Chương 116: Chapter 137: Tandem

There was a stir before we pulled up. The flyers could see us at least as far along as we could see them, so they had all descended to ground level by the time we arrived. About a hundred people here, mostly kids, with a handful of teens about our ages, and a couple of senior-citizen types mixed in. The grayhairs were hovering behind, unwilling to put their bones back on solid ground. But the kids, especially the school-aged kids, were lined up near the road looking nervous and mortified.

Larianne was the first one out of the carriage.

"Oh fuck off," she blurted.

"I'm not from your school, don't look at me like that." The joy on their faces when they realized it's the countess and not their truant officer was priceless. The kids bolted back to the field and leaped into the air, swooping straight up. Trazom was the next one off the coach, staring up in wonder as the people zoomed about up in the air.

"My word," he said, awed. He turned to help Vancy and Elica down off the running board, but I ignored his hand because I was already airborne. Yheta followed after, seeming amused by all this but not fully shaken out of his thoughts. Larianne went to pay the coachman while we stood and stared. The field itself was about two hundred yards across, and the chiseled stones that bore the magic were forming a loose unconnected circle, maybe a hundred yards, in the middle.

There was a tap of a whip against the harness, and the horse-drawn carriage behind us was headed back to the town.

"All right then," Larianne said, adopting a tone I've never heard from her. But I've heard it from every lifeguard, laser-tag marshal, and summer-camp counselor I've ever heard of.

"I'm going to tell you how to have fun safely" is an incredibly distinct and specific tone of voice.

"The flight effect is focused inside the stones, but outside of them it tapers off. If you accidentally stray out you will fall slowly and after a bit you'll be able to fly yourself back in. Try not to let that happen, keep an eye on yourself and your surroundings. Do not fly in straight lines at high speed, if you reach the edge you could accidentally launch yourself outside the magic entirely and hit the ground without protection. This will kill you. You can die of a fall much smaller than you think.

Once you're up, it will be very hard to tell how high you are. Your senses will lie to you. Do not fly straight down, no power-diving. It is hard to pull up in time to avoid hitting, and you will not know how low is too low. Mind your head- if you see that you're about to hit someone or something, put your arms up and protect your head. Even if the hit is not your head, you protect your head anyway. Give the small kids room, and the oldies. Always look in the direction you are flying, with one exception.

That exception is if you are looking down to see the stones. Don't get hurt, don't get killed. It will embarrass me if my guests get killed. Do not embarrass me."

"Yes Larianne," I singsonged, and the other chorused after me. It just felt right. Universal.

"Um, but before we go any further?" I spoke up. A spot of conjury created four pairs of blousy, silky drawstring trousers.

"I find these are best for flying with a skirt on." I started handing them around to the girls. Vancy giggled like it was naughty to put more clothes on out in the open, Larianne just complied without a word, and Elica demanded Rinnie help her. For the rest of them, the process was simple enough: set the pants down with the legs down, the waist up, and tucked open so you can see grass straight through both legs. Step over it until your feet are on grass at each leg.

Bend low, reach under your skirt, grab the waistband, and stand up. Nothing can be seen, no worries about modesty or propriety. All except Elica, who had Rinnie practically crawling underneath her, and that looked very improper and clearly Elica was regretting her demands very quickly. Then I used magic to tie all the drawstrings tight, and we were ready. Larianne turned and walked forward, leading the others on.

About a hundred feet from the stones she started to gently lift up, and the further they got the higher and faster they were moving. A gradual effect, those safety measures she had told us about. I lifted straight up and hovered over near, watching them. Vancy almost fell over when she got a little lift, and laughed at herself as her balance went over and she started skimming along the grass to her right, trying to level herself out but without the center of gravity.

Her path took her outside the outer circle and she dropped to the grass in a heap of giggles and ribbons. Elica went slowly, holding herself as if she were walking up a flight of stairs. Keeping her movements familiar seemed to help her orient herself.

