Eagles and Swans

Ruthenia didn't bother picking up her usual fix of honey milkshake on her way home. She was too busy trying to get her thoughts to sit right in her head. From the canopy of her umbrella, she frowned and watched the scenery pass a hundred feet below, listening to the frogs croaking in the River Colura as she followed it.

How had the Arcane royal family found out about her work? Questions buzzed in her mind like hornets as she drifted on homeward. This was too close for comfort. They were one step from uncovering the nest. The unspeakable thing.

How dare that Arcane Priss make those demands!

Downstream, the banks of the watercourses grew more crowded with marsh birds, squawking into the evening among the bobbing reeds, but even their piercing shrieks could not break through her thoughts. She was almost thankful for the distraction of Tanio, awaiting her on her patio as the last of the light slipping beneath the horizon.

“Somno needs that engine by Friday!” was his singsong greeting as she landed. Ruthenia was no longer thankful for the distraction. She glared as she went inside her shed, slamming the door shut between him and herself.

Still, she found herself at her workbench after dinner, hammering the last rivets into the engine's chassis plates. By eight o’clock that night, it was ready to be sent back to Mr. Somno, and she only need shoot a message to his private courier. She flung her plasma welder and wrenches into her toolbox with a loud jangle, pushing it under her shelves with a foot, then stood and stretched, working the knots out of her shoulder muscles.

Ruthenia was launched out of her stretching exercises by a monstrous, watery gurgling. She glanced about for a beast before realising it came from beneath her feet, rattling her floorboards. She flung her doors open and dashed out into the night and to the edge of her patio, leaning over the rails.

Her mouth fell open. Down beneath her shed, the River Colura had been conquered by a never-ending chain of whirlpools—like mouths gaping in the surface, sucking the currents and the plant debris in. Every inch of the river frothed white in the moonlight, and the marsh birds flew in frantic circles over the banks, shrieking.

“What’s going on—” she breathed as she stumbled across the bridge to Tanio’s house, tripping on the gaps between the planks and yelling her boss’ name.

Within a minute, Tanio was out on his front porch with her, notebook and pencil in hand, glasses perched on his nose. 

“What d’you reckon is going on down there?” she asked.

“I don’t know!” the man exclaimed, flipping his notebook open. “But it must have to do with everything else! The swaying buildings. The ships and the sounds in the Deeps. Something beautiful, something amazing!” He stared as if hypnotised, eyes wide as the full moon. 

“There’s nothing beautiful about what I’m seeing here,” she muttered, drawing away from the rails. 

They took in the bizarre moonlit spectacle for a while, but the man continued to stare at the currents long after Ruthenia had lost interest, flipping through his notebook and jotting frantic notes in its pages.

---

Ruthenia crossed the bridge beneath the heavy grey morning sky, canvas bag full of notebooks, rolled blueprints beneath her arm, her umbrella on her elbow. She stumbled to a stop on Tanio’s porch. The man was already waiting for her, arms crossed on his porch railings.

“Well, that’s an improvement for punctuality,” he said with a smirk, before turning once again to the grey horizon where a speck was soaring towards them—one that slowly grew into the shape of a man atop a large wooden rectangle.

It was the job of Sharmon Aldo, their chemist friend and resident fuel expert, to ferry Titanio and Ruthenia to Eldon’s mansion every Saturday. He had the largest flight mount among them: a priceless Onao table, its ornate legs sawed off.

He waved from the distance as he hurtled towards them. “Hedgehog Head!” Tanio shouted. The chemist was built like a beer barrel, and his rosy face was topped by a crop of brown hair that frequently matted into spikes thanks to his overtures in the laboratory. His brown coat, stained by various chemicals and reagents, fluttered out behind him like a cape.

“No time to waste now, the rain’s about to start!” he shouted, gesturing for them to board.

Once seated comfortably, the two men burst into animated conversation about the great amount of work to come. "How are the purification studies coming along?"

"The last trial with fractionation gave me some potion half clean, but half isn't much good, now!"

