The Weight of Falling Up
By the time Examiner Dovek called my name, three people had already left the roof. Two had chosen brooms, which was what sensible people at Nine Eaves usually did.
The first leaned low over a broom and cut around the western chimney in a polished brown arc. The second sat upright on another, rising at a measured angle while the lacquered handle stayed level beneath both hands. The third went past between the lifted wings of a pale horse, hands buried in its mane while each downstroke sent a warm gust rolling over the slates.
Two brooms were not a coincidence. Nine Eaves kept racks of practice models, broom-width gates, and enough standard diagrams to wallpaper a tower. The horse was rare enough to draw looks in the dining hall, but not questions on an assessment roof. Its lane was painted wider, its harness had already passed inspection, and everyone present knew what those wings could do.
Then there was me.
“Juni Wex,” Dovek called again.
“Present. Still regrettably attached to the building.”
The Collegium of Nine Eaves occupied most of the view below us: black roofs pitched at improbable angles, bridges stitching tower to tower, windows bright as chips of amber. Beyond it, the city fell away in terraces toward a silver bend of river. The launch roof was so high that birds passed beneath the gutters. Prestige, I had learned, was often ordinary terror with excellent masonry.
I sat on the warm slate and unlaced my shoes. Mine were scuffed brown leather, bought without enchantment, one still bearing a pale water mark from a badly judged fountain.
I pulled them off, set my stockinged feet on the roof, and turned the right shoe heel-up across my knee.
Dovek crouched opposite me. Their examination coat snapped once in the wind and settled. “Begin.”
The ink stylus came from my cuff. I pressed its blunt nib beside the heel and drew the first stroke in a curve around the back of the shoe. The second hooked across the underside toward the arch. The third doubled inward, a black curl aimed at the small hollow between them. It looked less like a word than an arrow teaching the wind where to leave.
Nothing happened. Ink was only ink until someone living asked more of it.
I cupped the shoe between both hands, breathed, and let warmth run out through my palms. The three lines drank it. For an instant, black deepened beyond black.
I drew the mirrored wind curl around the other heel and underside, charged it, and put both shoes back on. My fingers trembled at the laces. Apparently fear was mostly an audience with opinions.
Dovek tapped one gloved finger above the right-hand curl. “No crown.”
“I’m fond of steering.”
“And your stationary count?”
“Small bursts.”
I traced the shape I had omitted: a shallow cap with three points. “A crown spreads one heel’s wind beneath my center. It will check a fall and quiet a turn, but it cannot steer. Once I feed it power, one point burns away per breath. Three points, exactly three breaths, then the crown is gone and the narrow jet returns.”
“Can you interrupt it?”
“I can cut power, but the unused points burn out anyway. It cannot be restarted.”
“A limitation.”
“A feature with strict opinions about counting.”
“A limitation,” Dovek repeated. “You are required to remain inside the stationary boundary for a count of three. Demonstrate the limitation. Do not conceal it.”
The first broom candidate flashed past the far eave, coat streaming straight behind. Above, the second held almost motionless while the broom’s bristles trembled through corrections too small to see. The pale horse climbed through a patch of sun, every feather briefly edged in gold.
I imagined a wide, blunt plume roaring beneath me while I hung unable to turn, all three crown points visibly burning away. Effective, temporary, and about as elegant as being held aloft by an argument.
“Understood,” I said.
I did understand. I simply had no intention of doing it.
Dovek raised a hand.
I ran for the edge.
At the gutter, I jumped, pointed both soles down, and drove warmth through my legs.
The curls answered.
Two pale streams of wind tore from my heels. They snapped my coat against my back, flung grit from the gutter, and punched me upward so hard my stomach arrived a moment after the rest of me.
I made a sound that began as a scream and improved into laughter.
The shoes did not carry me. The ink did not decide where I went. I supplied the power; the curls narrowed it into two rushing jets; my feet aimed the result. With both soles turned toward the roof and the output matched, I climbed. When I swept my heels behind me, the streams bent backward and shoved me forward into the blue.
For three glorious seconds, everything worked.
Then I drove a shade too much power through my left leg. Its jet surged harder.
My left hip lifted. My right shoulder dropped. The western chimney tipped sideways in front of me as I rolled toward the weaker stream.
“Excellent,” I told the rapidly rotating school. “A view.”
I nearly answered by forcing more through both heels. Instead I eased my left leg and fed the right until the two pale currents matched. The roll slowed. I opened my arms, shifted my hips, and came level with enough dignity to fool anyone who had not seen the first half.
