The Towers, the Moon

Two Wings

Griff Tenning, kneeling on his seat, strained to see through to the windows of the airship’s forward compartment, but there were heads, a potted palm, and a very round man in the way.

"How can these be the best seats for viewing?" he asked. "At the back and on the wrong side?"

"Which is better?" his aunt replied. "A long view at a distance, or a shorter view right up close?"

"Both. They wouldn’t even notice if I went up front."

"They did the last two times," Griff’s sister Ned said. "I think they meant it about putting you up in one of the ballonet seats next time they caught you."

The insistence of the airship staff that passengers keep to their own particular quarter of the main gondola, rather than crowd to the best vantage points, was peculiar and unfair, but Griff had yet to find a way around it. Ever since he’d turned thirteen, opening his eyes wide and asking as politely as possible was no longer consistently effective. Unfair.

Deciding not to risk being stowed up with the second class passengers inside the outer envelope of the airship’s ballonet, where there would be no views at all, Griff turned to his own window. At least they were coming over the city proper now, and there were streets, and rows of houses, all dressed up in tiny wrought iron balconies, too small to even step out on. Griff thrust his head out the window, and when Aunt Arianne quickly grasped the waistband of his shendy, he leaned further, drinking in the courses of the roads, and all the different sorts of chimneys. Lutèce, capital of France, spread out like a little map.

Airships were better than anything. You could see the city’s bones from up above, and all the little secret places usually blocked by high walls. Best of all, Griff didn’t really feel like they were moving, and so long as he didn’t keep focused on any single object on the ground, he hardly felt sick at all.

"We’re about to turn," a passing attendant said. "You’ll see the Sun Palace almost directly below us, and then the Towers."

Griff leaned further, then pulled back a little when Aunt Arianne gave his waistband a warning tug. It was bad design that the airship didn’t have a glass bottom. He wanted to see the palace from above most particularly, because photographs were not the same, and…yes! There it was.

France had a Sun Court and a Moon Court. The Moon Court – the Cour de Lune – was properly in charge, of course, but since they could only come out at night, the French had a human King as well. The yellow stone palace curving along the shore of a dark artificial lake was meant to represent a solar eclipse, to make sure the King never forgot exactly where he stood. This King. They changed kings a lot, in France.

The palace façade was a perfect curve, and there were exactly two hundred and twenty-two columns. Symmetry and repetition, not something that would be interesting if it was everywhere, but…

Stomach churning, Griff sat down. Aunt Arianne handed him a glass of water, and he took a hasty sip, then turned the whole of his attention back to the window, and just in time. One of the world’s greatest wonders heeled into view.

"It’s like a giant dandelion."

Typical Ned, with her head full of plants. "A snowflake," Griff corrected. "If snowflakes formed as domes instead of flat."

Though he saw where Ned had got the idea of dandelions. There was a central core, dimpled much like the round bit at the centre of a puff of dandelion seeds. That was the Hall of Balance, filling the Island of Emergence right in the middle of the River Seine. Out of it rose the Towers of the Moon. The central tower, the Tower of Balance, grew directly up: a single smooth column interrupted three times by horizontal structures, smaller columns spreading out to form interconnecting stars. The stars increased in size so that the largest was at the top, like a faintly curving snowflake suspended on a pole.

Four other major towers grew to the same length as the central column, but projected out at precise forty-five degree angles north, south, east and west. The stars of their three levels met and joined with each other, and with the stars of the central column, to form three filigree domes, each inside the other.

The whole thing was a deep black, though up close the black would have tones of muted, rainbow velvet. And that was just in the daytime. At night, when the Cour de Lune came, it would glow white and then really would look like a dandelion.

But more like a snowflake.

No human could build anything like the Towers of the Moon. The Towers had grown, expanding from the central core, and increased in size every year since the Court had taken France. The entire thing was hollow, filled with floors and walls and furniture, waiting for sunset when the Court would arrive. Griff began calculating just how many square miles it covered, and how long, at the known rate of growth, it would be before it swallowed the Sun Palace – for the third time in the Court’s history – and they would have to build another.

Enormous as it was, Griff’s view of the Towers was irritatingly short, as the airship curved around to the north-west and began to drop toward the ground. Griff continued to stare at the increasingly foreshortened view, but sat back as he did so.

"Le Tour de l'équilibre…" Ned was saying.

"La Tour," Griff put in quickly. "Towers are la, right, Aunt Arianne?"

"That’s right," Aunt Arianne said. "The one nearest us is La Tour de ciel. East is La Tour de neige, west is La Tour Dorée, and north La Tour de tambour."