Over the farmland they coursed. Fields of wheat, barley and corn passed beneath them, small squares coming together in a huge tapestry. All the colours were muted beneath the blackening blanket of clouds above.

Sharmon and Tanio’s conversation at the front of the table was rapid and brash; they passed jokes about work life and appeasing sponsors and assistants who refused to listen. Ruthenia sighed and curled her arm around one table-leg stump, letting her legs hang over the edge and watching the fields slip by beneath her soles.

Thunder clapped. All three looked up. “Ihir blessing us with haste,” Sharmon said under his breath. He put his hands out on either side and swept them through the air. Their speed doubled.

The first sprinkling of rain began as they came flying past the Royal Palace of Helika. Ruthenia stared at the serene estate’s floating mansions and side houses through the thin misty drizzle. It wasn't a building complex so much as a small airborne town on its own, stretching a mile in the direction they flew. The wings and blocks and side-houses were centred around the main tower, whose gilded doors stood shut, its interior a mystery to all but the Arcane and Ordinary royal families.

She had heard wild stories about their grotesque wealth. Five attendants to a person. An equine for every resident. Breakfast in bed! It wasn’t hard to see how the old Arcane Kings had so quickly lost sight of the country they had meant to serve.

What was the difference, anyway, between the Kings and she? Resolving diplomatic issues couldn’t be any harder than building a train engine from scraps, or fixing a backed-up valve.

She wrinkled her nose at the gleaming walls as they passed, the drizzle beginning to grow a little less friendly.

“You daydreaming about the palace life?” said Sharmon, turning briefly to her.

Ruthenia scrunched up her face. “Why would I?” she growled. “That place rots people’s souls, that’s what it does.”

The palace vanished behind them, and all the mysteries cloistered within it. The drizzle swelled into a downpour.

*

While it wasn't the palace exactly, the Legars Manor would steal a breath or two yet. It was as much as one could expect of the abode of a royal secretary: the houses didn't hire anyone without a respectable estate of their own. One of the remaining ground mansions left in Astra, this fine specimen had been renovated a dozen times over, but never relocated to the air.

By the time they skidded to a stop over the Legars landing balcony, all three were soaked and shivering. Ruthenia grimaced at every squelch of her socks in her shoes, her shirt clinging damply to her back. They tumbled off Sharmon's table, dripping, and scurried down the stairs into the shelter to be halted by Eldon Legars himself in the hallway.

“Good to see you! Your shirts have certainly seen better days.” Eldon, a bespectacled man of forty or so, smiled at the three sodden messes on his front step with both hands tucked behind his back. Brown hair combed over his scalp, he wore a pressed green tweed sweater-vest, not a fold out of place. “You will be pleased to know that the interns have made remarkable progress since last week.”

“Oh, very nice!” answered Sharmon.

Eldon watched them the way a supervisor might watch a team of bumbling workers. He welcomed each of them in turn with a perfunctory handshake, each returning it with a different degree of enthusiasm. Then he waved them along down the corridor, and like a huddle of ducklings they followed.

Rounding the curve of the staircase, they glided into a hall of gilded chandeliers and marble floors. Ruthenia stared at the golden floral designs in the carpet as they passed beneath her feet. Halfway down the hall, where they passed a cosy sitting room populated with ornate chairs, Eldon paused and glanced about for incoming attendants. Then he began towards his study door in a brisk walk, gesturing for them to follow.

As Ruthenia had found out on the day she had first met Eldon, building a secret basement in your own home was not the simple matter of hiding a doorway behind a bookcase. There were all sorts of giveaways one had to account for: friction marks, telltale seams, thin walls.

So instead of resorting to the designs of predecessors, the four of them had designed their own door mechanism together, from wood and carpets and a system of Threaded pulleys.

“You’d better not let anyone discover it, Moneypants,” Tanio had warned as he had signed off on the blueprint, “or it’s straight to the slammer with you.”

Eldon had smiled in response. “If we were discovered, you’d have only yourself to blame.”

