Updraft by Fran Wilde Read Free Book Online Page 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.
    â€œSing 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.
    â€œTobiat 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.
    â€œKirit, 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?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhy did she stop?”
    â€œI 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