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.