The course turned around a tall iron arch strung with blue streamers. The first broom candidate banked through it by leaning into the curved handle. The second rose in a straight, measured line, hands quiet on the grip. Higher still, the winged horse folded its wings for one clean heartbeat, then opened them and surged upward.
There are respectable ways to fly. I had watched them practiced from the lower courts for years: the long broom bank, the patient broom hover, the powerful bargain between a rider and a winged animal. They all looked as though the sky were a country one might enter with the correct papers.
I arrived with two handwritten winds shouting at my heels.
I angled both feet down and poured on a smooth, sustained rush. Bells chimed somewhere below, nine notes thrown loose among the roofs. The jets curled white around my ankles and streamed behind me in twisting ribbons. Every change began in my body: toes lowered for climb, heels swept back for speed, one ankle canted outward to carve the bank. The air struck my soles, seized my coat, watered my eyes. I did not feel weightless. I felt gloriously outvoted by my own momentum.
The blue streamers cracked beside my ears. The city wheeled below in slate and copper and green garden squares. My legs began to tremble from holding both channels even, but the strain had a rhythm: power, angle, answer; power, angle, answer.
At the top of the arch hung the high-course bell.
I pitched forward, let the paired streams drive me through a rising curve, and slapped the bell with my palm.
Its note burst out bright enough to shake my teeth.
The arch rushed past beneath me. I was still climbing and moving far too fast toward the next roofline.
I swung both heels ahead and gave a moderate reverse pulse.
Wind blasted forward across my soles. My speed eased. The jets rasped over the curls and carried a few black flecks away into the white stream.
I noticed. I also noticed that the course marker remained safely unstruck, which seemed the more flattering observation.
Below, Dovek wrote on the examination sheet. Naturally, I assumed it meant astonishing, perhaps historic.
The stationary boundary waited ahead.
It was a square of yellow ribbons stretched between four slender poles on neighboring roofs, enclosing a piece of perfectly good empty air. The second broom candidate already occupied it.
They sat upright in the center, the broom level beneath them. Its bound twigs made tiny, practiced corrections while Dovek counted from the launch roof below.
“One.”
The rider shifted one knee. The broom eased back half a handspan.
“Two.”
The bristles dipped and recovered. From a distance, the candidate might have been sitting on a bench.
“Three.”
They glided out with a small, satisfied turn.
I hovered outside the ribbons on a low sustained rush. My legs had opinions now. Both were unprintable.
The safe answer waited in my cuff. I could draw the three-point crown over one heel, feed it power, and let the broad plume spend its three breaths beneath my center. I would lose steering while it burned, but I would remain stable long enough for the count.
Instead, I entered the square and began firing alternating microbursts.
Left, right, left, right. Each gust lasted barely longer than a blink. My ankles chattered beneath me as I corrected every drift with another sharp pulse. If I moved quickly enough, I reasoned, I would appear almost still.
“One,” Dovek called.
A left burst nudged me toward the upper ribbon. I snapped the right heel down and inward. Its jet kicked me back, then too far. Black specks peppered the pale wind behind it.
The first broom candidate swept along the outer course. The second left the square on an easy level line. The pale horse crossed the sun above, the rider bent to its rhythm. All three were moving. Moving looked dignified.
“Two.”
I fired right, left, right in quick succession. Each ignition punched through my calf. The last correction spun me a quarter turn and produced a sound from my throat like a startled kettle.
I smiled toward Dovek. Dovek did not smile back.
The right curl was shedding more ink than the left. I favored that foot whenever I drifted, and the separate little starts were eating its edges. I twisted enough to glimpse the heel. A gray nick had appeared in the outer curve.
“Three.”
I lurched out of the square with my chest heaving. Behind me, the wind-traces knotted and unraveled in no pattern worth admitting to.
“Juni,” Dovek called.
I curved back toward the nearest eave. Dovek had crossed to its ridge, the examination sheet tucked under one arm. Their attention fixed on my right heel.
“Your outer channel is scouring.”
So much for altitude protecting a person’s secrets.
“It has another descent in it.”
“You may declare a repair pause. One-point deduction. Inspect both shoes, then continue.”
One point. A small price, if points were the only things being weighed. But the other candidates were clean silhouettes against the sky, and I was sweating hard enough to drown a modest insect. A repair on the ridge would make the runes look provisional. It would make them look like something I had drawn on ordinary leather that morning.
