Svala

• Build & height: 1.58 m, small, light-boned and quick, all wiry energy. Age 19. She is never still. Even standing, she's bouncing on her toes.
• Face: a pointed chin, a big, quick grin with a chipped front tooth, sun-browned cheeks and a nose that has been broken twice by landings.
• Hair: blue-black, cut short like feathers, layered and spiky, flicked back by permanent wind.
• Eyes: bright black, like a bird's: glittering, darting, never resting on one thing for long.
• Skin & sin-mark: sun-brown. Wrath, crimson, precision: the one correct strike. A thin crimson line runs from her right shoulder down to the tip of her index finger: the flight-line, which blazes when she commits to one. Since she was Tested, script crawls along it.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a fitted dark-blue flight-shirt · a long white scarf that streams behind her like a contrail · a dark navy coat with swallow-tailed coat-tails, split deep at the back · leather bracers · soft-soled climbing boots.
• Signature item: twin hooked blades shaped like swallow wings, curved and pale steel, worn crossed at the small of her back.
• Movement: constant. She perches on railings, masts, other people's shoulders. In a flight-line she is a single streak: drawn as one perfectly straight line across the panel with her at the tip, never curved.
• Voice: quick, bright and laughing. She talks fast and interrupts herself. Her balloons are small and wing-shaped, often in clusters.
• Variant looks: The line (a dead-straight streak across a splash page, everything it passes through split cleanly). Perched (crouched on a mast-top, heart racing, catching her breath). Netted (wrapped in a Fowler's net, furious, laughing anyway).

She flies in a perfectly straight line, faster than tempo itself, and cuts through anything in her path, once per flight.

• Point and commit: she chooses the line and its length before she launches, and the crimson mark on her arm blazes.
• Faster than tempo: while she is on the line, nobody's heartbeat lands. No speed can react to her.
• Once per flight: the first thing in her path is cut cleanly through, whatever it is (a wall, a mast, a spear-wall, a ship's chain). After that she's just flying very fast.
• She can't turn or stop until the line ends. Anything unexpected in her path after the cut, she hits at full speed.
• She must perch (touch something solid and catch her breath) before she can fly another line.
• The Flyttfågeln rule (home field): it never lands in the same place twice. On her island, the ground moves under every enemy who stands still.
• What it can't do: curve, fly twice without perching, cut twice in one line, or fly near the Null.

• Tempo: 110 on her feet. The flight-line is outside tempo.
• Home tempo: Flyttfågeln, in flight, on the wind.
• Heartbeat technique: ONE WINGBEAT. She trades a heartbeat for a wingbeat: her whole line happens inside one wingbeat of hers, which the count can't see. No heartbeat anywhere lands while she's on it. No one else leaves the count to move.
• Burn cost: her heart skips a beat during every line, and afterwards it races like a bird's. She has to perch, breathless, until it settles, and every line leaves her a little more short of breath for the rest of the day.

Flight-Line on the page after she joins (Arcs 3–5):

• Ch. 271: cuts the Barkstrippers' great two-man iron saw's chain at the Great Root.
• Ch. 274: cuts their nine-barrel nail-cannon.
• Ch. 277: through a squall and out the other side, and the squall doesn't care. Then she points at a captain, not the storm: "one line, through."
• Ch. 282: straight through a squall's mast of cloud; the squall loses its sails and spins into the lake.
• Ch. 283: flies the Marka's hawser to Old Pike's stern across the lake. The first thing in her path is a sheet of falling hail, and she cuts it, slaps the hawser's eye over the stern-post, and crashes into the lake beyond: "Tied! …Sort of!"
• Ch. 285: a line across the flat water to the two men in the lake ("Point me at the shore!" / "It's that way. Obviously.", Rougeina). She holds Njord up on her arm through the terms (ch. 286).

She can't turn or stop mid-flight. Once she commits to a line, she rides it to the end, whatever appears in it. And her world never lands, so she has never had a home that stayed put. She's cheerful, with a sore spot: she has never been anywhere long enough to be missed.

• Predictable once launched: see the line, and you know where she'll be.
• Two obstacles: she cuts only the first.
• Nets: the Fowlers of the House of Grip, hunters who net migrating islands and sell them at the auction at the edge (Skatt is gone). Their nets are made to stop flying things: limed, weighted with lead swallows, thrown on the drum. Netmaster Grip throws the Lace so it is waiting at the end of a flier's line (it caught Svala in ch. 245). She reads a flier's arm and steps out of a line before it's flown. In ch. 248 she hung the whole island in the Sky-Net.
• Lures: the House's lure-whistles copy the wing-keeper's whistle too perfectly, and the birds turn (ch. 243). Only the crack in Tärna's real whistle can't be copied.
• Thresholds: Veyra's THRESHOLD (Saga III) would stop her launch dead at its line, because nothing crosses it except on foot.
• Heavy worlds: on Tyngd's Tyngden she couldn't get off the ground.
• The end of the line: an ambush where she has to land.