"The Sky, the Snow, the Gilded, and the Drum," Griff said helpfully, and quickly moved out of reach when Ned leaned forward to tweak his nose. "I’m not showing off, I’m explaining."

"Good that he can speak a bit of it," Griff’s other sister, Eleri, said. "Even if obnoxious about it."

Griff peeked at her out of the corner of his eye. A little while ago, Eleri had stopped being Eleri, and had become someone who spoke a lot less, and moped over a girl, and was different and strange. Griff didn’t know how to make her go back to being Eleri.

"You two will be able to get by on your Latin," Aunt Arianne said. "Tante Sabet is fluent – most people who have to deal frequently with travellers have some Latin, if grudgingly so, and the constant exchange of rule in Aquitania gives Latin a particularly strong presence in France."

Aquitania was the country south of France – or Southern France, whenever the French won it back from the Republic. It was Roman at the moment, because the Gilded Tower was in charge of France, and they weren’t very interested in armies.

French politics was interesting, but not nearly so much as their buildings, and Griff turned his attention wholly to looking about as Aunt Arianne got them from the north-west airfield to Tante Sabet’s hotel in the city’s south-west quarter, which was not, sadly, within the bounds of the Towers, but at least sat quite close to the nearest outer edge.

The hotel had particularly excellent little balconies, taking a theme of flowers with four petals and doing clever things with the negative space. Otherwise, it was nothing special as a building, just a lot of levels piled on top of each other, looking across at other balconies over a narrow street.

"Hotel Lourien," Ned said, reading the small sign beside the closed glass doors.

"Established by Father’s father’s father’s…" Griff began, but then hesitated, and was annoyed, because Father had told him this, but it had gotten mixed up somehow.

"Your great-great-grandfather, Guillaume Lourien, married Aude Beaumont, and together they took over the running of the Hotel Beaumont," Aunt Arianne said, as she paid for their taxicab. "They had seven children and your grandfather was the son of their third oldest child, Honorine. Tante Sabet married the oldest son of the oldest Lourien son, which means she is, strictly speaking, our cousin by marriage, not our aunt or great-aunt, but the whole extended family and a great many people who are not in any way related call her Tante Sabet. We all come battening on Tante Sabet when we’re short of a place to stay."

Aunt Arianne paid off the driver and checked to see they had their suitcases, then added with a conspiratorial smile: "Brace yourselves," before pulling open the door.

This interesting warning fell flat, since the inside of the hotel seemed all very quiet and restrained. Bigger than Griff had expected, with a nice ceiling and sweeping staircase, and an arch to their right leading to a space that looked like it was someone’s sitting room, multiplied many times over. Lots of low, comfortable chairs, tossed in with some small tables. A big shiny bar took up one corner, reminding Griff of a public house, although the people inside seemed to be drinking coffee.

Behind the foyer counter, a lady dressed in crisp black and white said: "Bonjour Mesdemoiselles, jeune homme," and glanced past them at the door. This had become normal. People kept thinking Aunt Arianne was their sister, and looked around for their parents.

Then a woman coming down the stair said, in a disbelieving voice, "Rian?!", and that was like a magic spell, bringing people out of nowhere to exclaim as well, and to kiss Aunt Arianne on either cheek and tell her, as everyone who had met her before did, that she looked so young. Griff watched the kissing with interest, picking out the people who kissed his aunt on the mouth instead, and one who tried, but Aunt Arianne turned her head just in time, and then, Griff thought, it seemed she might have stood on that man’s foot when he tried again.

Unfortunately, Aunt Arianne remembered them after that, and introduced them to the lady called Tante Sabet, who was very small and fluffy, though her eyes were as sharp and dark as her hair was soft and white. She told them welcome, and to stand up straight, and then she kissed each of them on both cheeks as well, and it seemed the whole room tried to follow her lead.

Griff squirmed out of the onslaught as best he could, though one of those who descended was a red-headed girl maybe a year older than him. Her name was Josette, and she was Tante Sabet’s granddaughter, and Griff did not duck his head so much when she took him by the shoulders and bussed each cheek. Someone his own age had never done that before, and he was surprised to find it only half as revolting as the rest.

Watching Ned glow pink after an older boy did the same to her was worth the fuss, anyway.

Eventually all the kissing and introductions stopped, and they got to go up the stair – Griff eyeing the wide curving railing with interest – and into rooms just one level up. The older boy, called Milo, carried the heaviest bags. He had an interesting face, narrow and all angles.

