Eagles and Swans

“Put away your books. I have a treat for you today!"

A quiet conversation bloomed in the corner as Ms. Arina strode into the stifling classroom and set down her books.

Ruthenia knew what those classmates knew: that a treat, in Ms. Arina's parlance, was never a good thing.

“Quiet when I talk!" she snapped. "Now, over the next four weeks, to account for a third of your grade, you will all be completing a practical Weaving assignment." The disappointment was palpable in the silence—the surprise, none. "Mind that this is no ordinary assignment. You will work together, in pairs of your choosing, to craft a performance. That performance will involve the movement of a sheet of paper through the air in precise patterns, by means of Weaving. Through investigation and cross-reference with the appropriate literature, you..."

The class was swept up in a high-strung mutter before Arina had completed her current sentence. “Calan! Psst!” Alacero called sharply across Ruthenia's desk, and her two seatmates were instantly embroiled in a whispered discussion.

Ruthenia already knew who she would be working with. It had never been anyone else. Drumming her fingers, she turned to stare at the back of Hollia’s head, willing her to look this way.

When a few seconds had gone by and the girl hadn't yet noticed, her shoulders grew rigid. She began clawing at the back of her left palm, grinding her teeth. Had Hollia known before the class? Had she already agreed to do the project with someone else? Had she been waiting for this chance to leave Ruthenia? But it couldn't be—what did Hollia stand to gain? She was the best student in this class—

She leapt in her seat when her friend finally turned to wave, obliviously beaming. Ruthenia let her shoulders sag, gesturing at herself and then at Hollia, to which the girl nodded.

"In addition to this performance, you will each return a report," Arina's shrillness cut through their wordless exchange. Hollia perked up, attention usurped by the teacher once more. Bowing her head to make way for Alacero and Calan's conversation, Ruthenia began sketching solutions to their paper problem, Arina's voice a buzz in the back of her thoughts. "This report will describe, in detail, the problems you encountered and how you went about solving them with Weaving. You may only solve your problem with Weaving—"

She rolled her eyes, drawing resolutely. It was always about this, Weaving, Weaving, Weaving with these Flight Physics classes, as if that were all there was to flight.

But she knew what they were dodging around, the buried sin—the sin so great it couldn't even be spoken of.

A twinge pierced her. She swiped her pencil across her sketch, trying to gash the paper. The tip of the lead cracked off. But no one seemed to notice, and they continued to listen and write like automata.

It was hard to keep your eyes on any one spot in this afternoon heat. Ruthenia couldn't be bothered with paying the teachers and the school more thought than they deserved, so she let the broken pencil tip drop to the paper again, a trail of frustrated angular lines appearing beneath.

She came here for Tanio's sake. It was Tanio's money that had put her here in this school for snobs, and she would honour his efforts by attending her classes. But every minute was a chore, and would not stop being a chore.

"You will spend the rest of today's class forming pairs and creating a list of possible solutions to the assignment problem. Please, begin." At long last, the teacher released them from her lecture, though it would be a while yet before they were truly freed from her. Chairs rumbled across the floor even as she spoke, and the classroom was swept up in a furor of discussion and argument.

From her seat, Ruthenia stared at Telis, the girl beside Hollia, until she felt her gaze burning into her back and broke off from her conversation with the blonde girl, rising. Only then did she shuffle out of her seat.

She dropped into the now-deserted chair beside Hollia, slapping her sketched plans on her friend's desk. “You'll do the Weaving,” she said at once. “I'll do everything else.”

Hollia sighed, and her smile came a second too late. “It is your forte,” she answered with a nod. “When will we meet to work on it?”

“This Sunday, in my shed,” Ruthenia answered promptly. “That’s it, we’re done here.”

“I...suppose so!” murmured Hollia. “Should we at least pretend not to be? We still have the whole hour.”

Ruthenia snorted. “Why would you pretend?”

"I mean, it wouldn't look good for us to not be working on something..."

"Who cares how we look?" she laughed.

She anticipated an answer from Hollia, but instead she bowed her head to scribble the details of the arrangement in her organiser. Sniffing, Ruthenia swung her legs up onto Telis' desk and closed her eyes. The class continued to bustle with chatter around her, lulling her to sleep.

