What is the sky to us? Jorren thought, frantically. What prisoners see through their bars. What sailors pray to for the stars to lead them home. What the drought-stricken watch for the miracle of rain. What we all stare up into, awed to wonder whether there are unimaginable other places out there beyond the curtain of night. It’s hope itself.
Araias squinted over the arbalist’s shoulder, judging angle. “A single bolt through the forehead should keep the soiling to a minimum, yes?”
No, this is what mere hope reaches for and never touches. It is the realization of hope, the answer to all unanswered and unanswerable prayers, the vindication of all the world’s broken-hearted yearning. I am surrounded on all sides by death, and the only way out would be to—
“Take aim!”
—fly.
The ache in her knees and feet ceased. It took her a long moment to realize the ground was no longer pressing on them, and longer still to notice herself lifting. But she wasn’t flying so much as lurching sickeningly upward with no control over speed or direction—
“Kill her, you scruffy buffoons! Now!”
Jorren screamed, as much from her sudden altitude as from the bolts and blades whistling past her ears, but her attackers were almost as bewildered by her flight as she was, and by the time they straightened their aim she had already tumbled up out of sight behind a smoke stack.
“Help!” she yelled as she continued to rise. She fought to clear her mind and remember that thought alone wouldn’t steer her flight; the jacket only responded to deep yearning. She stopped trying to right herself and focused instead on feeling the full force of her need to be upright—and when she opened her eye again the horizon was a steady, unshifting ring.
Where did that leave her? She couldn’t yearn for the ground while violent death waited down there. She thought of yearning for Araias’s forgiveness, but that was too difficult to imagine.
But she knew how to yearn for Tyan.
With her arms in the sleeves of this jacket, that longing carried her like a wind.
“If you need me,” Tyan had said. “Find me in our secret place.”
The soot-blackened rooftops rushed by under her holey boots, followed by the trapezoidal spires of the great white wall, and everything below her instantly turned clean and lustrous. The jacket bore her down past gold-flecked domes and ornamented terraces, between flowering trees and Tailored flags that cast their magic over everything below.
Tyan was already there, waiting on the narrow walkway that ringed the dome of the Upper Library, a place the two of them had chosen for its privacy so long ago.
“I woke from a dream of you coming here,” Tyan said, and extended a hand to anchor Jorren to the Earth again. And when Jorren pulled their bodies together into a tight hug, all the heart-pounding dread and sweltering heat of the world outside fell away. Within the jacket’s cool aura, only the two of them existed.
Then Jorren realized: Tyan’s lack of surprise wasn’t just because of some dream.
“You knew,” Jorren said. “You were the only person I ever told about my research into sky. You told Araias to hire me?”
“Oh, love.” Tyan looked sadly out across the city stretching away into the lightening twilight. “Why couldn’t you just have given him his due?”
Jorren let go and gripped the railing instead. “I couldn’t let Araias have it,” she said. “I didn’t know what he would do with it once he had it. What could he want from this jacket that he doesn’t already have?”
Tyan gripped Jorren’s sleeve. She inhaled sharply, sharing momentarily in the energy pouring out of the fabric, and murmured almost drunkenly: “There’s only one thing a man with so much power yearns for.”
Jorren blinked. Her hands tightened around the iron railing that tethered her. “For his power to be unquestioned.”
Tyan lay her smooth young hands on Jorren’s wrinkled ones. “I don’t think anything could convince Araias to spare your life now, but you still have to give him the sky. If not for yourself then for the good of the entire city.”
“For lint’s sake, why?”
“Fifty years you’ve been trapped on the other side of the wall. You must’ve sensed the growing unrest. The social order is unraveling. If nothing is done there’ll be chaos. A massive and bloody revolt could kindle any day now. In the right hands, this jacket can defuse all that and restore order.”
Jorren couldn’t help looking back at the line where the soft lamplight of the Upper City gave way abruptly to the smoky darkness of the lower. “They deserve better.”
“They won’t get it. They have no real hope, and hopeless rebellions are cheap and invariably crushed at great human cost. For all their imperfections—” here Tyan flinched and looked away from Jorren’s scars— “the Swathed want peace. When Araias has the sky, its magic will cause all rebellious passions in the lower city fade into apathy. All unrest quelled.”
“I’m not the first person to sew sky, am I?” Jorren said. “All references to it in the library are censored. But all of this must have happened before.”