"Devant les escaliers," Milo said, as he put the bags down in a sitting room that opened out into two different bedrooms. That meant front of stairs, which didn’t make sense to Griff, but Aunt Arianne smiled and told the boy that she’d always wanted to try it.

"My room’s next door," Aunt Arianne went on, switching to Prytennian. "Once you’re settled in, we’ll go to dinner under the Towers."

She gave Milo money before he went, overriding his motion to refuse it. Griff had heard of tipping, though he didn’t know it applied to relatives, and waited until the French boy was gone to ask what front of stairs meant.

"I’ve never stayed here as a guest before," Aunt Arianne said. "Only behind stairs, working for Tante Sabet." She turned a considering glance on them, then added: "Wash and change out of those shendies into your semi-formal wear. Skirts are challenging under the Towers."

She left them to go to her own room, and Griff paused briefly to explore the suite and debate over who got which bed, and then made short work of washing and changing. The tunic and long pants were new, a bit stiff, and Griff much preferred his casual wrap shendy. With winter coming he’d be stuck in trousers for months now.

Tante Sabet was waiting in the foyer as they came downstairs, leaning on a gnarled black cane. Her expression didn’t change, but she watched them every step of the way, and though Griff didn’t know all the words of what she said to Aunt Arianne, even Eleri and Ned would understand trois garçons.

France was one of the countries where boys didn’t wear summer shendies at all, and only foreign girls would think to wear trousers. Since Aunt Arianne was wearing Prytennian daywear – long pants with a knee-length skirt over them – she wasn’t really dressed that differently from Ned and Eleri, but it was true enough that, with their short blond hair and up and down sorts of figures, Ned and Eleri did look a lot more like boys.

They were also pretending to have not understood, and Aunt Arianne was very good at sweeping on around interesting ructions, simply saying: "They’ll have all the girls after them, then," and asking about the taxi that was to take them to dinner.

It ended up being two taxis, since Tante Sabet and her son and his family were coming with them. Griff rode in the second, with Josette and her mother, and the woman who had been on the stair, who was some other sort of cousin called Martine. All of them were inclined to pet him, which Griff was willing to put up with. He suspected Tante Sabet, in the other taxi, would likely tell him to sit properly rather than hang his head out the window.

It wasn’t very far to the edge of the Towers at all, but the drive inward took longer, giving Griff plenty of time to verify some of the things he’d read about the Towers. The domes really didn’t touch the ground at all. Only the central building on the Island of Balance did that. The stresses on the five towers that grew out of it, supporting all of the interconnected filigree, had to be immense, though of course that interconnectedness would also provide support.

The river and the Island of Balance were at the very centre of the three domes, but the taxis stopped short of it, not far inside the innermost dome. A great, circular parkland took up most of the space around the island, interrupted only by a scattering of buildings and a few bridges crossing the Seine to the Hall of Balance. Everything else at the very centre had been cleared away long ago.

Hopping out of the taxi at the very edge of the park, Griff craned his head back to consider the sky, very pale and crossed and criss-crossed by three layers of velvety black.

The structure wasn’t even narrow: the filigree only looked delicate because of the enormous space it covered. Every arm and twist and loop of the snowflakes was at least as thick around as a house, and the five central towers much wider still. Why it didn’t all come crashing down under its own weight was one of the greatest puzzles of engineering.

Absorbed in looking, Griff allowed himself to be chivvied over to one particular spot in the enormous ring of buildings that surrounded the park. These were almost all hotels and restaurants with outdoor tables. Some of these had façades worth looking at, and so Griff divided his time between domes and towers and hotels until a plate was put in front of him.

His stomach was quite settled by then, so he dug in, gleefully listening to Tante Sabet refusing to respond to Ned and Eleri’s Latin, talking to them only in French, and correcting their pronunciation. He was lucky to be sitting further down the table.

"What time of the day should I switch from saying bonjour to saying bonsoir?" he asked Josette eventually. "Does it change between winter and summer?"

"When the sun is no longer above, whatever the season," Josette said. "Why is it that you speak French when your sisters do not?"

"My father had a book of maps of cities all over the world. I took French at school so I could read it. Aunt Arianne has been talking to us a lot in French the last few days as well, trying to catch Ned and Eleri up."

"Ar-ent?"

He’d used the Prytennian word. "Tante. Tante Arianne feels strange to say."

"She does not look it, certainly! You would think her the same age as Milo instead of Martine! I have been waiting and waiting for you all to arrive and tell me everything that happened to make her so."

