Updraft by Fran Wilde Read Free Book Online

carefully. “Tell me about them?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œWhy? 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.
    â€œIt might be a tower far away.” Nat looked out into the dark. “Why?”
    â€œBecause 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.
    He tried to play it off. “You worry too much,” he mumbled.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œWhere 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.
    â€œTobiat 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œI 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