by Jeff Minerd
With the late afternoon sun low in the sky and the island positioned near the Highspire Mountains, the view was spectacular. From horizon to horizon, silvery gray clouds blanketed the surface of Etherium, as they always did. To the east, the mountains rose tall and craggy and green out of these clouds, reaching for the sky. The mountain range stretched northward and southward in lazy zigs and zags, the farthest mountains fading off into the distance. The sky was a pretty shade of pinkish-purple. Banks of cumulus clouds piled high on the horizon like echoes of the mountains.
The nearest mountain was so close that, if her mother were looking at the view, she could have made out the terraced fields and orchards on its lower flanks. She could have glimpsed the tiny specks of ox- and donkey-drawn carts making their way along the roads that spiraled or switchbacked up the mountainside. Further up the mountain, she could have seen the city of Selestria in all its sunlit splendor, the brightly-colored pennants flying from the roofs of the stone houses, the airships swarming about the city like busy bees—constantly touching down and taking off—their silvery sails glinting when they caught the sun. At the mountain’s crown, she could have admired Castle Selestria, which seemed as much a part of the sky as part of the earth, its tallest towers and turrets lost in the clouds.
But Brieze’s mother wasn’t looking at any of this. She hadn’t gone outside for the view. She stood with her head down, shoulders hunched, and her hands thrust deep into her pockets, muttering to herself. She didn’t notice the gusts of wind tugging at her skirt. The knotted bun of her hair had come undone—it whipped around her face in a frenzy.
Brieze unclipped a brand-new spyglass from the belt of her black flightsuit. It had been a gift from the wizard for her sixteenth birthday. She studied her mother through it. The house’s rafters groaned in the wind.
“Ah ha!” the wizard said, and advanced one of his pawns with a satisfied little clink. “Your move.”
“She’s not wearing a parachute,” Brieze said, peering through the spyglass.
“Hmmmm…?” the wizard looked up from the chessboard, his blue eyes blinking beneath bushy white brows.
“It’s windy out there and she forgot to grab a chute from the porch.”
The wizard came to the window. He frowned at the distant figure of Patentia Crofter standing near the island’s edge with her shoulders hunched against the wind, her hands in her pockets, her hair flying. “That is exceedingly dangerous,” he said, his brow furrowing and his eyebrows squinching closer together.
And, as if to prove him right, a huge gust of wind ballooned Patentia’s skirt, lifted her off her feet, and carried her tumbling end-over-end off the island’s edge.
Brieze screamed.
The wizard dashed from the room, knocking over the chessboard. The pieces scattered across the floor. He shouted at the top of his lungs, “Overside! Someone’s gone overside!” His footsteps thumped down the hallway toward the stairs. People had been windswept off the island before. It was an accepted risk of island life. The islanders would form a rescue party. They would pull on parachutes, launch airships, toss lifelines over the side. But by the time they did any of this, it might be too late. Things, including people, fall slowly in the thick atmosphere of Etherium. But they do fall, and they gather speed as they go.
So Brieze didn’t waste time with the three flights of stairs.
She threw open the window, checked her flightsuit, and jumped out—headfirst.
She spread her arms wide. The loose folds of fabric between her wrists and waist snapped taut in the wind and became wings. The wind tried to whisk her away, but she wrestled with it, steered into it and used the weight of her body to bring herself down to the ground in a long, wobbling arc. She hit the green lawn in front of the wizard’s house shoulder first and rolled to her feet. Dizzy, she dashed to the porch, where dozens of parachute packs were stacked neatly by the double front doors.
She grabbed up a pack and slung it around her shoulders. There was commotion inside the house—confused shouting, running footsteps. Soon, she knew, people would come spilling out of the house onto the porch to form the rescue party. If she waited, she could lead them to the spot where her mother had gone over, which might increase the chances of a rescue.
But Brieze couldn’t waste her precious head start. She pelted out to the island’s edge, to the spot where she’d last seen her mother, tightening the leather straps and belt and working the buckles of the parachute pack as best she could as she ran. At the edge, she stopped for a last split-second adjustment, gathered her courage, and dove over the side.
