Prologue: The Ash Cart
Twenty-two years earlier
Levko knew what had burned by the way the ash sat on his shovel.
Oak left pale flakes that broke under their own weight. Pine made black curls and carried the sweet smell of pitch. Wool fused into sticky clumps. Hair burned almost at once, but the smell lingered. Bone remained after all of them, dull white at the edges and blue where the fire had lacked air.
The priests called everything in the pit “temple refuse.” They had left before midnight. They always did. Fire was sacred while clean hands tended it. By morning it became weight, grease, teeth, and work for men like Levko.
He stood at the lip of the burn trench with a wet cloth tied across his mouth. Heat still lived beneath the ash. It pressed through the soles of his boots. Behind him waited the cart, with iron-rimmed wheels and high plank sides. It held two sacks of lime and a body hook. The mule in the harness was old enough to know that nothing in the pit was worth fearing until it breathed.
Levko unfolded the collection order.
Six condemned adults. Two doors. Bedding. Temple refuse.
Near the center of the trench, two iron bands from the doors lay twisted together in the ash. Levko looked toward the dark temple wall above the pits. No lamps remained in its windows.
“They forgot you,” he said.
He spoke to the dead when no one else was near. They never interrupted him or expected comfort, which made them easier company than the men who signed collection orders.
He descended by the cut steps, testing each one with the shovel before trusting it with his weight. Heat breathed through a crack to his left. He marked it with a piece of broken tile and began at the cold end of the trench.
The first body still had boots. The leather had hardened around the ankles, but the soles were sound. Levko slit the back seams with his knife rather than tear the leather by pulling the boots off.
The dead man offered no objection.
“Your feet won’t get wet now.”
Levko opened the small panel beneath the driver’s seat and stowed the boots inside. A copper ring followed. Two teeth with silver caps went into the inner pocket of Levko’s coat, where the pit clerk would not find them if he decided to count what remained.
Levko stole carefully.
Pit clerks knew the value of boots and capped teeth, even when they pretended otherwise. He left cheap prayer coins where officials expected them, recorded each jaw from which teeth had already been taken, and never took anything bearing a noble seal. He had seen another collector lose two fingers after selling a signet to the wrong broker.
He loaded the larger remains first. He used the body hook to lift ribs, chains from the prisoners’ waists, and the iron pins that had fixed those chains to the floor. The chains had kept the condemned from crawling toward the doors. Each piece knocked against the cart boards with a familiar sound, one Levko knew how to ignore.
At the deeper end of the trench, fresh ash covered an older layer of remains. The stone floor had cracked in the night’s fire. Among the cracks lay bones from a previous burning. Levko uncovered the curve of an adult spine, a shoulder fused to stone, and a scatter of neck vertebrae.
Something dark lay beside them. He cleared it with the back of his glove.
At first he took it for a length of burned chain. Then ash slipped from between the links and revealed a black collar made of tightly joined sections, large enough to slip over a grown man’s head. Its surface did not look entirely metallic. One link looked like old bone, the next like black iron. Levko could not tell where one material ended and the other began.
No rust. No clasp. No temple stamp.
Levko glanced up at the dark temple wall.
No one had entered the collar on the collection order. If he put it in his cart, the pit clerk would first have to prove it had ever been there.
He lifted the collar.
It was lighter than iron and colder than the air above the trench.
He turned it in his hands. Before deciding what to ask for it, he wanted to see how it sat.
Levko slipped it over his head.
The links rested loosely at the base of his neck. He kept his left hand on the front.
His thumb went numb.
Then his throat tightened.
He opened his mouth behind the wet cloth and tried to breathe. No air came.
With his right hand, he hooked two fingers beneath the collar and pulled it forward. It lifted easily away from his throat.
He still could not breathe. Levko dragged it up over his chin and off his head.
He let go.
It struck the stone without ringing.
His next breath came with a cough that doubled him over. He stayed bent, his right hand braced on his knee, until he could draw another.