The door was still here, and it had proven its usefulness against the countless attendants residing within this house. One by one, they slipped into the carpeted study. Once all four were in, Eldon shut the door quietly behind them. It was ordinary, if opulent: the walls were towering bookcases, and a single ancient desk stood against the far wall, with a drawer locked by a key.

Fishing it from his pants pocket, the man slid the key into the lock, and turned it one full round clockwise.

“Here we go!” Sharmon whooped like a child, grabbing the study chair. Ruthenia simply sat down on the carpet. With a quiet hiss, the floor began to descend, leaving the desk and the shelves behind. The ceiling shifted upward, blank walls streaking upward around them. From below, a doorway slid into view and beyond it, the basement where everything happened.

They stumbled out  of the dimness into the bright hall, two stories tall and almost as sprawling as the mansion above it. Their steps echoed as they entered, Ruthenia's heart swelling at the sight of this great secret of theirs, the thing that had necessitated all this hiding, raised on props in the middle of the room.

Modeled after the bird for which it was named, the Swift was Tanio’s blueprint given life: the slender scaffolding of a steel skeleton, thrice as long as she was tall, the beginnings of canvas wings stretched out on either side of it. They were not the first ones here: two young men worked away beneath the incomplete skeleton of the machine, wrenching and welding atop a pair of stepladders.

Both auburn heads whipped around at the sound of the newcomers, their faces similar enough that Ruthenia was certain they were siblings.

“Excellent work, boys!” announced Tanio, pushing ahead to meet the two interns. “Your names?”

“You must be Mister Calied! I'm Sandro,” said the slightly taller of the two with a grin, reaching a gloved hand out to shake the inventor's.

"The one and only," he answered with a little bow.

“My name is Sef.” The other boy waved cautiously with the hand not holding the welder.

Eldon hastened towards the newly-met boss and intern. “These two have been unusually industrious today,” he said with a chuckle. “Rather nervous about their first inspection, I imagine.”

“We’re no monsters! Nothing to be nervous about,” Ruthenia said, marching up to the gathering.

Seph turned. "Who's that?"

"Just my rather hotheaded assistant," Tanio murmured. "I'm pleased to hear that you've been hard at work!"

While the man and the newfound interns meandered into a conversation about the work they had done this week so far, Ruthenia was startled by a call of her last name. She turned to find that Eldon, the issuer, had already retreated back to the doorway and was waving her towards himself.

"Wait, but, inspections—"

Ruthenia glanced over at Tanio, but the man was busy guffawing at a joke he had just made, while the brothers returned his laughter sheepishly. Sighing, she walked away from the gathering.

Eldon waited till she had come to a stop. “I presume," he said, "that you've been in contact with a member of the Arcane royal family."

Her mouth gaped. “It was you!”

“Why, yes, Miss Cendina,” the royal secretary replied. “It was at a council meeting three nights ago that the Arcane King put forth a most curious request, for help of a mechanical nature. I hope you do not mind that I offered your name, I do think you fit their needs perfectly." He pushed up his glasses. "But I am told you..." he cleared his throat, "rejected their offer of work.”

Ruthenia let out a voiced sighed. "Yeah, why would I want to work for that Arcane Priss?"

"Surely you would!" Eldon's brow furrowed. She drew her lips into a line. Here it came. “What an opportunity, and what a rare one! Young lady, you're lucky they have decided to persist with their request; I spoke so well of you and I insisted upon it. Play along and you’ll be rewarded handsomely!"

“I don't know about that. He offered the honour of having worked for the Arcane royal family,” Ruthenia said in a whiny mockery of his voice.

"They offered no reward? Well, I say—"

She shrugged. “Thank you. For thinking that highly of me, I mean.”

“There's no need to thank me,” he replied with an earnest grimace. "The best thanks you could pay me would be to accept their job. I could see their distress plainly; I assure you they are in great need of you. And besides..." Here he tipped his glasses and raised an eyebrow. "Wouldn't you like to improve their opinion of my advice?"

