A sample from
Second to None
The spring rolls go up on the mess door this morning, and I already know they will put me level with a man who earns his marks by smiling.
The clerk comes in with them under his arm while the tea is still too hot to drink.
He is a thin man in ground-services gray with ink to the second knuckle, and he walks down the long mess as if nobody is watching him. That lasts about three steps. Then somebody at the Storm table by the hearth says "Rolls," and the word goes down the hall like a gust down a ridge, and every second-year on every bench turns around on the seat.
He pins the sheet to the mess door. One tack at each corner. He steps back, and the crowd closes over the paper before he is clear of it.
I don't get up. I hold my cup in both hands and let the steam come up into my face. My palms are raw from yesterday's rope drill out on the point, and the heat of the clay goes straight into the burns and sits there. Good. It gives me something to think about besides that door.
"You're not going to look," Hadie says.
"I know what it says."
"You don't."
"I know what it said in the autumn. I know what it said at midwinter." I drink. The tea in the long mess is black and stewed and strong enough to take the pitch off a hull. "It'll say the same."
Hadie Wennet is my bunkmate. She is twenty-five, short and solid, with red-brown curls cropped hard at the jaw and a face the wind has been working on all spring. She looks at me the way her copper looks at a sheep that is taking too long to make up its mind. Then she gets up and shoves into the crowd at the door, elbows first.
So I am alone at the Ember table when the noise changes.
It isn't a cheer. It's lower than a cheer, a long rising sound from the second-years, the noise cadets make in the yard when two people go down in the mud together and nobody can say who threw whom. Somebody laughs. A dozen faces turn and find me. A dozen more turn the other way, across the aisle, to the Tide table.
I put my cup down.
Fine.
I go and look.
The crowd lets me through, which is worse than if it hadn't. The second-year list runs down the sheet in the clerk's square hand, and the top line isn't a line. It's a bracket with two names inside it.
Lomond, K., Ember.
Brannick, O., Tide.
The same mark beside each. Level at the top of the year. Third posting running.
I read it twice, the way I check a buckle twice, and it doesn't change.
I am Kesta Lomond. I am twenty-seven. My family came up from the river cities when my father was a boy, and he runs carts out of the depot under the Greylag Gap, and from the year I turned sixteen until the morning I walked up to the gate tower for Muster, I drove his mules up the drove road to the beacon fort and back. Snow, mud, and the crosswind off the north wall that will take a pack clean off a mule's back if the lashing is lazy. I have olive skin that the first spring flights have already burned brown, heavy dark brows, and a double braid of dark hair wound into a crown and pinned flat to my skull, because Ember flies the morning patrol and I will not have my hair in my goggles over the foothills.
I have been bonded to Nerra for fifteen months. I have earned every mark on that paper in hours. Hours in the saddle, hours over the pass maps in the rolls hall, hours in the tack room after the lamps go out in the bunkroom.
And I am level with Brannick again.
At the end of this border season the Commandant names one cadet strike leader of the cadets' border flights. The post runs from the autumn until commissioning. One post, one cadet, and a second of the leader's choosing. Everybody on these benches knows the two names it lies between. Everybody also knows how it ends, because nobody in the history of the Wingwatch has been named anything for being good with mules.
I go back to the Ember table and sit down and pick up my cup. My hand is steady. I check.
Across the aisle, the Tide table has gone loose and loud. I don't look. I hear him anyway, because Oren Brannick has the kind of voice that carries without being raised, and when I do look, against my own orders, he is already up and coming over.
He doesn't come straight. He never comes straight. He stops at the door first and thanks the clerk by his given name, and the clerk, who has walked past me every day I have been here without either of us learning anything, goes pink to the ears. Then Oren stops at the end of his own table, where the youngest cadet in Tide is fighting a goggle strap, and says something low with the boy's name in it, and turns the strap the right way over with two fingers, and moves on before the boy can thank him.
I watch all of it. I always watch all of it. It's very good.
He is twenty-eight, and white, from a fjord-hold family up the northern coast, with fair skin that the wind weathers instead of freckling and a paler band across the eyes where his goggles sit. Gray-green eyes. A long straight jaw, clean-shaven this morning, as it is every morning. Wheat-blond hair to the collar, tied back already in a short tail for flight. He is six foot two and broad through the shoulders, and his sea-green Tide tunic has its sleeves pushed up to the elbow over forearms that a harness has been building for two years, and there isn't a crease in it that he didn't put there. Four generations of Brannicks have flown the Gap as commissioned riders. His great-grandfather's name is cut into the rolls-hall wall among the dead.
He stops across the table from me. Hadie arrives back at the same moment with her cheeks red from the crush, sees him, and sits down very fast with her tea.
"Level again," Oren says.
He says it gently. As if he is breaking it to me. As if it is a kindness.
"I can read."
"Third time."
"I can count, too."
He looks down at the bench beside Hadie as though he might sit on it, and then he doesn't. He knows better. "Ravell marked you up on the foothill run."
"Mollen marked you up on everything."
"Mollen marked me down on the foothill run." He tips his head. "You climb late."
"You climb pretty."
There it is. Hadie laughs into her tea and gets most of it up her nose.