The collar lay at his feet.
He touched his throat. Swallowing still hurt.
“Keep it, then,” he said when his voice returned.
He had been breathing smoke since he entered the pit. He wanted that to be the explanation. He was not willing to put the collar on again to find out.
He kicked ash over it until he could no longer see the black links, then turned to one of the burned doors. His left hand was still numb, so he used the iron bar in his right until the feeling returned.
The sound came while he was prying a hinge from one of the burned doors. It was too soft to be crying.
A shallow intake of breath, a pause, then a faint, rasping exhalation. Levko stopped with both hands on the iron bar.
The mule shifted above him. A chain on its harness clicked.
Levko waited.
The sound came again.
Rats sometimes crawled beneath warm bodies. Dogs came in through the drainage channel to feed on the remains. Levko had found both alive where no living thing should have been.
He had never heard either one try so hard to complete a single breath. He set down the bar and followed the sound toward the iron bands from the doors.
The ash there had settled into a shallow bowl.
He moved it first with the shovel, then stopped when the blade struck something softer than timber. He knelt and slipped the body hook beneath the edge of a blackened cloth.
He lifted the cloth.
Beneath lay a hand small enough to close around one of his fingers.
It did not move.
Levko uncovered the arm, then the shoulder and head.
A boy.
He had been wrapped before the burning—perhaps to keep him still, perhaps because whoever carried him had not wanted to look at him. The cloth had protected little. One side of the face was swollen and dark. The mouth hung open. Soot coated the lips.
Levko pulled off his right glove and put two fingers against the boy’s throat. He could not tell whether he felt a pulse.
Then the boy breathed.
Barely.
The breath touched the back of Levko’s hand. He drew away so quickly that his heel sank into the hot layer behind him.
“No,” he said.
The boy answered with another broken breath. On the trench step, the collection order waited in the ash.
Six adults. Two doors. Bedding. Temple refuse.
A living child was not on the list. For Levko, that made the child more dangerous than anything the priests had admitted burning.
If Levko carried him back, the temple would ask where he had been found, who had seen him, and what Levko himself had taken from the pit. If he called the guard, the guard would call the priests.
Men who had already burned a child once would not reward Levko for returning their mistake alive. He could cover the body and finish his work.
The fire had done most of what it was meant to do. Another hour under warm ash might complete it.
Levko would not have killed the child. He would only have believed the order.
He reached for the loose cloth.
The boy’s fingers bent.
It was not a grasp. The hand closed halfway, stopped, then tried again.
Levko touched the wrist.
No pulse met his fingers.
The flesh remained cold.
“You do not know when to stop,” he whispered.
He complained the same way about bent nails and balking mules. Stubborn things always made extra work for the person least able to walk away.
He stood and went to the cart for the cleanest burial cloth he had. When he returned, the black collar no longer lay beside the old bones.
Levko searched the ash around his boots. He had been struggling for breath when he dropped it. It might have rolled into the cracked floor. It might lie beneath the cloth or under one of the remains he had shifted.
The trench floor was riddled with deep cracks. The collar was not on the order, and the temple had no habit of searching for things that officially did not exist.
Levko abandoned the search.
He wrapped the boy from the feet upward, leaving his mouth uncovered. The bundle weighed almost nothing.
He carried the bundle up the trench steps and laid it on the driver’s seat.
Beneath the seat, a narrow panel opened into the hiding space under the cart’s false floor. Levko used it for boots and pieces of metal too large for his pockets. The floor above rested on thick wooden beams; the cargo’s weight would not fall on whatever he hid beneath it.
The panel opened from the front. He could reach the hiding space without disturbing the rear latch the clerk would seal.
He pulled out the boots and loose metal. The copper ring went into his coat pocket; he tucked the rest beneath a lime sack.
Levko eased the boy inside, feet first, leaving his head close to the opening.
