Landing Is the One Weak Spot

For the first stretch of the flight I did everything wrong that a person can do with a staff without letting go of it. I gripped it. I leaned against every wobble, which made more wobbles. Knees locked and jaw set, I cleared the first row of rooftops, and told myself the chimney had been closer than it looked.

Kou flew point, a gray scrap against the dark, and every so often put a pulse out ahead of us, so soft I felt it only as pressure behind my teeth. Mori took my left flank. Ryu stayed close to Kathi-1, who rode a little above and ahead of me, sitting her staff as if it were a chair.

Somewhere above a long stretch of black fields, something in the small of my back came to an agreement with the staff. It wasn’t skill. Level stopped being something I did and became something that was simply happening, and I stopped gripping and started riding. I wouldn’t call it graceful. Upright, though.

It lasted until the day came to collect. I had slid, fought off monsters, landed on a boy and hidden in a corner, and an afternoon in a heap of curtains had not been enough to pay any of it back. The ache started in my shoulders and went down my arms. Then my grip began to go a finger at a time. Then I lost track of where the staff ended and I began, and had to look down to check.

Kathi-1 dropped back to fly beside me for a while. She looked at my hands on the staff and didn’t comment. I didn’t comment on her not commenting.

“Kit said the lab’s at the far end of the town house grounds,” Kou called back. “Away from the house. We’re coming up on the wall.”

“I’ve never even seen Father’s town house,” Kathi-1 said, mostly to the dark.

“Nor have I.”

Neither of us said anything else about it.

A long wall across the dark, a mass of trees behind it, and, set far back from everything, one low building without a light in any window: the lab showed up as an absence first. I had never in my life been so glad to see a building.

That was when I remembered what comes at the end of flying.

“Landing,” I said, in a perfectly level voice, “is the one weak spot in the whole discipline.”

Nobody answered.

“Structurally,” I added.

Kathi-1 turned her head. “Structurally.”

“Kou,” I said. “I’ll need you to—”

He was out in front, holding short of the wall, ears fanned toward the dark building, a bat with one thing on his mind.

“Kou.”

The ears didn’t move. He was searching. I knew what for, and I was in no position to resent it, and I resented it anyway.

The ground was coming up faster than I had budgeted for.

Too fast.

I leaned into the descent with great confidence, the way you’re supposed to, and the staff took it as a suggestion to go faster.

Mori took my sleeve. Ryu took a clawful of my collar. Kathi-1 swung in and caught the foot of my staff. Three of them, three directions, and I felt each one as a separate vote. Then Kathi-1, trying to steer two staffs with one hand each, lost hold of her own, and the rest of us went down with her.

We came down in a hedge. Four of us at once, in a heap of staffs and robes and wings and one dragon, and it was a good deal sharper than it had looked from above.

“I want it on the record that we landed,” I said, from somewhere near the bottom.

“You’re on my hair,” said Kathi-1.

“Nobody fell. We reached the ground together, which is a different thing.”

“You’re in a hedge,” said Kou. He had come back at the noise and was hanging upside down from the topmost twig of the hedge, with a look I would have called thoughtful if it hadn’t been aimed at me.

“Nothing rang,” Mori said, at the top of the wall. “We came down outside it.”

“Outside what?”

“There’s a ward running along the wall, just inside it. An intruder ward, from the feel of it. Anything crossing that it didn’t know would have set it off like a bell.”

“You were headed straight through the middle of it,” Kou said.

I decided I would have corrected for that.

I got out of the hedge by degrees and put my hand flat against the wall. It hummed through the stone beneath my palm, three notes, climbing, the last one held a beat too long. I knew it. It had been over the house at home for as long as I had lived there.

Kathi-1 had her hand on the stones a little way along. “That’s home,” she said.

“The same hand built it,” I said. “Whoever did ours did this.”

“It won’t ring for a signature it knows,” Kou said. “It doesn’t read faces. It reads how you leak, the way mana comes off you when you’re standing still. Everyone has a pattern. Get close enough to one on the books and it takes you for him.”

“Magical breathing,” said Kathi-1.

“If you like. Kit’s will probably be on the books, he’s family. So will Kou-3’s, they’ve had him here for weeks. Mori and I both do Kou-3. It’ll probably read as a very nervous Kou-3.”

“Not Ryu,” said Mori. “I doubt there’s anything on the books like him. He’d ring it on the first step.”

Kathi-1 had already sat down against the wall, with Ryu in her lap and her staff across her knees. “Then I’ll stay with him. Somebody should hold the way out.” She looked up at me. “Bring him back.”

“I spent enough time on his wrist to know it,” Kou said to me. “I can talk you through it.”

“I am perfectly capable of—”

“Close your mouth. Tighter, Kathi. Even. Pulled in at the edges.”

“I don’t have edges.”

“Everyone has edges. Yours are just a long way out.”

I tried. I couldn’t feel my own signature, only the effort of it. I had only their word to go on.

“Bell,” said Kou. “A bell in a tower.”

I tried again.

“Now it’s a bell in a coat.”

On the next try I stopped pushing, and something in me folded down along a crease I hadn’t known I had.

“Closer,” Mori said.

I held it.

“That’s him,” said Kou, and after a moment, in a different voice, “Huh.”

“Indistinguishable,” said Mori, sounding faintly put out.

Kou and Mori went quiet, one at a time, and came back different between one breath and the next. Matching him cost them nothing at all, and Kou-3 was near enough that they could hear him from the wall.

“That’s not fair,” I said. “You can hear what you’re matching. I’m doing it on your word, blind.”

“Yes,” said Kou.

“It is, rather,” said Mori.

The gate was a narrow iron thing a little way along the wall, with moss on its hinges. I took my staff, and Kou and Mori took my shoulders, and I glanced back at the hedge. Kathi-1 lifted a hand from Ryu’s back and let it fall.

I went through carrying someone else’s breath. The ward hummed against my skin, warm and close. Nothing rang.

My heart was going hard, and my hands had started to shake. That was the signature, obviously. It was a great deal to hold.