father could have made these,” he whispered, although everyone had gone up to the market. The tower was wrapped with ladders and ropes as people hauled their extra from gardens to the tower council’s farm stores.

“Don’t you think the chips are too old for that?” I shifted from the guest area into the deeper recesses of their quarters. I lifted a lid on a basket, poked a finger through the handwork that Elna took in. Searching for a way to switch the subject.

“The holes in the chips. The shadow of an older carving, not fully ground away. Something’s been erased, and replaced.” He jumped as Elna dropped onto the balcony. As she entered, Nat pushed the skein back into my hand and stuffed the scrap of cloak into a basket. I slipped the bone markers into a pocket and prayed they wouldn’t clatter too much. Elna had very sharp ears.

“Forgot my sewing kit. You two had better get going,” she scolded. “Three more tiers to clean.”

Ugh. We’d done the worst one yesterday. The next three likely had occupants too, but anything would be more sanitary than Tobiat’s. We got moving.