Which, inconveniently, they were.
The rooftop-survey roster closed today. I pictured a term copying elevations from other apprentices’ notebooks while they measured the world with their own eyes.
I raised my right heel and looked. The nick was pale, narrow, and entirely real.
“I can complete,” I said.
Dovek’s expression did not change, but their questions became precise when they were worried. “Have you measured how much line remains?”
“I have seen it.”
“That was not my question.”
I fed a thin stream through the right curl. It came half a beat late, ragged at one edge.
“It is enough.”
The words left a sour place behind my teeth.
Dovek held my gaze for another beat, then pointed toward the descending course and the white landing ring on the launch roof.
“Proceed.”
I proceeded too quickly.
Smooth, matched output would have worn the ink slowly. I managed several sensible seconds of it.
Then I saw the first broom candidate arrowing toward the landing roof below, and my good judgment, already bruised, developed a competitive fever.
I tipped my heels back and drove.
The paired jets lengthened into white cords. Roofs rose around me. Wind shoved hair into my mouth. I spat it out, rolled between two stone finials, and added a sharp right pulse to recover the line. The pale horse wheeled well above the course, kept to its familiar wider lane. The second broom glided toward the far landing mark with infuriating composure.
My own ring came into view: a white circle on dark slate, Dovek approaching along the ridge beside it. I was high and fast. I should have begun braking then, with both feet angled forward and a long, moderate reverse flow.
Instead I chased the lost seconds.
The ring widened below.
I swung both heels ahead and drove power through the curls.
The left jet roared forward.
The right gave one ragged cough. Reverse wind tore across the worn outer curve, lifted the last thread of black, and silenced it.
The left side of my body was shoved backward. The right kept carrying forward and down.
My right shoulder dropped. The city rolled over me. In one sickening instant I snapped into a rightward corkscrew.
I forced more power down both legs by instinct.
Only the left answered.
The surviving reverse jet hammered my left side farther back. The corkscrew tightened. Roof, sky, roof, sky—the world became a wheel with me badly nailed to its rim.
I tried again. More power. More spin.
The shoes had not betrayed me. The right curl had announced its wear in black dust and a gray break. Dovek had offered me time. I had spent both warnings to purchase the appearance of ease.
“Call your stop, Juni!” Dovek shouted.
One hand was raised at the roof’s edge, ready for my declared surrender.
I could call and fail cleanly. I would be alive, unqualified, and indoors for a term.
Or I could keep feeding the one jet I had because motion felt more useful than falling.
That was the trap. The left curl was obeying perfectly. Every desperate command made the imbalance worse.
There was no graceful way out.
That helped.
Grace was what had put me here.
I cut all power.
The left jet vanished. Nothing corrected me; nothing chose a safer line. The added torque stopped, but the spin remained, and gravity took the rest.
I fell.
Wind clawed tears from my eyes. The roofs below looked small enough to fit in a box.
I pulled my knees tight, not to slow the rotation but to bring the failed shoe within reach. The world became a smaller, faster wheel around one steady thing: the scuffed heel a handspan from my nose.
The outer curl had opened to bare brown leather.
I tore the stylus from my cuff.
With the shoe turning beside my face, I dragged the missing curve around the heel. The nib skated. I drew again, slower, following the surviving line under the shoe until wet black joined black.
The base curl was whole.
I could have powered it then and hoped two narrow jets would agree before I struck a roof. Hope had already submitted enough examination work for one morning.
Above the repaired curl, I drew a shallow cap.
One point.
The roofs spun through the corner of my sight.
Two.
The pale horse crossed the wheel of sky, wings spread wide.
Three.
The crown waited in fresh black ink.
Neither leather nor drawing knew I was falling. Neither could decide to help. I flattened my palm over the heel and sent my living warmth through every new line.
Then I extended the right leg beneath me and supplied power.
The crowned curl opened.
Instead of a narrow jet kicking from one heel, a broad pale plume curved inward and blossomed beneath my center. It had no aim beyond the shape I had drawn. It could not choose the roof or turn me toward it. It simply poured wide and steady while I held the power.
I took the first breath.
The first crown point flashed white and blew away. The broad wind pressed against my rotation from below. Roof and sky stopped striking past quite so fast. My corkscrew widened, shuddered, and began to flatten.
One.
I took the second breath.