There was barely enough room. He passed his fingers between the wrapped shoulder and the boards above it. Nothing pressed against the child.
He checked that the boy’s mouth was uncovered, then shut the panel. A narrow gap along its lower edge let in air.
Levko shifted the lime sacks and scattered broken, charred boards across the floor, concealing the joins around the removable boards.
The cart became untidy.
That was expected of carts no one wanted to inspect. He returned to the trench and worked faster, loading the remaining bodies.
The priests had paid for six adults. He gave them six adults.
He recorded the iron bands from the doors as parts of a broken grain chest and included the hinge in the recorded weight of the load. He left a silver prayer coin on the last tongue. He covered the older bones and the empty place beside them with cooling ash.
By the time he climbed out, the eastern sky had become the color of dirty tin.
The pit clerk waited near the gatehouse with his tally board tucked beneath one arm. He wore temple gray, but his boots had never entered ash.
“Late,” the clerk said.
Levko handed him the order.
“The floor cracked. Old bones showed through.”
“Counted?”
“Do you want old bones counted as new prisoners?”
The clerk considered the question as if someone might blame him for choosing incorrectly.
“Temple refuse,” he said at last.
Levko almost smiled.
“That is what the paper says.”
The clerk walked around the cart. Ash leaked in a thin line between two boards. He lifted one corner of the covering cloth, saw a blackened foot, and let it fall.
“The lime field before sunrise. No stopping in the lower wards.”
“The dead have no money for breakfast.”
The clerk pressed the temple seal into the wax on the cord tied around the rear latch. He never looked beneath the driver’s seat.
Levko climbed to the driver’s bench.
The mule leaned into its harness, and the cart rolled beneath the temple wall, past the empty guard yard, and onto the road descending toward the city gate.
With every turn of the wheels, the bodies settled against one another. Levko felt each shift through the bench but did not look behind him.
The lower city was beginning to wake.
Bakers opened their oven vents. Water carriers argued beneath the cistern steps. Lift chains groaned along the cliff, hauling the first servants toward the royal town above.
People moved aside for the ash cart without being asked.
Some covered their mouths. Others touched doorframes or prayer knots after it passed.
The royal town caught the sun first.
Bronze window frames flashed high above streets still blue with night. Levko made his living carrying downhill what the people in that light preferred not to keep near them.
He had never minded being avoided. Distance was the only respect his work received.
At the outer gate, two soldiers stood beside a brazier. One checked the wax seal. The other looked at the black wheels and stepped away before the smell reached him.
“Temple pit?” the first asked.
Levko held out the order. The soldier read the first line and no further.
“Six?”
“Six they remembered.”
The soldier glanced toward the cart.
“Something valuable in there?”
Levko thought of the boots beneath the lime sack, the silver teeth in his coat, and the black collar missing from the pit.
“Take your gloves off and look.”
The second soldier laughed.
The first folded the order and returned it.
“Move.”
The gate opened.
Levko clicked his tongue at the mule.
The cart rolled beneath the stone arch, morning entering the city behind him. For those few breaths, Levko expected a cry, a command, or the gate closing before the cart was clear.
Nothing happened.
The wheels found the rutted ground beyond the wall. The city gate closed behind him.
Levko drove until the road bent around an abandoned lime kiln and the wall disappeared from sight. Only then did he steer the cart beneath the kiln’s broken loading shelter.
He sat still, listening for any sound from the hidden compartment.
The mule chewed its bit. Wind rubbed dry grass against stone.
Nothing came from inside the cart. Levko told himself that was better.
A dead child could be counted as temple refuse.
Then Levko would not have to decide where to take him, who might treat him, or what payment to ask for taking the risk. He could carry the small body to the lime field with the others and be home before the upper lifts began their second climb.
He climbed down and sat on the ground in front of the panel. Then he opened it.
The hidden compartment smelled of wet cloth and burned skin.