Both of those are true, and both of them are information. I hold Nerra low off the Ledge for a full turn before I let her climb, because the air close over the water is thick and lifts cheaper, and I would rather spend her wind high in a climb than low in it. It costs me a length on the climb-out. It wins me that length back over the ridge, and more, when Vorrel is breathing hard from climbing steep to be first on the board. Oren knows that. He has watched me do it all spring. And I know that his long bronze could out-climb Nerra on any day of the year if Oren flew him for the ridge instead of for the officers on the Ledge with the spyglass.
"Pretty gets there first," he says.
"Pretty gets there tired."
"Not yet."
"Not yet," I agree, and drink my tea.
He smiles. It isn't the smile he gave the clerk. It's smaller and drier and it goes nowhere near his eyes, and for half a breath I think it might be the only honest one he owns. Then it's gone, and he raps two knuckles on the Ember table as if he is knocking at a door, and says, "See you on the board, Lomond," and walks back across the aisle to a table that is already making room for him.
Hadie wipes her nose with the back of her wrist. "He's not that bad."
"He's exactly that bad."
"He fixed the little one's strap."
"He fixed the little one's strap where the whole mess could see him fix it."
She looks at me for a long moment, the way she looks at a knot she thinks I tied wrong. "Kesta. He's in Tide."
"I know where he is."
"I mean you're allowed to look."
I know what she means. Everybody hears the wing rule at Muster, in the Commandant's flat voice on the first night: riders of the same wing may not be lovers, because a rider who breaks formation for a lover gets the wing killed. Riders of different wings may love whom they like. Ember and Tide sit side by side down the middle of this hall, with an aisle and a rule's width between them, and the rule doesn't touch us at all.
"I'd sooner kiss a skein-bow," I tell her.
"That's not a no."
"Drink your tea, Wennet."
The tack rooms are off the aerie stair, low stone rooms cut back into the cliff one after another. Each one has a door that has never in its life shut properly and a lamp on an iron hook. I take the third along, because it has the best lamp and because it is mine at this hour, and nobody in Ember is fool enough to argue about it anymore.
The room smells of oiled leather and damp stone, and the cold in here is the old cold of the rock, not the morning's. It gets into the crocks of oil overnight and thickens them, so the first thing I do is set the crock on the bench under the lamp and wait for it to loosen while I lift my harness down off its peg.
Brown leather, dark with oil and with use. The buckles are brass and they are clean. They are always clean.
I sit on the stool with the harness across my knees and start at the top, out loud. Everybody checks out loud. The officers say it's so the next rider can hear your mistake. I do it because my own voice is steadier than my head.
"Girth strap."
I work the oil into the long strap with the heel of my hand, root to tip, and feel along the stitching for anything lifting. The oil finds the rope burns on my palm straight away. It bites like sea water in a cut. I breathe out through my teeth and keep going.
"Cross-strap."
The cross-strap takes the weight when Nerra rolls. I flex it hard where it crosses, looking for the fine pale cracks that come before a tear. Nothing.
"Thigh buckles. Left. Right."
I oil the leather around each one and leave the brass dry, and I work each tongue through its keeper and back until it moves the way it should, without catching.
"Quick-release."
The catch at the breastbone is never oiled. Oil turns to grit, and grit is how a catch jams with the ground coming up. I wipe it with a clean rag and work it, open and shut, open and shut, until the snap is crisp enough to hear over a wind.
You are grinding your teeth, Nerra says. I can feel it in mine.
She is below me on the Ledge. I can feel her down there the way I can feel weather coming, a pressure on the left side of my skull, and this morning the pressure won't sit still. She has been pacing since first light. I felt it in the mess. I felt it in the clerk's walk.
"I'm oiling," I tell the empty room.
You are oiling with your jaw. Mule. Stop it.
She has called me Mule since the second week. She says it is because I am stubborn and I carry too much. I think she just likes the sound of it.
"It's level again."
I know. I heard the whole Ledge say so. The Tide dragons are very pleased about it. They think it means their boy wins.
"It does mean that."
Does it.
"Reserve line," I say, louder than I need to, and unclip it from its ring.
The reserve line is the last thing between a rider and the sea when everything else has gone wrong. I pay it out through my hands an arm's length at a time and feel every inch for chafe, and the rough hemp drags over the burns on my palms, and that is the moment it all comes up in me at once, the bracket on the door and the clerk going pink and the boy's strap and that small dry smile, and the Brannick names on the rolls-hall wall, and my father loading carts in the dark under the Gap, and all my hours, and the plain fact that I can fly as well as Oren Brannick and he can fly as well as me and the only thing on earth that will separate us at the end of this season is that people want to follow him and nobody has ever once wanted to follow a mule.
I stop paying out line. My hands are shaking. Not from the cold.
I coil the line back up, tight and even, and clip it to its ring, and check the clip twice.
There is something else, Nerra says.
Her voice has changed. Lighter. She sounds the way she does after a seal hunt, when she has eaten and wants me to ask her about it.
"What?"
The bronze from Tide.
"Vorrel."
He has flown past my aerie three mornings running. Very slowly. With his wings out further than he needs them.
I sit with the rag in my hand. "He's showing off."
He is. He does it rather well. A pause, and in it I can feel her stretching, a long pull across shoulders I don't have. He is not as stupid as his rider.
"Oren isn't stupid," I say, before I can stop it.
The lamp ticks on its hook. Down on the Ledge, Nerra goes very, very quiet in a way that feels a lot like a dragon laughing.
I did not say he was, Mule. You did.
"Go hunt something."
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.