---

For every Astran student, Practical Flight was either one’s favourite subject, or the most painful.

For Ruthenia, it was both. Today they would begin learning the most dangerous beginner's skill—the roll—and as dangerous skills went, those with unstable mounts found them five times as painful to learn; those who could barely Weave, ten times.

This would be a long class.

The only consolation was the evening that set the backdrop for this lesson. Drops of gold and orange had begun to seep into the sky as the class commenced, the garden around them abloom in rainbow shades upon the first swell of spring. Gripping her glinting bicycle by the handles, Ms. Decanda wheeled it out onto the lawn, all smiles.

It wasn't that Ruthenia couldn't demand to sit it out; Decanda had no qualms about students making their own decisions about their ability. It was that she was alright with it, that she didn't care for the pretence of obedience. Her earnestness was like a dare.

“Mister Delor,” Ms. Decanda said, pointing at the student who had long become her honorary demonstration partner.

"Yes, ma'am!" Orrem lifted his head, red hair blazing bright. His racing eagle, Astero, beat his wings out across the grass.

“I take it you’ve done this before?”

“A number of times, ma’am,” answered Orrem.

"Show 'er!" came a cry from the brunet boy whose name Ruthenia never learned.

“Get up,” she said.

Awaiting the command till now, Orrem swung onto his eagle's back and gave him the racer's heel-spur, as he had a thousand times. Amid twenty gazes, Astero sprung into the air with a single roaring beat of his eight-foot wings, sending a breeze blustering in the watching crowd's direction. Leaping into her seat, Ms. Decanda began to pedal, gaining momentum till her bicycle lurched into the sky after her student. She shot to the other end of the courtyard, swerving around to face her class.

“Now, as with every other technique!” she shouted down at the rest of the gathering, “everyone will discover their own unique method of rolling on their mount! It is an interactive process, one that will be expedited by sincere attention to your mount’s strengths and weaknesses!”

“My mount has nothing but weaknesses,” Ruthenia muttered.

“Now, you will see the differences between the way I roll, and how your classmate does. Alright, Mister Delor, fly at me, as fast as you can.”

Orrem’s eagle made a final loop around the courtyard, passing each tower in turn. In a clean swerve, it broke from that arc, hurtling straight at the flight instructor in a blur. Around Ruthenia, classmates raised their voices in cries of alarm.

Those shouts turned to cheers as Ms. Decanda’s bicycle lurched into a steep angle and Orrem’s eagle gusted past, feathers brushing the wheels, setting them spinning. Even Ruthenia found herself quietly clapping. She was hard-pressed to hate him. He was, at the very least, very good at what he did, and if he was well-to-do it was because he had earned it.

One of the few who did.

The sun glared through the gap on the clock-tower side and lit the courtyard orange, turning the two fliers into silhouettes. The bicycle swung straight, and before Orrem had turned back, Ms. Decanda was shooting like an arrow in his direction.

He gave a shout, but threw himself bodily to his right, arms looping about Astero's neck as his wings folded and he twisted, going horizontal while the teacher streaked past in a gleam of metal.

The eagle plummeted a foot before his wings unfurled once more, completing his spin and righting himself. The entire class erupted into applause while they made a final lap and swooped back down towards the field.

“Your rolling needs a bit of work,” admitted Ms. Decanda with a slap on the boy’s back, “by professional standards, that is. But a roll like that will earn you top marks from me, if that’s all that matters.” Nodding to send him back, the flight instructor turned to the rest of her class. “The rest of you—practise for ten minutes, and then find yourself a partner to practice with. Sooner if you’re confident.”

Ruthenia felt her stomach twist itself into knots as the class scattered across the field, all grins and whoops. She glanced down at the umbrella curled tightly in her fist. "Stupid umbrella," she growled.

---

Not ten minutes into the class, Ruthenia was twenty bruises bluer than before. She’d lost count of the number of times Ms. Decanda had had to Weave her to safety, each time with an increasingly furrowed brow.

“I shan’t hold your hand through this, Miss Cendina,” she said. “You must learn to cooperate with your umbrella.”

