Eagles and Swans

A downpour began that lasted through the night, the pitter-patter lulling Ruthenia gently to sleep. By the next morning, the rain had cleared, leaving a fresh mist on the fields below. The clouds parted to reveal a clear blue dawn. Out on the patio, shimmering puddles caught the sun. The wind carried the scent of storm’s end, of grass ruffled by the rain, petals and twigs.

After downing her breakfast of bread and jam at the dining table, Ruthenia returned for her umbrella and stepped out onto her patio without her shoes. The wood was damp under her feet.

She shut the squeaky wooden double doors behind her and turned to the gap in the balustrades bordering the patio. Hanging the umbrella over the edge, she pulled it open. Today, the Threads took it more easily than usual, and her heart leapt when they caught. She tumbled into the canopy and soared away with a kick, staring upward between the white clouds as the sky turned a deeper shade of blue around her.

As Ruthenia flew westward through the airborne suburbs, she lowered herself till she was sitting. The River Colura passed beneath her as she followed its glittering current, lowering her course to shout and wave at the farm children swimming in it.

Floating two feet from the surface, she stuck her legs out to swish them in the cool current. She flew for twenty minutes southwest, till the fields became sand and the river fanned out in a broad estuary flowing into the sea.

The buildings of the Bollard District hung around her like paper ornaments, white and weightless, all poles and canvas. Out in the bay, the bells of trawlers chimed as they raised their nets to the calls of gulls. The steam vessels rode the swells of the tide, billows of condensed steam blooming from their chimneys. The shimmering expanse rippled on forever. 

Down to the bay Ruthenia flew. She landed on the grey rock roof of a reeking fish stall that overlooked the bay, and sat down with her umbrella floating overturned beside her, legs dangling over the edge of the rooftop beside the pulley that sailors would load full nets of fish onto.

Conversations drifted in and out of hearing beneath her amid the ringing of bells and hissing of steam. She heard conversations about the catch and the tides, and inevitably about the events that had been sweeping Astra of late.

“Been like this a week or so,” said a scraggly man who must be a steamship captain, beard brushing his tarnished uniform buttons. “Whirlpools and glitter on the waves, all that damned glitter. It clings to our hulls. Sailing's choppy from here to the Deeps and farther. No one dares sail the Argenta Sea, not like this.”

“It’s driving the fish mad,” answered the stall's owner. “Plenty of fish in our nets, plenty of silver scum too.”

“I saw a boat get pulled in with my own eyes,” the captain answered. “Got dragged bow-first into the sea, I could hear their screams from a mile out, poor souls.”

"Ihir help them."

"I say the whirlpools are Ihir's will, it is hebis loricoda anew."

The captain and the stall owner launched into a debate on theology and scripture, and that was when Ruthenia knew it was time for her to make her departure. She turned her umbrella around, kicking off and away before she could hear Ihir's name another time.

---

When she arrived back home, the wooden boards of Ruthenia's patio were warm against her soles, dried by the sun by now. Her mind was clear as glass. She returned her umbrella to the rack and dropped into her desk chair, where her messenger's glass was glowing.

Thank you most kindly. A courier will arrive at ten o’clock today.

It occurred to her then that it was Sunday, and Hollia meant to be visiting to complete the Flight Physics task they had been assigned. If she had sent a message about it, it was too bad about the timing, as the Arcane Priss' message would have replaced it.

But either way, Hollia would not be here till the afternoon. Remembering the library book stuffed in her bag, Ruthenia's eyes scanned the floor until she found it lying by the toolbox. She ducked to retrieve the textbook from inside it, and then found her way to her hammock with the massive volume. For the next hour or so, she absorbed herself in the inner workings of internal combustion engines, until there came a knock on her door.

Ruthenia glanced up and saw a blonde woman lurking by her open door, but not the one she had been expecting. “Come in,” she shouted.

She watched as the stranger entered haltingly, as if afraid the shed might devour her. She was pale-skinned with her long sun-blonde braid hanging to the woven silver chain belt girding her waist. A messenger bag hung upon her shoulder, the edges trimmed in gold, and at once Ruthenia knew who she might be.

“Good morning, Miss Cendina,” she said with a practiced smile. “I was sent by His Highness, the Arcane Prince, to—”

“Oh, yes, I know,” answered Ruthenia, picking up the heavy black box from her desktop and holding it out towards the visitor, mouth still hanging half open.

“Thank you,” she replied, in equally measured tone, clasping the box tightly in her hands. Flipping the cover of her hemp bag open, she fished out a brown parcel tied up in a red ribbon, and offered it to Ruthenia.

“What’s this?” she said, hands sinking with its unexpected weight. She put it on her tabletop with a telltale clink, and tugged the ribbon loose.

“Payment,” the courier replied.

Sure enough, as soon as the wrapping came undone, she found herself gaping at a wooden case of stacked aur coins—more than enough to pay off her expenses for the next three months. She spent the next five minutes shuffling the coins around, and then began to unload them from the box into the drawer, whereupon a stiff “May I go?” from the courier reminded Ruthenia that she had been standing there the entire while.

Her head sprang up. “Of course! Thank you and see you!”

With a dip of her head, she wished Ruthenia a good day, and Ruthenia grinned after her, resuming her examination of the case of aurs.

---

It was midway through slurping up her beef noodle lunch that with Tanio stepped out of the dining room and into the living room, the top of his head brushing the top of the doorway.