Levko reached in until his fingers touched the bundle. It remained warm from the pit, but warmth was not life.
He drew the bundle closer to the opening, bringing the boy’s mouth into the light. A breath passed between the boy’s lips.
“Of course,” Levko said.
He loosened the cloth around the jaw to clear the airway. The black collar was closed around the boy’s throat.
Levko jerked his hand away and struck his elbow against the upper edge of the opening. For a moment he could only stare.
The collar had changed.
Only a short while ago, Levko had pulled it over his own head. Now the tightly joined links fitted the boy’s burned throat without slack or overlap.
No buckle.
No clasp.
The black edge disappeared against the damaged skin as if collar and flesh had cooled into the same shape.
Levko tried to remember whether the collar might have fallen into the burial cloth. He had carried the cloth over one arm. He had searched the ash. He had wrapped the boy in heat and smoke without trusting what his own hands felt.
He might have carried it here in the cloth without noticing. But that did not explain why it had changed size.
Supporting the boy’s head, Levko eased him out of the compartment and onto his lap. He tried to slide one fingernail beneath the lowest link.
There was no space.
He turned the boy slightly and tried to work the knife point beneath the collar at the back of the boy’s neck. The blade slid along the black surface and cut into the skin without finding a seam.
The boy did not cry, but Levko stopped almost at once.
He wiped the blade.
A fleck was missing from its point.
There were men in the lower market who would pay enough for the collar to keep him warm through three winters. They would not ask whether it came from a temple pit.
They would ask what it could do. To remove the collar, he would have to cut into the flesh beneath it.
The throat was already damaged. A careful cut might become a merciful one.
The boy had no name Levko knew. No family waited at the gate. Almost no life remained to steal.
Levko laid the knife on the ground beside his knee and rested his hand on its hilt.
His fingers stayed open.
He remembered how he had struggled for air while the collar lay loose around his neck. Then he imagined it doing nothing while his own hand completed the cut.
The second thought frightened him more. He put the knife away.
“You cost me three winters,” he told the boy.
The border road ran past the kiln.
Farther north, mercenary companies wintered where temple questions carried less weight and camp surgeons had learned to keep badly burned fighters alive. Levko had hauled their dead from battlefields and sold recovered iron back to them.
One camp surgeon had once stitched Levko’s arm without asking whose blade had opened it. The companies were not kind, but they preserved useful lives more carefully than priests recorded inconvenient deaths.
It was the only place Levko could think of that might take both the child and the thing around his neck. He folded the cloth beneath the boy’s mouth and pushed the bundle back into darkness.
Then he closed the front panel, climbed to the bench, and turned the mule toward the border road. Beneath the bodies, in the darkness of the hidden compartment, the burned child opened his eyes.
Chapter 1: The Red Ropes
Highbough, twenty-two years after Levko found the child
Veska struck Eryan hard enough to make the branch answer under his feet.
The practice blades met between them with a dry crack. Eryan gave ground, one bare foot sliding along bark polished by generations of students. The branch was broad enough for an Arvani child to run across and narrow enough to remind everyone else that they had not been born in the trees.
Below it waited the training platform. Below that, ropes, bridges, houses, and gardens descended through the crown of the great tree until the branches vanished into white mist.
Eryan had never seen the Eldergloom floor.
Veska pressed again. She fought with the patience of someone trying to move a stone. Her cropped hair had fallen across one eye, but she did not shake it away. She watched Eryan’s hips rather than his blade.
“Your heel,” Mareth said.
Eryan looked down.
Veska hooked his blade aside and drove her shoulder into his chest. Eryan stepped back to recover, but his heel found no bark, and he dropped from the branch.
He landed badly on the bark mat.
His left elbow struck first. Air left him in a grunt that made the younger children laugh.
“A lesson in obedience,” Liora announced from the platform edge. “When Mareth tells you where your foot is, always look.”
“A lesson in listening,” Mareth said.
“That was my second choice.”