Trazom misjudged the degree of loft, and flung himself forward like Superman as if he would take off the way the kids had, but instead he barely had enough propulsion to coast over the tops of the grass, flitting forward almost face-down in the ground until he got closer and the lift kicked in, bringing him up and up and away.

It was obvious that Rinnie could feel when it was kicking in, but she did not seem to know what to do with it, she was walking like the ground was swampy, high steps lifting carefully up and then down, making her way towards the stone circle. Her face showed definite distaste. When she judged she was far enough she started hovering herself straight up, dangling in the air with her feet kicking. I swooped down to help Vancy back to her feet.

"Not fair!" she laughed.

"You make it look so easy!"

"She really does," Larianne said, coasting past us with her hands folded behind her back.

"I've had years of practice out here, but nobody moves as fluidly as that." I held Vancy's hand as she trudged forward to get the magic back.

"Oh, it's feedback from my sorcery," I said.

"We develop an affinity for elements. So, I can not only move like wind or birds, I can feel the air as if it was part of me."

"And I assumed it was years and years of practice," Trazom said, wobbling around. He could not seem to fix his pitch, he kept tumbling forward or back.

"Oh, no, this is an ability I've only had for a few weeks," I laughed, and held Vancy's hand as she lifted.

"But I admit I do practice it pretty much any time I get the chance."

"Does that get lonely?" Vancy asked me. I considered the polite way to answer that question.

"I have a different threshold of loneliness than you do," I said.

"Oh! Well that's all right then." Larianne cleared her throat.

"Could everyone move to the side a little? We've got some children coming through." I moved Vancy out of the way, and helped Trazom stabilize enough to follow. A couple of kids were having some kind of game that involved laying on their backs in the air and dropping just a foot at a time until they reached the ground. Yheta drifted up past us, upside down, leading with his heels. He was grasping one elbow and scratching his jaw with the other.

"Does anyone else find this terribly disorienting?" We had a laugh at that, and then we threw ourselves in. Yheta had a hidden gift for aerial clownery, finding ridiculous poses and stunts. In particular he seemed to have more of a knack for flying upside-down or backwards than the rest of us. Elica refused to compromise her dignity and mostly just hovered about and tried to stay out of the way.

Rinnie immediately became obsessed with the limits of this place, and wanted to see how high she could get, how fast she could climb, how sharply she could bank at speed. Trazom was having a hard time controlling himself, like he would concentrate too hard on one aspect of his movement and fumble another. And Vancy was excited and overjoyed by everything.

She was the first of us to accidentally fall out of the column, and she screamed for twenty feet before her fall slowed down, and then she was squealing with exhilaration until she got herself back under control and angled back into the column. There were always at least a couple kids lined up on the southwest side of the column, staring off into the distance. Maybe they were aware that this was an important duty for the safety of the city.

More likely they were staring at the only really interesting landmarks around: The Wall, and The Frontier. The wall itself was massive and imposing, stretching from horizon to horizon. Wild meadows ran right up to its base, interrupted by the service roads for the overloaded wagons, and the scaffoldings and wooden cranes that lined this side of the barrier. Like the carts, they all seemed to be made of whole logs fitted and lashed together, built massive and strong to support these weights.

The blocks we saw heading down the road looked like legos in its surface, that wall was stacked tall. At least two hundred yards up by the look of it, and it was certainly more than a single block thick. The top was ragged, as if it was not being finished all quite at the same rate. Or that it had been damaged and was getting repaired. And past that, the other side, was a seething wilderness that glowed golden-orange. It was a color I associated with lava in the movies.

The ground warped and writhed, but that was an illusion. The ground was just ground, the landscape was just landscape. The shifting prowling surface of the ground came from the thousands of serpentine monsters that rippled and slithered underneath the surface, in some places passing over each other and bunching up. The golden light came from the jets of heated gas that blew up out of the ground wherever the monsters thrashed about.