With her hands together in front of her and her ankles together behind, Brieze made her body into a long, slim knife that sliced through the air. The side of the island, all naked stone, porous and pitted, rushed up past her. Her long braid of jet-black hair whipped out straight behind her. She squinted as the wind stung and watered her eyes. There had been no time for goggles.
There was her mother! A few hundred yards below and to the left—a small human figure standing out against the silvery-gray sea of clouds below, clouds that would soon swallow her up. Brieze was glad to see her mother had kept her head. She wasn’t flailing or screaming. She was doing what everyone had been instructed to do, from an early age, if you found yourself in free fall without a parachute. She was on her back, her arms and legs spread wide, presenting as much resistance to the wind as possible. The dress she wore, which Brieze had always considered ridiculous—the kind of baggy, impractical thing that could only be fashionable in a backwater village—was working to her advantage now. It was catching the wind and slowing her fall.
“Mother!” Brieze shouted. The wind tore the words from her mouth and spirited them away.
But Patentia heard her, or at least spotted her. She waved her arms to attract Brieze’s attention. Brieze came out of her dive. She spread her arms wide and used the wings of her flightsuit to steer. She aimed straight for her mother’s chest. She was close enough now to see the widened whites of her eyes, the flush on her cheeks. Patentia managed to look frightened, embarrassed, and angry all at the same time.
“Grab on! Don’t let go!” Brieze shouted.
They smacked into each other.
The impact knocked the breath out of them, sent them spinning and tumbling. Brieze wrapped her arms and legs tightly around her mother. Her mother’s limbs clamped around her. For seconds that seemed like forever, they gripped each other as hard as they could. There was no up, no down. Only each other. They became one body with eight limbs, two hearts thumping wildly against each other, and one mind begging the universe to let it live.
Soon, they stopped spinning. Their breath came back to them. Their grip on each other relaxed by a fraction of a squeeze. Brieze could tell up from down. She wrestled an arm free from her mother and pulled the ripcord of her parachute pack. The chute and its lines slithered out of the pack, and the chute expanded with a whump as it filled with air. They felt as if they were being yanked upward as the chute strained to slow their fall. Brieze looked down. The surface clouds were so close it seemed as if her dangling feet could touch them. Another few moments of free fall, and they would have fallen through those clouds and hit the very solid, very hard ground beneath them.
Brieze looked up. The floating island was far above them, looking like a jagged-edged rock suspended in the sky. Much too high to reach.
Brieze looked over at Selemont, the nearest mountain. It was close, and their best bet. Their only bet. At the very least, she thought, she should be able to land them safely in some field or orchard on its lower flanks. And she might get lucky and catch a mountain updraft that would carry them high enough to get back to the island again.
Patentia’s chin nestled snugly into the crook of Brieze’s neck and shoulder. Brieze asked if she was all right, and felt her nod in response. “I have to let go to steer,” Brieze said. “Hold on.”
Brieze reached for the steering toggles that dangled near her hands. Patentia h
eld on. Though, as Brieze tugged on the toggle cords and steered them toward the mountain, she became aware that her mother wasn’t gripping her with both hands. One set of her mother’s fingers dug into her back, but the fingers of her other hand were closed into a fist that pressed against her, as if her mother were clutching something she didn’t want to let go of.
They got lucky. The heavy winds hitting the sun-warmed mountain produced a strong updraft. As soon as Brieze steered close enough to see rows of golden ripe wheat and harvest-ready corn rippling with the gusts, close enough that she could have hailed the fieldworkers if she’d wanted to, the updraft caught and lifted them. They rose past the fields and orchards. Past the walled city of Selemont and the bustling traffic in its stone-paved streets. They rose right past the western wall of Castle Selestria. Soldiers manning the wall stared in surprise at the two women clinging to each other in midair, riding the precarious lift of a single parachute. But before the soldiers could call out and ask if they needed any help, Brieze and her mother were far above the castle.