At twenty-two, Eryan belonged to Mareth’s oldest group: four students expected to help keep the younger children in order.
Liora sat on the platform edge above the bark mat with both legs swinging, although Mareth had told everyone twice to stay away from that edge during a bout. Her dark hair ended unevenly at her jaw, as though she had cut it with whichever knife was nearest.
She could imitate his voice well enough to make children obey the wrong person from another room. This morning she had copied the way he cleared his throat before a correction. The younger children had laughed the first three times.
On the fourth, they had straightened their backs.
Veska jumped down without using the ladder. She landed beside Eryan and offered her hand.
“You knew he would make me look,” he said.
“You keep watching him when you should watch me.”
He took her hand.
Veska pulled him upright with more force than he needed. Mareth waited beside the blade rack.
He was not tall by Highbough measure, but when he stood still, people gave him more space than his height required. His gray hair was bound at the nape with plain cord. Chalk dust marked two fingers of his right hand, and a dark thread clung to one sleeve where he had repaired a guidance line before dawn.
“What did Veska use?” he asked.
One of the smaller children raised a hand.
“Her shoulder.”
“Eryan’s attention,” Tovar said.
He was kneeling near the water jar with a girl’s scraped palm turned toward the light. His sleeves were tied tightly above narrow wrists, and herb stains darkened otherwise clean nails.
Tovar examined every injury as though the body had lied about it and he meant to learn why. The girl watched his face with more concern than she watched her own blood.
“Both,” Mareth said. “Force matters. Where a person sends it matters more. Again tomorrow.”
Veska returned her practice blade to the rack. Eryan bent for his, but Mareth put one foot across it.
“Your elbow.”
“It works.”
“Let me see it.”
Eryan turned his arm. The joint stung, but the arm still moved freely.
Tovar looked over from the girl.
“If it swells, I get to cut the sleeve.”
“Why the sleeve?”
“Because pulling it over a swollen elbow hurts. Show me after breakfast.”
Eryan looked down at the patch he had sewn there the night before. Tovar was already turning back to the girl’s palm.
She laughed and stopped watching the blood. Tovar tied a strip of clean barkcloth around her hand.
Mareth removed his foot.
The wooden swords had been cut from fallen limbwood and rubbed smooth with oil, but generations of children had nicked every edge. The blade Veska had knocked from Eryan’s hand lay a short distance from the rack.
A duskglass butterfly rested near its wooden point, black until sunlight revealed pale veins in its wings. Eryan left the blade where it was.
Children arrived at Mareth’s house when no other door remained open. He never asked them to earn their place.
Objects received less mercy.
Benches became worktables, old blankets became line padding, and broken bowls became scoops for the root beds. If something could be useful a second time, Mareth found a way to use it.
Above the platform, morning work moved through Highbough.
Two Arvani women crossed a sloping branch with water jars secured along their backs. Their long toes closed around the bark at each step, leaving their hands free. A worker hung beneath a higher limb by one foot while he fed rope through a bridge rail. Farther up, children shook dew from stretched nets into wooden channels.
The water flashed as it fell from level to level. Lessons on the platform were as ordinary a part of the day’s work as scraping fungus from a cistern or checking knots after rain.
Mareth clapped once.
“Seeds.”
The younger children moved at once. Liora clapped a second time, and half of them turned toward her.
“You see the danger,” she said.
Mareth pointed at the storage rack. She smiled and went to help carry it.
The rack held twelve practice wayseeds in shallow bark cradles. Each was the length of Eryan’s forearm, green-brown and ridged, with two folded membranes pressed along its sides.
Full-grown wayseeds could carry a person beyond the Eldergloom. These carried clay markers and enough living stubbornness to ruin a morning.
Eryan and Veska lowered the rack near the outer edge.
Below them, red ropes stretched between posts among the lower branches. In several places, the ropes crossed one another. They were bright even in shadow, dyed again every spring so mist could not hide them.