• The twin swallow-blades.
• The white scarf, her mother's, the only thing she owns that is older than the island's last migration. "I was three. I don't remember her. I remember the scarf." (ch. 244). Her mother wears the same scarf in Grip's stands (ch. 247).
• The Flock: the people of Flyttfågeln, who live on the flying island, wear glider-cloaks (one on a peg by every nest-house door) and follow her lines. Their old wing-keeper, Farmor Tärna (TÄRNA · K-I UNMARKED · Scalelist #5,002,610, 99, unpowered, with Svala's black bird's eyes eighty years older), whistled the island where it went with a bone whistle with a crack in its note. She died in ch. 253 after the Homing Call, and the birds carried her up (ch. 254). The flock of ten thousand birds is the island's wings. Her successor is a ten-year-old whistle-girl whose note cracks in the same place.
• Mingus: waiting where she lands, every time, from her very first line (ch. 243).

Point and go. She opens from a perch, high up, and launches one line through the most important thing on the field: a mast, a gate-chain, a general's guard. She lands, perches, breathes, and goes again. Team combos: Svala + Smurjan: the Sightline draws her line, a crimson line from his third eye to the one weak point, and she flies it: Wrath and Wrath, precision squared. Svala + Rougeina: Svala flies the line, Rougeina Swaps with her at the end of it, and an enemy who braced for one dancer gets the other. Svala + Vigolas: he points. "Point me at it."

• Wants: to be missed. For someone to wait for her to come back.
• Fears: the end of a line with nobody there.
• Contradiction: the girl who can't turn around wants someone to turn around for.
• Humour: bubbly, teasing and fast. "Faster than tempo! Faster than your mouth, anyway!"
• Habits: perches on high things; whistles migratory songs; never sits in a chair properly.
• Alone: sits on the edge of the island's wing, legs dangling over the Current, watching it pass.

• Rougeina: her sparring partner: two dancers with blades, one who swaps and one who flies. Rougeina teaches her to stop; Svala teaches Rougeina to commit. "Before you go. That's the only place you can turn." / "Point and GO!" (ch. 246). Swallow-and-Swap (ch. 250, 252). The first person she ever told about Sparv (ch. 254). Best friends begun, and by the end of Saga V.
• Vigolas: the captain who points ("Point me at it." / "…That."), and the first person who ever waited for her to come back. In ch. 254 her line ends on the Marka holding course at its end (Perne looked down it, and Drekk steered to it): "Nobody gets left at the end of a line." / "…You waited." / "Land? Land where?" / "Here." / "…Here's good." It undoes her.
• Kompis + Mingus: Mingus runs after every flight, barking, and is waiting at the end of her line when she lands. Every time, from ch. 243 on.
• Farmor Tärna: the wing-keeper. She saw Drekk turn the Marka under Svala's line: "Nobody's ever done that for you." (ch. 244). From her last words to Svala: "Flyttfågeln never lands. Neither should you. Find the ones who wait at the end of your line." (ch. 253)
• Nine: Grip's great-grandson and Sparv's brother. He recognised her and hated her (ch. 249), then told her his brother's name (ch. 254).
• Trollmage: the fastest and the slowest. She tries to make him run once. It doesn't take.
• Smurjan: a fellow Wrath. The Sightline-Line combo makes them the crew's sharpest pair.
• Drekk: she scouts ahead; he steers to where she lands. His head-count counts "the swallow" (ch. 253). With her aboard: "I'll need a longer head-count." (ch. 254)
• Hallbard: his Beam always finds her island. She calls him "Grandpa Lamp", which he hates.
• Netmaster Grip: the woman who netted her mother. Svala beat her in the Arena (ch. 247) and had a clear line to her heart in ch. 252, and didn't start it.

• "Point me at it. I'll go through. Just don't ask me to turn around."
• "Faster than tempo! Faster than your mouth, anyway!"
• "…You waited."
• "I couldn't turn. I've never been able to turn." (ch. 247)
• "Land? Land where?" / "Here." / "Oh. Here? …Here's good." (ch. 254)
• "Tied! …Sort of!" (ch. 283)