She folded her arms and sniffed. “Well, if he wants my service, he’d better be ready to fork out hundreds of aurs. And three favours. At the very least.”

---

After a tea of unseasoned waterfowl the next day, Ruthenia came back to a folded note on her desk, written on an immaculate piece of white card.

She already knew who its sender must be before she had picked it up, but she flipped it over to be sure. And sure enough, she found the signature of one Aleigh Luzerno, Arcane Prince of Astra.

She contemplated crumpling it up without reading its contents, but even as she held it, she found herself wrestling with, and then succumbing to, curiosity.

As her last class ended, Ruthenia stacked her books up and slid them into her sling-bag, leaving the classroom and its afternoon glow behind. She prepared a scowl as she marched along the corridor.

The Arcane Prince awaited her by the menagerie gate, just as he had said he would, the dull light throwing streaks of shadows across everything. Today, he seemed to be making a decent effort to look a touch less contemptuous.

“Thank you for your time, Miss Cendina,” he said, as she burst through the gates into the dim, hay-scented hall. “I would like to negotiate a price.”

“A price, now!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t you propose one last week?” She folded her arms and pretended disinterest. A bird's squawk answered.

“We require help, urgently," he said again. "There are few other places we may find the sort of help we need.”

She paused, lowering her umbrella. “Firstly, who’s we?” she said.

“The Arcane royal family.”

“Your whole family?”

“Yes,” he said. “We require your help. Once again, I cannot reveal the nature of the task before you have agreed. But if you do choose to render your services to us, we shall be indebted to you—a hundred aurs indebted. Once agreed to, you shall be bound by your word to complete the task to the letter. You will receive your payment of a hundred aurs after. Do you agree?”

Ruthenia hated binding words, but at the mention of a hundred aurs, she suddenly felt very much less resistant to the thought of helping them. “I still don’t understand,” she murmured. “How do you know I'm good for the job?”

“Your recommender, a trusted friend, was enthusiastic in their recommendation.” His expression betrayed nothing.

She narrowed her eyes. “Put another fifty aurs into the deal and you have my agreement.”

He nodded. Her eyes widened. “I shall have a hundred and fifty aurs delivered personally to you. What do you have to offer me as security?”

She frowned in puzzlement. “Security?”

“I must have some way of ensuring that you see the task through to the end, and not take the cargo hostage—”

"Take it hostage? No, that's enough of your Arcane nonsense! I'm not giving you one of my belongings just because you don't trust me, me, the one you expect to accept some mystery job you won't tell me anything about! Do you have no ounce of faith in your body?"

In perhaps the least frigid gesture he had made since they had begun talking, the Arcane Prince sighed. "Please, Miss Cendina. This is a singularly sensitive project—surely you must understand that by now." He curled the fingers of his right hand. "If you must know, a person's life—the life of someone important—hangs in the balance here. I cannot reiterate how important it is to us that this transaction be completed without incident, and that we be sure of that."

Whatever protest had been forthcoming, Ruthenia smothered it out. "Alright. Alright. I get it." She sucked in a breath between her teeth. "How about—" Casting her gaze down, she reached for the only object that would be worth anything to his fancy Arcane eyes: her watch, hanging from her neck. She unlooped its chain from around her neck, frowned, and planted it in his outstretched palm. "Take care of it."

His fingers curled around the device. “Thank you, sincerely, Miss Cendina. I shall have the package delivered to you tomorrow morning. You will know what to do with it then." He blinked. "That is all; you are dismissed.”

And there went everything. She held up a finger. “I am not dismissed, Arcane Priss! Don't you dismiss me! Who d'you think you are, my mother?”

“I am the—” He broke off as she shoved a hand in his face.

“You’re the one who needs my help,” Ruthenia shouted. “Now act like you actually want it.”

She managed to leave him stunned as she sprinted up the staircase into the sunlight, feeling uncomfortably light without her watch.

Damn it! Ihir save her from these royals.