The ropes held no weight. They marked the last branches inspected by Highbough climbers and the boundary beyond which no child went without an adult descent team.
Inside that boundary, a recovery net stretched between two inspected limbs. A short service ladder descended past the net and stopped at the red ropes.
Every branch below the red ropes required an adult climber and a descent line. Mareth kept the children behind a white line painted across the platform.
“Tell me what the air is doing,” he said.
Hands rose.
“It is going down,” a boy said.
Mareth turned to Veska.
Veska crouched and held a frayed thread over the edge. It leaned outward, trembled, then lifted.
“The crown is warming,” she said. “Air rises along the east bark. The lower mist is still cold. Anything light will turn beneath the third branch and come back toward us.”
“How far?”
She looked past the red ropes. Her eyes moved from leaves to bridge cords to a flock of tiny gray birds clustered on one side of a distant limb.
“To the split branch with the pale fungus.”
“Why are the birds there?” Eryan asked.
“Because the air is rougher on the other side.”
The leaves on the other side looked still. Mareth chose one practice seed and ran his thumb along the seam.
At his touch, the membranes loosened. They were thin as onion skin and veined with green. A guidance cord ran from a smooth ring beneath the seed’s blunt end to a small wooden reel fixed near the platform edge.
“The line is for drag,” Mareth said. “Not rescue. If the seed catches, you lock the reel and call for help. If it is caught against a branch, you do not try to reel it in. You do not tie the line to your wrist, and you keep loose things away from the reel.”
“What if it is a very valuable seed?” Liora asked.
“Then it deserves a less valuable student.”
Several children looked uncertain.
One corner of Mareth’s mouth moved. He put a red clay bead inside the seed and closed the seam.
“Before you release, you choose where it will land. If your answer is wrong, tell me why. A wrong answer honestly examined is useful. A lucky answer defended with nonsense is not.”
He opened his hand.
The seed dropped past the platform.
Its membranes snapped wide without sound. It fell another body length, caught the rising air, and began a slow turn around the trunk.
Mareth fed the cord between two fingers. When he tightened it, the added drag made the seed dip. When he let it run, the wind carried it in a wider turn.
The children leaned forward together.
“White line,” Mareth said.
They shuffled back without taking their eyes from the seed. It passed beneath the third branch, turned in the cold mist, and glided toward the split limb with pale fungus.
The seed struck once, bounced, and settled in a net stretched between two inspected branches. Veska kept studying where it had landed.
“The birds moved before the leaves,” Mareth told the younger children. “Watch what lives in the wind, not only the wind.”
Liora leaned toward the boy beside her.
“He means birds. My translations are shorter.”
The first releases went well.
A girl named Seli predicted too much lift and admitted she had watched Veska’s thread instead of the lower leaves. One of the twins from the west sleeping room sent his seed into the underside of a bridge and blamed a carpenter who had been dead for ninety years.
Liora collected three polished plum stones from children betting on where the next seed would land. When Mareth passed behind her, she hurriedly returned their stakes, adding a fourth stone from her own pocket as though she had only been handing out presents.
By the next release, the children nearest Liora were arguing over plum stones instead of watching the empty space beneath their feet. Eryan helped reset the reels after each release.
The cords had to lie flat, with no loop large enough to catch a finger. He checked the seed seams, wiped resin from the guide rings, and sent two younger children back for the clay markers they had forgotten.
Mareth rarely praised work done correctly. He simply gave more of it.
Tovar touched Eryan’s sleeve as he passed.
“The small one near the post,” he said.
Pell stood at the end of the waiting line.
He was eight and thin enough that the practice seed in his arms looked full-grown. His fingers were white around it. A wooden bird protruded from his other fist.
“What about him?”
“Pell has swallowed six times since Mareth opened the first seed. His breaths are shallow; only his upper chest rises. When the line jumped, he straightened his legs and froze.”
