23
Tara could not take notes on Shale’s surging back, and as the moon arced through the sky, the angle from which the road sigils were visible changed too. The night ran long and late with flight and rest. They landed on an ivied university battlement at 1:00 A.M. and Shale brooded northward as Tara scratched lines in her black notebook.
“Lady of the skies?”
“Lady of the skies,” he confirmed.
“All the skies?”
“She could not be Lady of all the skies. Each sky has its own Lady. But she is Lady of all skies over us.”
“I always thought that was weird. I mean, if we have three women of different faiths in the same army and they look up, they’re looking into the same sky.”
“Same space,” Shale said. “Different sky.”
“And this is her oldest epithet.”
He nodded.
She heard whispers from the tower to her left, and a scrape of lockpick over tumblers and teeth, and drunken laughter not quite stifled. She doubted students were supposed to climb up here—schools probably had to make rules about this sort of thing when students couldn’t fly—but explanations would be awkward. She hurried her notes. Shale’s religious signeurage did not quite mesh with modern ownership models, but she could bridge the gap. She’d learned how in the Hidden Schools, back when she wasn’t doing the same thing these kids were: breaking into places she shouldn’t be, and climbing towers not made for climbing.
“Are you done?”
“Done enough.” She capped her pen and slipped pen and notebook into her purse. Behind them the lockpick raked again, and a latch clicked open. “Let’s go.” She grabbed Shale. His wings spread, squeezing her ribs, and he lunged out over the city. Drunken students screamed as a half-seen shape swept above them through the dark.
“You were angry this morning,” she said as they gained altitude. She’d hesitated on this conversation’s edge all night, unwilling to bring up a subject fraught for them both. But they had worked well enough, and she did not want to leave the wound unstitched.
“I still am.”
“I told the truth. We’re weak. Exposed. We need to be careful.”
“We were made to guard this city. It is hard to hide and serve. You ask us to deny what we are. And your use of ‘we,’ there—you aid us, but you are not us. You are more at home in our own city than we are. You do not have to hide.”
“I suppose not,” she said, remembering.
Tara’s mom had first warned her to keep hidden. Tara had brought her a fallen star, crackling in her hand. The sky hung thunder-dark overhead, but not so dark as Ma Abernathy’s face. Tara’s mother never hit her, like most Edgemont parents hit their children. Tara had never squirmed on her village schoolroom seat from switch marks. Nor had Ma Abernathy honed a scalpel of guilt like the mothers of her classmates at the Hidden Schools. Concern was her tool.
Tara’d run out into the rain, age ten, beneath a tornado-dark sky. She heard whispers on the wind and singing in the stars, and talked back, sang up, calling to the voices until the storm came, all spinning noise and fire, a solstice festival in the sky. She chased the voices into the fields, through sheets of rain, through broken whipping cornstalks, clothes plastered to her skin, hair a tangle of heavy rings. Then the thunder spoke, and a star fell. She caught it in her hand and brought it home.
Her mother met her on the cornfield’s edge in the thrashing rain, as wet through as she. Her father had run into the fields after Tara and hadn’t yet fought his way out. Tara held the star. It danced as it burned. She didn’t know her mother’s story then, didn’t know about Alt Selene and the siege from which Ma’s people fled, didn’t know that to her mother the fire Tara held was a weed with roots in the guts of their history. Tara only knew that the light sang, and made her blood sing too.
Let it go, her mother said. Let it go and don’t pick it up again.
Tara closed her hands and the fire entered her. Water steamed from her skin and she felt herself burned dry. She fell into her mother, and looking up saw only fear. She was sick for a week afterward, and her parents waited until she got better to talk to her about the future, about small towns and discovery, about hiding. About being anyone but who she was.
“I will ask a question of my own,” Shale said.
Tara waited.
“Aev stopped you from binding me at the tower this morning. Yet with your glyph, you could have found me yourself, or cursed me from afar, without her knowledge. Why didn’t you?”
“Because Aev didn’t want me to,” she said. “And because it’s so easy for me to catch people, to force them. Too easy for me to think it’s right. But I’m still not certain I made the right decision. You’ve brought us to a dangerous pass.”
They flew for a while in silence.
“I have enough,” she said when she did. “Let me down.”