Chapter 252

Svala on the Wing-Keep's rail, the crimson line blazing. Behind her, along the nest-house roofs, a hundred Flock fliers in feathered glider-cloaks, crouched, knives in their teeth. In front of her, across the dark: the Sky-Net's anchor-row, a hundred anchor-lines running side by side from the rim of the net down to the kite-ships, like the strings of a harp a mile wide.

not turning round, to the hundred behind her.

The price: a hundred fliers at the ends of their lines slamming into kite-masts, rigging, sails, and every one of them clinging on, perching, gasping, unable to go again. Svala, at the end of hers, wrapped round a kite-ship's yard, heart racing like a bird's, the edges of the panel greying. Her fifth line since the Sky-Net came down.

The Sky-Net sagging along its whole outer edge, the island dropping a few sickening fathoms. But holding. Every remaining strand of it now hanging from one woven knot at the centre: the crown of the Eyrie, under the Netmaster's feet.

on the sagging net below the Eyrie, looking up, his eyes ringing gold, the Greed-Compass on his chest swinging away from the crew for the first time today. What he sees: in all that miles-wide net, one point burning gold, a knot the size of a fist in the crown, under her heel.

The price: for one heartbeat he can't feel any of them through the Knot. In that heartbeat Kompis, on a strand beside him, misses the warning he'd have felt, and a Fowler's pole takes him across the ribs. krk.

Climbing the sagging net to the Eyrie: Rougeina Swapping from strand to strand; Krydog climbing hand over hand; Smurjan, three shadows sprawling across the mesh; Kompis, one arm across his ribs, Mingus scrambling up the cord beside him because he goes where Kompis goes; Vigolas first. Below them, nothing but dark.

A woven platform at the heart of the net, and on it, Grip: twenty-five, glowing faintly rose from a whole night's watching, the Lace over one arm, the Gaff in her hand, net-cord coat streaming.

One beat. A year burned inside it: her heart beating, for that one beat, like the heart of the youngest child she ever robbed, quick as a sparrow's.

THE SPRING BEAT.

She's everywhere: the Gaff hooking Krydog off the Eyrie onto the net below (WHUD, ba-BUMP ba-BUMP, HUP); the Lace snapping past Rougeina's face; Smurjan's open palm meeting empty air where she was a beat ago.

holding his ribs, eyes gold, reading her. What he sees: every rose thread on her running out of her eyes: to every face on the island, to every face she's ever watched, back across eighty years, thousands of them.

smiling, and burning another year, badumbadum—DUM. At her temple, where the Great Watch had made it black, a single grey hair grows back. Spent.

on a kite-ship's yard below the Eyrie, perched, heart slowing, the crimson line on her arm lighting again. Rougeina, on a strand above, calling down across the gap.

(Their own lessons, handed back. Both of them almost laughing.)

watching Svala's arm light up from across the net, and smiling, and stepping one pace to the left before the line has even started, because she knows exactly where it will go.

Svala's line: tsiiiip, straight at where Grip was, past her right shoulder, and ending one pace behind her, exactly where Svala chose to end it before she launched. And at the end of the line: blink. Rougeina Swaps with Svala. The Netmaster, turning to follow the swallow, turns straight into the dancer, already inside her guard.

Mirror-steel, twice: the Lace's draw-cord cut, the Gaff's hook cut. And then Rougeina's eyes flashing silver-rose: CROSS-SWAP. She trades two things she can see, neither of them her: the Lace, open and falling, and the Netmaster's own net-cord coat. The coat flutters away into the dark. The Lace is where the coat was: wrapped round Grip, limed, collar to knees.

And Rougeina, rooted for one heartbeat on the Eyrie's sagging edge, can't move, tipping, until Krydog's hand closes on her wrist.

netted in her own Lace, on her knees on the Eyrie, struggling, young, eyes wide open.

back from Rougeina's place in a single hop, perched on the Eyrie's rim three paces from her, crouched, the crimson flight-line on her arm blazing white-hot, aimed straight at the Netmaster's heart. A clear line. Nothing in it but her.

·

(The crimson line on her arm going dark, shoulder to fingertip.)

rooted beat over, Krydog still holding her wrist, quietly.

crouching over the crown of the Eyrie, under the netted Netmaster's knees: the one fist-sized knot that the whole Sky-Net now hangs from. Green lightning beginning to crawl up his arm.

one hand on Rougeina, the other on a strand.

(Kompis grabs Mingus. Mingus grabs Kompis's sleeve in his teeth. Svala grabs the Lace's cord.)

The Emerald Knuckle, full lightning, into the crown-knot.

The knot parting. And outward from it, across miles of dark, every strand of the Sky-Net going slack at once, the whole net folding in on itself like a dropped sail.

The Sky-Net collapsing; kites tumbling out of the sky; the kite-ships heeling; and Flyttfågeln, still snarled in loose net, its ten thousand carriers tangled, exhausted, half-drowned in mesh, lurching, and then dropping out of the sky.

falling with the island. Tärna thrown to her knees on the stone, the bone whistle at her lips, whistling, and the birds, tangled in the dead net under the cliffs, unable to reach her.

The crew on the Eyrie falling: the platform gone out from under them, the strands whipping away, everyone tumbling through the dark. Grip falling in her Lace. Svala falling with the Lace's cord wrapped round her fist, holding on.

falling, looking down, the Lace's cord still round her fist. A line launches from a perch, and there's nothing under her feet to launch from; and she won't let go of the cord. Below them, not the island: the island is falling too, far below, out of reach. Below that, the sea, much too far. No ground.

falling backwards into the dark, coat flaring, eyes wide. Terrified of the dark, falling into all of it.

falling, one arm round his cracked ribs, the other reaching for the gold shape tumbling through the air beside him.

The whole crew, a Netmaster wrapped in her own net, and a girl in a white scarf, falling through the starless dark with nothing underneath them at all.

falling beside Kompis, ears flat in the wind, turning his kind brown eyes down toward the dark below his people. And his gold coat beginning, very faintly, to glow.