“Tell Mareth.”
“Then Pell will hear me tell Mareth.”
Eryan looked at him.
Tovar shrugged.
“You are better at faces.”
“You noticed him.”
“I notice when people are about to fall over. Comfort is a separate trade.”
Eryan went to Pell.
The boy looked past him toward the white line.
“You can go last,” Eryan said.
“I am last.”
“Then Mareth planned well.”
Pell did not smile.
The bird in his hand had a blunt beak and one wing longer than the other. A dark thumb mark remained in the wood near its tail. It had been carved with an ordinary knife by someone who understood birds better than carving.
“Does it have a name?” Eryan asked.
Pell closed his hand until only the beak showed.
“It is only a bird.”
“That sounds inconvenient. What do you call it?”
“I don’t.”
“Then it can never disobey you.”
Pell glanced at him.
His breathing eased for a moment.
Eryan sat on the platform. From there the edge looked less like a place waiting to take someone.
“You can be frightened,” he said. “Keep your hand on the cord. Let it run.”
Pell looked at Eryan’s scraped elbow.
“Your feet listened to Veska.”
“They listen to her better than they listen to me.”
This time the boy smiled.
Mareth called another name. A seed opened and drifted away.
Pell watched it until it reached the net.
“My mother made this,” he said.
He did not say more. Eryan did not ask him to.
“During your turn, the bird stays on the bench behind us,” Eryan said. “The cord stays in your right hand. If the bird falls, do not try to catch it.”
“I don’t want another bird.”
“I know. That is why this one stays beyond the cord’s reach.”
By Pell’s turn, the sun had climbed above the upper leaves.
Light reached the training platform in broken pieces. Warm bark released the smell of rain from the night before.
Mareth inspected Pell’s seed himself. He loosened one membrane that had stuck along the ridge and put a blue clay bead inside.
“Where will it land?” he asked.
Pell looked at Veska.
“Not her answer,” Mareth said. “Yours.”
The boy’s eyes moved across the lower crown. He was silent long enough for the other children to begin shifting behind him.
Liora crouched beside the reel.
“I predict it will land in the breakfast room and improve the porridge.”
“It will turn at the third branch,” Pell said quickly. “Then go to the net.”
“Which part of the net?” Mareth asked.
Pell swallowed.
Eryan saw Tovar watching the pulse at the boy’s throat.
“The left side,” Pell said.
“Why?”
“The little birds moved there.”
Mareth nodded.
“Get the line ready. Put the bird on the bench behind the white line.”
Pell knelt at the reel. Eryan helped him lay the cord across its smooth lip, then set the bird on the low bench behind them, beyond the loose cord.
Pell looked back to check it. His right hand pinched the line hard enough to whiten one finger.
“Let it run,” Eryan said, easing the boy’s grip.
Pell’s hand trembled as Eryan drew his own away. Mareth lifted the seed over the edge.
“Ready?”
Pell nodded.
“Say it.”
“Ready.”
Mareth was already leaning over the platform edge when Pell snatched the bird from the bench and set it beside his left knee, on a loose coil of cord. Eryan reached to move it.
Mareth released the seed. Its green membranes opened in the rising air, drawing the cord after it. A loop caught the bird’s longer wing and swept it toward the edge.
Pell lunged after it. His fingers closed around the bird, but his knee slipped off the boards. Eryan caught him around the waist and went down hard on his stomach, with Pell hanging over the edge.
Eryan tried to lift him. The boy’s free hand scrabbled at the boards; the other stayed clenched around the bird.
“Let go,” Eryan said.
Pell made no sound.
He could not.
His fingers had locked around the bird and would not open.
Eryan hooked one leg around the reel post to keep himself from sliding farther.
He caught Pell’s wrist and struck Pell’s clenched fist against the platform edge once, then again.
The hand opened.
Pell caught the edge with both hands. Eryan hauled him onto the boards and fell backward with the boy against his chest.