This girl probably knew Aunt Arianne better than they did, since Griff had first met his aunt only a few months ago. But a lot had happened between then and now, beginning with a hunt for their parents' murderers, and ending with the return of the eternal Pharaoh Hatshepsu to Egypt. Aunt Arianne looked younger because she had been tangled up with a vampire, between all the conspiracies.

This took a while to tell, and before he was done the occupants of the nearby tables had openly turned to listen, and even the waiters were lingering and making unnecessary visits. Griff made sure to talk as clearly as he could manage, while pretending not to notice. Prytennia sat at one of the edges of the world: not very interesting to most people, but everyone knew of Hatshepsu’s return.

"Your accent is really quite good for someone who has never visited before," was all Aunt Arianne said, after he’d finished describing Hatshepsu’s departure for Egypt in the form of an automaton his own parents had built.

Ned was frowning at him, but Griff didn’t care. A friend of Aunt Arianne’s had died before Hatshepsu had been revealed, and he knew their aunt didn’t really like talking about it, just as Ned didn’t like talking about how she’d lost one of her arms.

Tante Sabet started to ask something, but then the sky exploded with birds – mostly pigeons and starlings – and Griff ducked his head, even though they were well above him, and didn’t sweep lower before flying away.

"The Shift is coming," Josette explained. "They always leave. It is the first sign."

Griff approved. Anything that made pigeons go away was a right and proper thing. He hadn’t begun to guess so many were up there, perched on top of the filigree. Were the Towers of the Moon covered in pigeon droppings? And how did plumbing and water and waste, all the practical concerns he was learning to take into consideration when planning buildings, how did that work?

Josette, when pressed, said, "The Towers take care of that, like a tree."

"It is starting," she added. "You notice my voice, it sounds deeper? The air is thickening. Now the colour will change."

All along the curving stretch of restaurants, people were falling silent, turning in their chairs, heads tilting back. The sky above looked darker than it should so early in the evening: a bruised blue that seemed to swallow the filigree, and then to contrast against it as the Towers of the Moon began to flush white.

Griff’s stomach shifted. He swallowed, and his ears popped, but it wasn’t too bad. He had worried that it would be like cars and trains and all the things that made his insides want to come out. Good. He had wanted, above all things, to see the Towers of the Moon, but it was better still that he could properly enjoy why this place was more than just an incredible building, why half the world wanted to travel to France, because there was nothing so fun as night beneath the Towers of the Moon.

"I’m floating!" a boy cried out, and fell over in a strange exaggerated wallow.

It wasn’t true, not quite. Griff carefully lifted and let go of a salt cellar, and it dropped directly back down to the table, but it did so with a lazy lack of haste. It was very like being underwater, without the need to hold your breath. Griff felt immensely strong, like he’d become a giant.

"May we get up, Aunt Arianne?" Ned asked and, when their aunt nodded, Ned moved like an old lady, holding on to Eleri for support.

Griff was not such a namby, surging to his feet and laughing when his chair sluggishly leaped away and bounced like a ball, while the table shifted ominously before cousin Martine stopped it. She was smiling, though, so he just grinned and picked the chair up carefully and then turned and put all his effort into one giant leap, all the way over the little row of potted greenery, and the path beyond.

He didn’t land very neatly, and tumbled and wallowed, and then lay on the grass and laughed until Ned and Eleri came and got him up. He and Ned and Eleri had a lot of trouble learning to stay on their feet, and the best of times throwing each other into the air, those launching falling over each time they did so, but the one flung into the air dropping down like a flailing snowflake. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of other people were doing the same, all across the enormous park, beneath the Towers of the Moon.

Above, people were flying.

Some were people-people, just like Griff, but wearing strange clothing with silk panels from wrist to ankle. They came spiralling down after leaping off the top of the smallest filigree dome. That looked tremendous fun.

Others were maybe-people. If you died in France, you would be reborn in the Court’s Otherworld as some sort of winged thing. Most were la clochettes, tiny people who spoke in bell voices. Others were larger, like a cross between a snake, a dog and a bat, and were called gargouille. And there were rarer, different shapes, and Griff did not know whether to consider them animals or people, since any of them might theoretically have been people-people once.

He was glad those stayed mostly overhead, anyway.

Only a single time did he see any of the Cour de Lune, the rulers of France. A little cluster of them passed at great speed, and went on to circle the whole of the dome. People with wings, not feathery or furry, but instead leathery like a bat’s, with a membrane made up of little circles and ovals, layered and almost see-through, and coloured depending on what Tower they belonged to. The ones who flew overhead were part of the current ruling Tower, the Gilded, and their wings were all golden circles, like a shower of coins, or sunlight reflecting off rippling water.