A series of knocks on the door to Tanio’s landing platform at the top of the stairs had Ruthenia abandoning the last dregs of noodles to the table. Leaping from her seat, she sprinted up the uneven stairs two at a time, straightening out her soup-drenched shirt as she went.

Skidding to a stop on the narrow sunlit landing, Ruthenia spotted Hollia’s head through the colourful semicircle of glass. She leapt over the squeaky floorboard and called out her name, turning the doorknob. The girl straightened at the noise and whirled around with the biggest smile.

"Ruthenia!" Hollia called out.

"Thanks for coming," said Ruthenia, dodging a hug. She glanced past her; Phore lay across half of the balcony outside, fluffing up his feathers in the sun. His owner stood on the other side of the doorway in a sleeveless blouse and loose grey pants that billowed in the breeze.

When they returned to the stairs, they found Tanio standing at the bottom. “You must be Hollia!” he called up the stairwell, offering a grin as she descended.

“Mister Calied, it's nice to meet you!” answered Hollia. “I’ve heard all about you.”

Tanio beamed. “Of course you’ve heard about me.” Ruthenia began steering her across the room.

“I still haven’t quite come to terms with the fact that Ruthenia is working for you.”

“Hollia, we have work to do!” Ruthenia growled, grabbing her friend by the elbow.

Once they were out on the porch and had shut the door behind them, Ruthenia beckoned Hollia across the plank bridge in the beating sun, holding the rope handholds steady while she crossed. On arriving safely on her own patio, Ruthenia threw her shed door open with a loud creak, and pulled her friend inside.

Once Hollia was inside, it seemed she cast her radiance over everything. Her poorly-sawed shelves and homemade desk stool seemed just a little uglier. Hollia's eyes widened at the bits and bobs on haphazard display across the floor, but all the same, Ruthenia was beginning to wish that she’d set some time aside to clean it up.

She leaned over her desk and threw her window open. Then she pulled a stack of paper, a pair of scissors and some industrial grade liquid adhesives from her drawer, and laid them out on her workbench. Beside them she placed her sketch. “Let’s get this over with.”

Through the long, lazy hours of the afternoon, the air was idle, and the motes of sawdust caught the light from the window. Ruthenia paused to lift her face to the window every time a soft breeze blew through. While she worked, and Hollia made herself helpful by passing her the materials, they talked—about the class, and their classmates, and then Hollia began about her social life and there was no end to what she could say. Telis and Lora, Arcane classmates who had never looked Ruthenia in the eye, met her regularly in Candelabra Town to do whatever it was that normal people did.

“You’re not about to leave me for them, now, are you?” Ruthenia said, with a nervous laugh that sounded like an afterthought.

“Huh? Of course not!”

“Just checking,” she said, then numbed the very thought out of her mind. “How’s work treating you?”

“Just as well as always,” Hollia said. “Every time migration season comes round, I can’t stop wondering if I should just open the doors. Set them free.”

“But they’ll die if you release them, right?”

She nodded, solemness clouding her voice. “They’re in too much danger outside. Some of them are the last families of their kind. Like the mourning doves. I can’t risk it.” Hollia's brow was furrowed with a frown that looked wrong on her face. “Does it ever bother you? That the work you’re doing might be wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean...” She put the glue bottle down. “We do what we do because it’s the right thing, don’t we? And sometimes, believing that it is the right thing, and believing it needs to be done, is why we strive to do it the best we can. But what if that’s not true? If what you’re doing isn’t...right?”

“I doubt Arcanes indulge in their business-making because they think it’s the right thing.”

“But I’ve been thinking about the birds, and I’ve started to wonder if they don’t need to be cared for.”

“You don’t think it’s right?”

“I think—I do think it is, usually, but sometimes—I feel like I’m just hurting them. Maybe we aren’t meant to keep them behind wires. Maybe we’ve been wrong...I don’t know. It keeps me awake at night.”

Ruthenia found that it was in moments like these that she had the highest tendency to say the worst thing possible. So she simply nodded  and said, “I don’t think it’s wrong.”

“But how about you?” said Hollia, regaining her smile. “Do you ever have doubts about your job?”

“I don’t know if any of what you said applies to me exactly,” Ruthenia replied, barely realising that she was no longer working. “I’m in the trade because it was all I heard about from the moment I was born. I’ve never thought of becoming anything else, especially since...well, since I decided to take up my parents’ work.”

“That’s noble of you.”

“It’s like I never actually got to decide. I don’t know if that still counts as being noble.”

The paper glider took twice as long to finish as it should have, and it was not until the sky turned orange in the windows that Ruthenia picked up pace, apologising for having kept Hollia so long. Hollia tied the Threads deftly and exactly as instructed. Ruthenia gave it a toss across the room. It shot off through the shadows, path undulating as it soared from the desk to the front door, bobbing up and down like a grasshopper across a field. Then it struck the door with a thud, and collapsed to the planks of the floor. Ruthenia punched the air, and Hollia clapped.

“And we’re done,” announced Ruthenia, dusting her hands together. “That’s as much work as I want to do today, anyway. Let’s finish the report some other time.”

The sun glowed hot vermilion, and the fields were stained orange all the way to the horizon, a few lone houses swaying back and forth in its glow on invisible tethers.

“Thanks for the today,” she said. Hollia had already left the shed; she looked up and whistled a three-note tune, and was answered by fluttering wings.

“Goodbye!” answered Hollia while she clambered onto Phore on the patio.

While the glowing streaks of light across the floorboards turned from orange to rose, Ruthenia settled back into her chair, and continued to read about compact engines until the growl of her stomach beckoned her towards Tanio’s house for dinner.