Brieze looked down at the floating island. They would make it now. She relaxed. The knots in her stomach and her shoulders, which she hadn’t even been aware of until now, loosened. She let out a relieved breath. So did her mother. But the next moment Patentia sucked in her breath again and let loose with a flurry of scolding words. Her mouth was right next to Brieze’s ear, and she felt the heat of the words against her cheek. “Never, ever, ever in all your life do anything like that again! What were you thinking diving off the edge of the island like that? You had me scared to death. You could have been killed.”
“Me!?” Brieze countered. “What about you, mother? What in the world were you doing standing near the edge of the island in that wind, muttering and talking to yourself like a crazy person?”
Patentia was quiet for a moment. “Tobias proposed to me,” she finally said, as if this were a perfectly logical and reasonable answer.
Brieze let this sink in. It was strange to think of her mother with a man. It had always been just the two of them. Back in the small village on the tiny mountain known as Footmont where she grew up, no man ever considered marrying her mother, a woman with an illegitimate, out-of-wedlock child. But Brieze supposed she should have known this might change when she became the wizard’s apprentice and they moved to his island. Her mother wasn’t that old, thirty-five, and she was still good-looking, Brieze supposed, in a rustic, plumpish sort of way.
“Let’s not have this conversation in midair,” Brieze said.
Patentia nodded in agreement.
Brieze skimmed over the island at treetop level, looking for a place to land. On its flat topside, the island’s surface was covered with grasses and mosses, scrub brush and hardy dwarf pines. Small ponds sparkled in the sunlight here and there, their surfaces rippling in the wind. Brieze floated right over the roof of the wizard’s large, rambling house, with its towers and balconies, its cornices and cupolas. She waved to the people gathered out front. They waved back and cheered when they saw that Patentia was safe.
But Brieze didn’t want to land near the house. She wanted somewhere more private, where they could talk. She chose a grassy field out of sight of the house. With the extra weight hanging on the chute, they had to come in low and fast.
“Rolling landing,” Brieze said.
Her mother nodded. Every sky rider has an instinct for riding the wind, for soaring and swooping, even Patentia, who by sky rider standards was short and thickly built and clumsy. Brieze hit the field in the exact center. Her toes touched the ground, her mother’s heels touched the ground, and they executed a rolling landing together, arms wrapped around each other. Patentia did a decent job, especially considering she faced backward as they touched down.
Lying on their sides in the grass, they disentangled themselves from the chute and from each other. They lay there for a few moments, just breathing, looking up at the sky and feeling the comforting solidness of the island beneath them. Brieze sat up and brushed the grass from her flightsuit. She pulled her long braid in front of her and ran her hands along it, cleaning it off. Stroking her braid this way always calmed her. “So,” she said, “Tobias proposed. That’s why you two are acting strange. I take it you didn’t say yes?”
Patentia sat up and brushed herself off. She did this one-handed, still clutching something in a fist in her lap. “I told him I need to think about it.”
“Are you in love with him?”
Patentia chewed her lower lip the way she did when thinking something over. Brieze recognized the gesture as one of her own. She understood her mother was debating what—or how much—to tell her. “It’s complicated,” Patentia finally said curtly, giving Brieze what she had always thought of as her mother’s “hard face.” It was a stern mask she used to hide her emotions. Brieze had seen the hard face nearly every day growing up on Footmont. But she rarely saw it since they joined the wizard’s island community. Here, her mother had made real friends. She smiled a lot, and flirted with Tobias, and laughed—a genuine laugh, not the false cheer she used to employ.
With her “hard face” firmly set, Patentia tried to gather up her hair and tie it in a knot. But she was having trouble because of the thing she held in her hand.
“For heaven’s sake, mother! What are you holding onto there like it’s your last silver coin?”
Patentia let her hair go. She looked down at her clenched fist. She opened the fist and handed the object concealed there to Brieze. Her face softened. She handed the thing over as if it were the explanation she couldn’t bring herself to put into words. All she said was, “I was trying to throw this over the side of the island. That’s why I was standing so close to the edge. But I couldn’t do it.”
