Episode One — The Choosing

The bells began before the sun cleared the crags, and by the third stroke Cael was already dressed, because a Vantric did not keep the Gyre waiting.

He had laid the clothes out the night before, the way his grandmother had taught him to lay out anything that mattered: the grey coat brushed and hung, the collar stiffened, the old house-pin set where he could reach it without looking. The pin was the only thing on him worth anything. It was silver gone soft at the edges from a hundred years of thumbs, and it showed an eagle stooping, wings back, the way the Sunward struck. His father had worn it. His father's father had worn it. Cael fixed it to his collar in the dark and felt, as he always did, that it was slightly too heavy for the cloth.

From the window of the candidates' hall he could see the whole shape of the morning. Skarrholt lay below him in its bowl of stone, tower and terrace and the long grey backs of the roosts, and beyond it the land opened into everything at once — cliffs to the north going gold at their tops, the black stitch of the Kettlewood, the flat shine of the Rivermouth, the fen lying under its own low weather like a bruise. It was said there was no other place in the Wend where you could stand in one spot and see six countries of birds. Cael had read that in a book when he was nine and had wanted, with a want that embarrassed him even then, to come here and find out if it was true.

It was true. He had been here a season now, a candidate among four hundred candidates, and every morning it was still true, and every morning it undid him a little.

Above the crags the Gyre was already turning.

You heard it before you understood what you were hearing — a sound like weather that was not weather, a vast dry rushing that came off the thermals in waves. Then you looked up and the sky over the Gyre was not empty. It was columned. Great birds rode the rising air in slow spirals, hundreds of them, thousands, stacked from the cliff-line up into cloud, each species holding to its own height and its own country of wind, all of them wheeling on the same invisible stair. Eagles at the crown where the sun struck first. Falcons above even them, small with distance, cold. Hawks lower, in their restless kettles over the wood. And below all of it, patient, riding the widest and least glamorous of the currents, the shapes Cael did not let his eye rest on, because no one let their eye rest on them, and he had learned early to want what other people wanted.

Today the birds would come down. Today, one of them, if the year was kind and the blood ran true, would come down for him.

The birds choose the worthy. He had been told it so many times that it had stopped being a sentence and become a fact of the world, like the weight of the pin, like the cold of the stone. He believed it the way one believes in weather.

⁂

They walked the candidates down to the Choosing-ground in their houses and their orders of precedence, and precedence was the first cruelty of the day, because it told you the answer before the question.

The Choosing-ground was the oldest built thing at Skarrholt: a great terraced arena cut back into the crag itself, tier on tier of pale stone rising around a floor of beaten earth, and above the highest tier, ringing the whole bowl, the perches. The perches were not decoration. They were platforms of black timber and iron the size of ballroom floors, cantilevered out over the drop, each one built for weight, and each one belonged to an Order. The Sunward perches crowned the eastern rim where the morning came in. Below them the Skyward, then the Woodward, then the long practical galleries of the Tideward and the Fenward and the Wayward stepping down and around toward the shadow side, where the stone was older and the timber greyer and one perch, the last and lowest, stood empty and had stood empty for as long as anyone living had come here.

Cael did not look at the last perch either. It was easy not to. Everyone had a lifetime of practice.

He was set in the third rank of the Sunward candidates, which was both more and less than his house deserved, and he knew exactly which people in the tiers above had spent exactly which favors to keep him from the second. The Vantric name still bought a place near the sun. It no longer bought a good one. His grandmother had written to him about it twice, in her flat upright hand, and both letters had said the same thing under the words they actually said: do not shame us further; be chosen well.

"You've got your father's pin on crooked," said a voice beside him, not unkindly.

Rennick Aldreth was the sort of person the morning had been built for. He stood a rank ahead by right and a head above by nature, and the grey candidate's coat that made everyone else look like a servant looked, on him, like something he had chosen to wear. He was already reaching over, unhurried, to set the eagle-pin straight at Cael's collar, and he did it the way he did everything, as if the world came right under his hands.

"There," Rennick said. "Now you look like a man who's about to inherit a mountain."

"I look like a man who's about to inherit a debt," Cael said, before he could stop himself.

Rennick laughed, honestly, and for a moment Cael forgot to dislike him. That was the trouble with the Aldreth boy; you wanted to, and then he was decent to you, and you were left holding the dislike with nowhere to put it. "Vantric," Rennick said, "if a bird comes down for you today, and one will, no one in this bowl is going to be adding up your grandmother's accounts. That's not what this is."

That is exactly what this is, Cael did not say. Instead he looked up, past Rennick's fine shoulder, at the turning sky, and said nothing, which was a thing his house was good at.

He had a book in the inner pocket of the coat. He should not have brought it; it made a bad line against his ribs and if a Warden saw it he'd be marked for frivolity on the one day frivolity could cost him a life. But he had not been able to leave it in the hall. It was a small sewn book, half its pages soft as cloth from handling, and it was full of birds — every bird, drawn in his own poor hand across ten years, an eagle on one page and on the facing page a harrier quartering a marsh, given exactly the same care, because when he was young enough not to know better he had simply loved the way a wing turned the light and had not yet been taught which wings it was correct to love. He had never shown it to anyone. He was not entirely sure why he had brought it to the place where he would be sorted for the rest of his life. He only knew that the part of him that had made the book was the part that was, this morning, most afraid.

The last bell rang. The bowl went quiet the way only a great crowd can, all at once, so that you could suddenly hear the wind.

The Provost came out onto the Sunward crown in the white-and-iron of her office, and the Wardens of the Orders came out below her, one to each perch, and where the last and lowest perch stood there was no Warden, because you cannot post a Warden to an Order that the Register says does not exist. The Provost lifted her hands, and four hundred candidates and half the Wend held its breath, and she spoke the words that had opened the Choosing since before the stone was cut.

"In the first age the sky was closed to us," she said, and her voice went out over the bowl thin and carrying. "In the first age we walked, and the great birds held the air alone, and owed us nothing. Then came the First Flight, and the birds bent their pride and came down to us of their own will, and took us up, and have taken us up every year since, that we might be more than we are. They come freely. They choose freely. They choose the worthy."

They choose the worthy. Around Cael the Sunward candidates stood a little straighter under the weight of it, and he stood straighter too, because he had been made to, and because some traitor part of him had wanted this since he was nine years old and would want it still with his last breath: to be found worthy in front of everyone, and lifted, and known.

"Let them come," the Provost said.

And the Gyre came down.

⁂

It did not happen all at once, and it was not gentle, and nothing in the songs prepared you for the noise of it.

The first bird to break from the column was a hawk, and it came out of its kettle over the Kettlewood and fell across the bowl in a long slanting rush that Cael felt in his teeth, and it did not float down like a leaf; it arrived, huge and brown and furious with life, throwing its wings wide at the last instant so that the wind of it flattened the banners along the Woodward gallery and slapped grit up off the floor. It struck the Woodward perch with a boom that went through the stone. The whole arena flinched. And a boy three ranks down in the Woodward candidates made a sound that was half a sob, because the bird had come for him, had turned its whole terrible head down toward him and would not look away, and that was the Choosing: not a ribbon, not a name read from a list, but a wild thing the size of a boat deciding, for reasons it would never explain, that it would let you fly.

After that they came fast.