Tyan nodded. “It was a sky dress that pacified the lower city a century ago. But when it was worn threadbare, the Swathed fought each other for control of the knowledge of its creation, until all was lost.”
“What happened to the Tailor who made it?”
Tyan looked away guiltily. “He was held captive by one Swathed or another. Then he disappeared. I want you to know I had a plan that would have protected you. For what little that’s worth now.”
“I don’t think he died,” Jorren said, her head spinning. “Not then. I think he was presented with the same choice I was, and he regretted his decision.”
Tyan squinted. “Why do you think that?”
Jorren could feel the materialized misery creeping up her arm. She stared away into the gloaming and failed to speak.
Tyan took back Jorren’s hand and squeezed it. “It’s not important. What matters is that... although you must give the jacket to Araias, you and I still have this moment, here and now. It’s ours. And for as long as you’re safe here with me, there are things you could wish for. Wishes the jacket would grant.”
“Like what?”
Her eyes watered as she reached out and cupped Jorren’s unscarred cheek. “Only true longing could have brought you here to me. I feel it too. Please believe I’ve missed you every day since your exile. And you, you must yearn so deeply to have your eye again, and for your scars to fade. All you have to do is focus on—”
Jorren stopped her. “I don’t.”
Tyan stared uncomprehendingly. “But surely you long for us to hold each other as we did, both beautiful and whole. Don’t you yearn to be young again?”
Jorren sighed. “There was a time when I would have given anything to be that person again. I don’t anymore. Not at all.”
The bewilderment in Tyan’s gaze turned over into disbelief, on its way to anger. “How could you not?”
Jorren’s heart sank. The hand with which she pushed Tyan’s away was the one where the mold-gray felt continued to spread from the wrist, already forking up the veins of her arm. She rolled up her sleeve and asked: “What do you see?”
Tyan grimaced and shuddered. She averted her eyes and choked out the words “Nothing. There’s nothing there.”
It was already happening, Jorren realized. She was becoming invisible in the same way the Gray Thing had been: not truly invisible at all but irresistibly pleasant to ignore or deny or forget—for someone who could. Someone like Tyan, whose jacket in the dawn light shone with the cruel metallic thread of other people’s spun-away youth. In this thought, Jorren felt a rush of vertigo as she unwittingly lurched back into the empty air.
“Wait!” Tyan shouted after her. “Where are you going?” She clutched at Jorren’s sleeves, but the jacket was answering a yearning to be elsewhere that was stronger by far than Tyan’s desire to keep her. She closed her eye, and by the time she opened it again Tyan was too fa
r away to see.
The streets drifting by between her feet changed color again as she passed back over the wall. By now dawn was breaking between the plumes of smoke from chimneys and stacks. Araias’s assassins had split into groups to haplessly chase Jorren through the streets—and everywhere their shouts rang up, the commotion called hundreds, soon thousands of people out of doors and windows: all the dyers and tanners and weavers and knitters who lived out their days in factories and workshops, and all those too young or old or sick or gaunt with starvation to join them. Sullen and sooty throngs looked up and pulled the caps from their heads in awe.
What would you reach for? the Gray Thing had asked.
Finally she knew.
Her hands found her scissors, and her cuts were quick and jagged. All that mattered was creating as many tiny shreds as possible, as quickly as she could. Each piece hung on the wind for a moment before losing contact with her desire to stay aloft. Then one by one they began to snow down across the lower city.
By the time her scissor blades reached the buttons, she could feel herself losing buoyancy; by the time she reached the sleeves the wind of her descent was roaring in her ears, but she didn’t dare to divert any attention from her work. As the ground rushed up to meet her, she thought to herself with a laugh that for all the wickedness of the deal she’d made with Araias, he hadn’t lied: the glory he’d promised had been paid in abundance.
In the streets below, a young boy in search of new customers for a sack of snakeskins paused in the shadow of the great white wall to cough and spit, but just then something made him look up.
The shred of sky was nearly invisible from below, but as it drifted down it cast a faint glimmering light into the wall’s shadows. The boy stepped forward and caught it. He pressed it to his cheek; its fabric was deliciously cold to the touch, and every breath he took as he held it was a little easier than the last.
He found himself thinking of all the things he hoped for. The more he did, the more he became aware of others all around him, all thinking the same thing. And when a noise turned his head, he could just make out the thin cracks snaking their way up the wall, singing like dream-thread.
© Copyright 2019 Elly Bangs
Elly Bangs - [BCS280 S01] - A Handful of Sky (htlm) Page 3