Brieze took the thing and studied it. It was a gray heart-shaped stone, worn smooth by some mountain stream and polished by years of constant handling. She had vague recollections of seeing the stone around their hut as a child. On one side, someone had carved the initials P and K. The other side of the stone was inscribed with the complicated characters used in the far-away Eastern Kingdoms. Brieze had been studying the Eastern language. It took her a moment to puzzle the characters out. They said, may our love last forever.
A jolt of anger stiffened her. She made a fist around the stone. “I remember this. It’s from my father,” she said. “Something he gave you.”
Patentia nodded. “He found it on the bank of a stream, and he inscribed it. See how the P and the K are joined?”
Brieze didn’t open her fist to look. She knew little about her biological father, and she didn’t care to know more. She and her mother didn’t talk about him anymore. His name was Kaishou Fujiwara, and he was a merchantman from the city of Kyo in the Eastern Kingdoms. At least that’s what he’d told her mother. His ship, the Atagu Maru, had stopped at Footmont for a week for repairs and to take on water and provisions for the journey home. During that time, Kaishou and her mother had “fallen in love,” as her mother put it. Kaishou had promised to return and marry her mother, once he’d gotten his merchant vessel safely home and secured the permission of his family.
But Patentia never saw or heard from him again. She’d written him many letters, sent by way of trading ships to Kyo, but never got one back.
When Brieze thought about her father, which wasn’t often, it opened a well of anger and sadness—and strangely, shame—in her. A well she preferred to keep tightly covered. As far as she was concerned, everything the man had said was a lie. She doubted Kaishou was even his real name. He’d seduced her mother, then disappeared. It was a story you heard often enough. When Brieze imagined her father, she pictured him drinking in some tavern, bragging to his friends about all the dumb farmers’ and herders’ daughters he’d bedded.
“So this is all he gave you,” Brieze said with a sneer. “The rich merchant from Kyo. A rock with your initials scratched into it?”
“He wasn’t rich. He was just a boy. And he was sweet. And kind.” Pat
entia reached out and tucked a few loose strands of Brieze’s straight, raven-black hair behind her ears, stroked the honey-colored skin of her cheek, looked wistfully into her daughter’s black, almond-shaped eyes. “And anyway, the stone wasn’t the only thing he gave me.”
Brieze flushed, understanding her mother meant her. This made her even sadder and angrier. She looked nothing like her mother, who had reddish-brown curly hair, blue eyes, a smattering of freckles across her fair skin. Brieze looked like an Easterner, not a Westerner, and she had always hated her features—her straight black hair, the color of her skin, the shape of her eyes. All her life, they had marked her as different.
“You can’t still be in love with him? After seventeen years?”
Patentia shrugged helplessly, looking down into her lap.
Brieze leapt to her feet. “That’s ridiculous. If you can’t throw this stupid stone away, mother, I’ll do it for you.” With that she stalked off, toward where she calculated the nearest edge of the island would be. Patentia got to her feet with a strangled sound and chased after her daughter. She tackled Brieze from behind, wrapping her arms around her waist and bringing them both to the ground with a thud. It was hard to say who was more surprised by this, daughter or mother. Brieze dropped the stone, and they wrestled for it, scrabbling and grunting. Patentia got it. She sat up and clutched the stone to her chest with both hands.
Then she doubled over, sobbing.
“He’s out there somewhere…I feel it in my bones…he still loves me…one day he’ll come back…”
Brieze blinked, stunned. Her anger evaporated. She may have noticed a lilt in her mother’s voice, a gleam in her eye, whenever they’d talked about her father, but she never imagined her mother felt anything like this. And it was hard to believe that her mother, who had always been so tough and practical-minded, if not exactly smart, believed something so pathetically delusional. How had it happened? It must have been a story she told herself over and over, Brieze supposed, an illusion she clung to that helped her get through the toughest times, until she started to actually believe it.