The next point burned. The plume thickened around my falling body, opposing the drop without erasing it. My stomach rose against my ribs. I opened from the tuck and hauled my left heel into view.
Its curl was frayed nearly through.
Two.
I drew the third breath.
The last point brightened above my right heel.
I put the stylus to the left shoe. Around the outside curve, under the heel, into the channel. Quick but whole. My lungs strained to release the breath too soon. I held it long enough to press my thumb over the wet line and send warmth into the repair.
The left curl darkened.
The final crown point vanished.
Three.
The broad plume collapsed to a narrow right-hand stream. I cut it at once rather than let one-sided thrust start another turn. The crown was gone, its one use spent, but the repaired curl beneath it remained.
For one raw heartbeat I was falling between decisions.
Then I aimed both heels below me and fed them equal power.
Two clean streams struck the air.
My hips steadied between them. I canted both feet against what remained of the turn and let the matched thrust unwind it. Then I angled both soles together and climbed away from the roofs on a smooth white rush.
“Right rune wore through!” I shouted toward Dovek. My voice tore thin in the wind. “I saw the damage. I declined the repair.”
The admission sounded embarrassingly small.
It also sounded true.
I did not chase the time I had lost. I did not rattle through frantic corrections. I held both outputs low and even, let the wind show every adjustment, and took the long curve back toward the landing roof.
The first broom candidate circled wide of my path. The second watched from beyond the yellow square, broom almost level. The pale horse beat upward with the rider low against its neck.
And I flew.
Not like any of them. Not tidily. My renewed jets streamed behind Nine Eaves, wavering when my ankles tired and straightening when I trusted the balance between them. A crosswind shoved me; I tilted both soles and let the paired thrust answer. Speed pulled me forward; I eased power instead of hiding it beneath another burst.
The landing ring swelled below.
I began braking while it still looked too far away.
Both heels forward. Both curls fed gently.
The jets streamed ahead in two pale fans, pushing against my motion. Ink flecks lifted from them, but slowly now, without the violent black spray of the earlier brake. The force climbed through my ankles, knees, and hips. I let it.
The roof rose.
I turned both soles down for one last soft rush, cut power, and dropped the final handspan onto slate.
Both ordinary shoes landed inside the white ring.
Momentum carried me three stumbling paces. I windmilled, recovered, and remained upright.
For several seconds, this seemed an unreasonable amount of success.
Then my legs sat me down.
Dovek came to stand at the edge of the ring.
I lay on my back with my knees up. “If that was the posture component, I request a merciful interpretation.”
“Your stationary-control component failed.”
“Ah.”
“You identified visible wear and declined an offered repair pause.”
“I remember that less fondly.”
“You continued into a high-load reverse brake without an adequate margin.”
“Are we approaching a point?” I asked.
“We are circling it to ensure you recognize the terrain.”
I pushed myself upright. Both heels were visible beyond my knees: the base curls dark and whole, the right crown entirely gone, the leather around them scuffed and dusty. They looked homemade because I had made them. They looked temporary because they were. Neither fact seemed shameful from the ground.
Dovek crouched and set the sheet on the slate between us.
“You also diagnosed asymmetric thrust while under load,” they said. “You stopped feeding it. You restored both channels without external intervention, used the crown as declared, stated the fault, and completed a controlled landing.”
The wind lifted one corner of the paper.
Beside stationary control, Dovek had written a mark I did not enjoy.
Beside judgment under failure, they had written one I did.
At the bottom was a pass.
I read it twice, in case the second reading revealed an educational cruelty.
“The rooftop-survey practicum?” I asked.
“You are qualified.”
Dovek held up a finger before I could become unbearable. “For long crossings, you will carry enough physical margin to finish with half the drawing intact. You will set a declared repair threshold before launch. And you will not confuse hiding effort with demonstrating control.”
I looked at the failed mark beside the stationary component.
Earlier, I would have argued that mark upward. Now my calves were still shaking from three breaths inside my own wind.
“That seems fair,” I said.
Dovek gave me the sheet.
Out beyond the roof, the last traces of my flight were coming apart. The rapid bursts inside the yellow square had left a ragged knot freckled with black. Lower down, the corkscrew twisted through itself where one jet had overruled the other. Beneath it hung one broad pale bloom, already thinning at the edges.
From there to the landing ring, two clean ribbons arrived side by side.
I had wanted one smooth wake across the sky.
What remained was better: an honest record of the wind I had wasted, the wind I had trusted, and the moment I finally learned the difference.