“But—it’s an umbrella, I can’t roll on this—”

The teacher gave her withering look. “I’ve seen students roll on tree branches,” she said.

“Maybe they weren’t useless Weavers—”

“No excuses now, Miss Cendina. I want to see you work hard.” The woman gave her two ineffectual pats on the shoulder, before steering her back towards the rest of the class.

Sulking as she trudged through the rustling grass, she quickly sought Hollia out from amidst the crowd and snagged her as her practice partner, though she almost relinquished her out of guilt when she noticed Telis right beside her, mouth open mid-invitation.

That guilt only worsened as practice proceeded. Hollia failed half the time to even roll, and not due to a lack of skill on her part: her pigeon Phore seemed to prefer roosting on a tower parapet to throwing itself at Ruthenia, particularly given how she’d crashed right into him on their very first attempt.

They didn’t do much better on switching roles, either. Three crashes meant Hollia ended the day almost as bruised as she.

The shame was thick enough that Ms. Decanda's call for the end of lesson brought no relief, even. She slunk back for the debrief, and sulked up at the vermilion sky as they were dismissed.

Ruthenia began to think, as the umbrella clattered to the ground for the fourth time, that going home would not be possible today. Her arms were too sore to even hold the umbrella up, let alone find some Thread that would take it. It fell for a fifth time, and she gave a yell of frustration, flinging her umbrella at the ground. Stooping to pick it up, she picked it up and began dusting the broken grass blades off its fabric.

“Miss Cendina," the voice almost did not register at first. "I would like to speak to you.”

"Me?" she muttered. Wait, that voice.

Ruthenia sprang to her feet and turned, letting her arms drop to her sides when she found the Arcane Prince of Astra waiting for her. She normally did her best not to look right at him, or at any other Arcane—but now she had no choice, and a chill of dread swept her as their gazes connected, brown to green.

He was as Belan as they came, with the thin face and golden locks of the settlers, which he wore tied in a ribbon, as many Belan men did. He had spiteful green eyes, and those eyes were regarding her as one might regard week-old dirty laundry.

They brought a bitter taste to Ruthenia's mouth.

“What do you want to talk about, prince?” She spat the last word like a curse.

“I would appreciate a more clement tone,” he said. “Could we speak elsewhere?”

The entire meadow washed vivid orange. Ruthenia clenched a fist. “No, tell me here,” she said.

He pursed his lips, as if to prevent himself from frowning. “Are you defying me?”

“As if I care what you want,” she said.

He seemed to toy with the idea of spitting a retort of equal acerbity, before pulling back. ”We have encountered a...situation that requires the immediate attention of a mechanic,” he said. “An acquaintance of ours recommended unto us your services, and we would hereby like to enlist your help.”

A pause. The wind whirled across the field, stirring strands of their hair. Some fluttered into his eyes, and he blinked.

Ruthenia’s brow furrowed. “Well? What’s the problem?”

“I cannot disclose its nature until you pledge your service to us.”

She folded her arms. “I’m sorry, I don’t know if Arcanes do it differently, but I don’t agree to do jobs without knowing what they involve.”

“As a matter of policy, I cannot disclose such sensitive information until you have made a binding pledge,” he replied curtly.

"Policy?" she sputtered.

“You must understand our privacy is of utmost importance. Is the opportunity to furnish your services to the Arcane royal family not reward enough?”

Ruthenia grimaced so hard her cheek twitched. “That's it, that's enough,” she snarled. “I don’t care who you are. Maybe you're used to everyone forgetting themselves at the very sight of your face, but I'm not just doing whatever you and your prissy lot want of me! I'm not a serf!”

She busied herself with her umbrella once more. A breeze filled the silence while she scrabbled at the threads with hooked fingers. Overhead, the clouds were whirling orange streaks. She gritted her teeth as the orange umbrella tumbled to the ground at her feet, aware that the Arcane Prince was still watching her fumble with her flight mount.

Stooping to pick it up, she turned to flick her hand at him. “Go away!”

Ruthenia finally succeeded in yanking the Threads from the air as the last word left her mouth. She barely heard the first word of the Arcane Prince’s response before she had shot off into the sky.