Their breath was hot enough to scald away all life, and it glowed on its own for several seconds after it escaped, creating a low-lying haze that sizzled with an ominous light. It was easy to understand why people decided to build a huge fuck-off wall there instead of trying to fight with those things or whatever. I shivered, and looked around. I went to go check on Rinnie, and found her straining high up. Honestly, she was very high up. She glared at me as I approached.

"Air's kind of thin up here," I observed.

"I don't mind," she said. She tried to force herself higher but flinched back from the growing headache.

"That's pressure in your sinuses, you need to release it slowly," I said.

"But if you keep climbing, you're going to pass out from hypoxia. Even odds you wake up and can resume flying before you hit the ground."

"Like you'd know!" she snapped.

"I promise, I would," I said.

"Hey, I think maybe the low pressure is messing with your head a little bit. Let's come down some." She refused, and I hung out nearby. I had gathered myself a bubble of denser, more comfortable air. Warmer, too. I thought about sharing it, but if I did she would probably just fly higher still. I was worried that she would pass out and drop, and if she did I was definitely the best qualified to catch her. But she was still working to ignore me as hard as she could. Like usual.

My belief, based on observations and supposition, is that Rinnie hates me just as much as she does Elica. But, unlike Elica that pays her (generously), Rinnie has no reason to hide how much she despises me. She also dislikes Larianne and Vancy, but not as much. So the majority of her scorn lands on me. And I've got just enough of a compulsive need to be liked by everyone that this really bugs me. Maybe not everyone has that same urge.

Some people really seem to be okay with being hated, even by large numbers of people. But if I may theorize, I'd say that very few people like that wind up playing a lot of romance-building visual novels. Rinnie was not just staring out at the world, she was staring back at Nurvedvu. With her chin slightly raised, and her arms crossed. Shoulders back. Sometimes she would look down, straight down from our vertiginous height, at the others, romping around in the shallows of the atmosphere.

The ground below was tinted blue, distance putting a haze over everything. The horizon was foggy, and the sky above looked darker than it should. We were looking straight out across many of the lower-hanging clouds, but not all. There were layers above us, mostly wispy or tiny clusters. Far off east, I could see a big anvil-shaped storm swollen wide at top and bottom with a dense dark column in between. The wizards must have an order for rain somewhere nearby.

It's no wonder that the kids don't play this high up- in addition to the very real danger and the lingering headache, it's also just no fun. Not much to see out this far, unless the only thing you want is to be as far away from everyone else as possible. And if I was 100% that she would not get caught by a random gust and knocked out of the column, I would absolutely bugger off and leave her to her privacy. Oh, right. I'm always pestering people to communicate better.

"Hey, if you came back down to a safer altitude I would push off and leave you alone," I said. Rinnie glared over her shoulder at me, and began sinking, descending to thicker air, where it's easier to see the ring of stones below. But she kept glaring over at the city, and down at where Elica and the others were romping. When she turned back to look down on Nurvedvu, I got a look at her face, her expression.

It really looked like she's been practicing that haughty, superior expression that Elica wears so reflexively. Well, that's certainly something to worry about another time. I'm still overwhelmed with my own crap and don't have time to sort out this girl's personality difficulties. I dropped back and started swooping and looping around with the others who were interested in having fun. The local kids were giving them plenty of space, since we are the strangers that arrived with the local countess.

Larianne's reputation for not giving a shit about kids playing far from the city still did not make her approachable. And that's good news, because if I found out that Larianne was good with kids it would have made my brain explode. Vancy was trying to do a barrel roll, but just wound up corkscrewing in place. I laughed and helped her out of her spin, then took her hands like a dance partner and guided her through the roll.

"Ah, that makes more sense," she said.

"You really do this all the time?"

"Not often enough," I admitted.

"I'd like to have more time for this." She paused, looking down and around.

"I don't know," he said, chewing at her lip again.

"I think that if I was this high up.. not just getting lonely, I wonder if it would change the way I think. From up here, all those people look like ants. I don't think I'd like to see other people as ants." Yheta came somersaulting by.