The bird struck the platform rim and fell, still caught in the cord. A chip of pale wood spun away from its wing. Children cried out behind them.
The seed swung beneath the platform and pulled the bird after it. Mareth seized the reel handle.
“Back. Everyone behind the rack.”
The command moved them faster than shouting would have.
Veska dragged the wayseed rack clear. Tovar was already on his knees beside Pell. Liora took the two smallest children by their collars and put them behind her.
Eryan rolled onto one elbow.
Pell had struck his chin. Blood gathered where his teeth had cut his lower lip.
“Look at me,” Tovar said.
Pell tried to turn toward the edge.
“Me first. The bird is not bleeding.”
Pell stared at him, offended enough to obey.
Mareth locked the reel.
The line trembled under the strain.
Below, the practice seed had missed the recovery net. It swung toward a lower branch, with the wooden bird dangling in the cord above it.
“Why did it miss?” Seli asked.
“The bird jerked the tether sideways,” Veska said.
She stood at the edge, careful not to cross the white paint.
“The seed rolled. The gust folded its left membrane.”
The seed slipped beyond the red boundary.
The wooden bird struck a lower branch and caught by its long wing in a wet fork just past the red rope. The seed dropped beneath it.
The cord ran from the locked reel to the trapped bird, then down to the seed. Each gust tugged at the wing wedged in the fork. Mareth kept his hands on the reel.
“No one touches the line.”
Eryan got up.
“That includes you,” Mareth said.
The bird turned slowly above the mist. Its chipped wing flashed pale in the sun.
Pell saw it.
His face crumpled in a way the cut lip had not caused.
“We can pull it back,” Eryan said.
“The wing will split,” Veska told him.
“Then we stop the seed from pulling.”
“And how will you reach the bird?”
He looked beyond the red boundary.
The branch holding the bird grew from the trunk less than two body lengths below the platform. A short service ladder descended to just above it.
By Highbough rules, crossing from the last rung to the branch required a descent cord for safety.
Mareth followed his eyes.
“No.”
“It is close.”
“Close is not the same as inspected.”
“The branch is holding the seed and the bird.”
“You weigh more than a seed.”
The carved wing gave a soft wooden complaint. Mareth looked toward the upper bridge.
The nearest adult climbers had moved beyond the water platforms.
“Veska, ring the work line. Tovar, take Pell inside. Liora, clear the platform.”
The students moved, but not far.
Veska pulled the brass ring twice, sending two hard knocks through the overhead rope toward the workers. Tovar wiped blood from Pell’s mouth. Liora ordered the younger children toward the inner bridge and received none of her usual obedience.
Eryan picked up a descent cord. Mareth caught the other end beneath his boot.
“Put it down.”
“The climbers will not reach us before the bird falls.”
“Then we lose a practice seed.”
Eryan looked at Pell.
Mareth’s voice lowered.
“And a wooden bird.”
Pell stood very still with Tovar’s hands on his shoulders.
He had not cried while hanging over the edge. He had not cried when his lip split.
Tears now ran down his face without changing his expression.
“My fault,” he whispered.
“No,” Eryan said.
“I grabbed it.”
“I put it too close.”
Mareth kept his foot on the cord.
“I was teaching the lesson. Responsibility is mine.”
The split in the long wing reached the dark thumb mark near the tail. Eryan let go of the cord.
Mareth watched him for a moment, then turned toward the work bridge and called for the climbers. The seed caught another lift of air.
The split wing sagged in the fork. Pell made a small sound.
The bird was still visible. The fork was close enough for Eryan to see the knife marks along its longer wing and the split widening through them.
Eryan crossed to the service ladder and put one foot on the first rung. Mareth turned back and knew at once what he had decided.
“Eryan. Stay above the red.”
Eryan climbed down.
At the final rung, the red rope barred the gap between the ladder and the lower branch. He put one leg over the red rope and set his foot on the lower branch.