"Well, really most people aren't much more than ants anyway," he said, as if that was patently self-evident. Wendy's face flashed for me, and I had to suppress an outburst. Vancy glared at him, but her scowl never held any real heat." Yheta! That's so mean!" He laughed, and she laughed, but I don't think they were laughing at the same joke. And I don't think either of them realized that the other was not laughing the same way. I zoomed around, and gave some thought.

I try to listen to Vancy, because she's got good advice. I used to get good advice from Nathan, but he's spent years turning himself into someone I can't trust. But Vancy is still smart, and good, and easy to understand. She swooped away, practicing the barrel roll some more.

Does it really change your perspective to be high up like this? Flying over the people, so they all look small and slow and insignificant? Like bugs. All their doings and goings are so small and hard to see that it must be meaningless. Maybe yes. Maybe she's right. Maybe this is what people really mean when they say 'man was not meant to fly'. Maybe it's more fair and accurate to say that man was not meant to fly alone. That human beings just aren't supposed to see some of us more powerful than others.

It's probably bad enough that I'm rich, privileged, respected and educated. Politically influential and socially sought-after. I get attention pretty much anywhere I go. That's the sort of thing that is very psychologically alienating. You know, like being a child prodigy, or being confined for long periods of time. For the first time, I'm coming to the realization that I'm probably a real mess and I never really noticed it happening.

After what I've been through, what are the odds that I'm really, really screwed up? Let's go in order. Bad childhood. Bad relationships. Died. Lost my entire world. Good childhood- too good, the kind that makes it hard to relate to other people. Holding onto world-shaking secrets I can never say out loud. Massive culture shock and forced to redefine all of my moral values. Being treated as a child prodigy. The isolation of high rank. Extensive training to perform my station. Losing friends. Almost dying again.

Incredible physical torture. Changing my entire physical appearance again. Killing dozens of people in a rage. The mocking mercy of a ludicrously corrupt court system. Three years of confinement, ninety-percent of it in solitary. Betrayed by family. Perception-bending amounts of privilege and wealth. Almost dying again. Turned into a tree for a day. Slaughtering monsters. Betrayed by family again. Dosed with hallucinogens. Killing dozens more people. Only saving one of my two cousins.

I've been self-medicating my emotions for months by running different magical essences into my soul to regulate my responses. Shit. When you put it all together like that, I'm probably completely fucked up and nobody's ever bothered to tell me. Either they assumed I already knew, or they assumed I wouldn't understand, or they assumed I would not react well and might become dangerous. Or people have tried to tell me and I actually was not able to really understand what they meant. That could happen too.

"Huh," Elica said. She was hovering nearby, coming up on me from just inside my peripheral vision.

"What?" I asked.

"I rarely see you that deep in thought unless you're planning murders," she said. Oh hell no I am not getting my wake-up call from Elica Dandston.

"It's only ever people that need murdering, I don't know what your problem is," I scoffed.

"Oh, so you've figured out the answer to your princess problem?" she scoffed. And that was when the penny dropped.

"Oh," I said, turning my gaze inward to look at this new plan.

"Oh, I think I have." So simple! All I need to do is betray a promise I made to myself years ago and reject any remaining illusions that I'm a heroine with a moral high ground in this mess. Back when I thought I wasn't going to need to move the trolley, back when I expected to get through all of this with my hands clean. I laughed and whirled away, whipping around at high speed, the wind blasting past me. My clothes whipping around in a tumult, I could see the answers clear and sharp and ready for me.

I was not just soaring high above everyone out there, I was soaring on my own, under my own power. I did not need their rocks and I was not confined to their column. The children of Nurvedvu looked on enviously as I defied the rules and went wherever I wanted, as fast and as unfettered as I liked. I could only be restrained if I chose to let it happen, after all. On my next pass, I saw the concerned frown on Elica's face.

Vancy was clapping her hands as she watched me whoosh by, laughing as I really cut loose and enjoyed myself on my own terms.