"Tired yourself out yet?"

Aunt Arianne, walking in short, effortless bounces, came bounding up to where they had paused for a rest.

"You make that look so easy," Ned told her. "I somehow keep forgetting where the ground is."

"Some people, they can never adjust to it," Aunt Arianne said. "They lose their sense of what is up and what is down, and fall over at all times. But a couple of days' practice and you’ll find it no longer so hard."

They were a long way from the restaurant, and Griff thought it odd that no-one had joined in, and only Aunt Arianne had come after them. He could understand that maybe Tante Sabet would find throwing each other into the air boring, but–

"Is Josette one of the people who can’t adjust?"

"Josette is far too grown up a young lady to be bouncing about," Aunt Arianne said, sitting down cross-legged. "She is very nearly fifteen, and knows better than to act like a tourist, particularly in front of Tante Sabet."

"You mean that the people who live here don’t – they have this wonderful thing and they don’t play with it?" Griff did not know whether to be angry or sorry for the French.

"The Gilded Reign is all about play. But Tante Sabet grew up during the reign of the Snow Tower, when everyone was expected to act very restrained. She didn’t have to adjust too much during the Sky Reign, but she is out of step with the Gilded Reign."

The four Towers of the Cour de Lune that took turns ruling France were very different. Father had said it was a mistake to simplify them into martial, spiritual, intellectual, and sensual, but that’s how Griff’s teachers had always talked about them. The things people were expected to value shifted along with the Towers, but Griff knew he would not want to change what he thought important just because someone else was in charge.

"Poor Josette," he said. "Living in the Reign that’s all about having fun, and stuck not enjoying it."

"There’s nothing poor about Josette," Aunt Arianne said. "And I suspect you would have preferred the Sky Reign. It’s a pity that they won only a short portion of rule this cycle."

The competition between the Towers was judged once a century by the Tower of Balance, which played umpire but never joined in. Griff was going to ask why he’d enjoy Sky Reign particularly, but Ned had a different question.

"You said that drinking vampire blood hadn’t made you as strong as a vampire, Aunt Arianne, but it had made you stronger, right?"

"A little. Nothing spectacular, I’m afraid."

"Does it matter to you if you behave like a tourist?"

Ned was like that: not nearly so interested in politics as things that made her heart race – and drawing her precious plants. But Griff didn’t mind, since adding Aunt Arianne to the launching team made an enormous difference. She even let them throw her up a couple of times, before they started back to the restaurant, and was definitely overall in a much lighter mood than she had been since…since they’d met her at the beginning of the year. Not just acting like nothing bothered her.

Perhaps she was simply glad to be back in France. She had, after all, dropped everything to come to Prytennia after Mother and Father had died…

Griff didn’t want to think about that right now, not on such a good night. There were other questions to answer.

"Aunt, why do people-people’s ears and noses and eyebrows get bigger when they get old, but vampires' don’t?"

"The vampiric symbionts try to maintain their hosts at an ideal state." Aunt Arianne lifted her hands to her ears, as if checking their size, and then laughed. "I am now picturing my most-irritating vampire master with enormous ears and a nose twice the size of his face. That would go well with his eternal bad mood."

“And what about the Cour de Lune? They can live longer than most vampires – do their ears and noses keep getting bigger?"

"Yes, but the rest of them grows as well, to match. That’s the main reason they don’t usually go outside the Towers in our world – the older ones are too tall to even stand at a normal weight, let alone fly."

"Have you met many? What are they like?"

Aunt Arianne looked up as a swirl of la clochettes passed overhead, like a shower of tiny bells falling sideways. "I’ve never been inside the Towers – far too expensive an indulgence. I’ve seen a few of the Court at the theatres, but I don’t have entrée to their circles."

Aunt Arianne always acted like having money was a bigger adjustment than all the other things that had happened to her. Griff started to ask whether she would like to be reborn in a different body in the Cour de Lune’s Otherworld, a thing Griff found mildly horrifying, but Aunt Arianne was covering her mouth, yawning.

"Time to go back to the hotel, I think – it’s been a long day. We can come back here again another night, if you wish."

Griff did. The Towers were even better than he’d hoped, and it had been a grand day, worth the risk of coming into a territory where you turned into something else when you died. And luckily Tante Sabet didn’t really seem all that sniffy about what they’d been doing, instead teasing Aunt Arianne in a grand way about acting even younger than she looked. He still felt sorry for Josette, though, for having to sit with her family instead of seeing how high she could leap.

They had to take a special chain-drawn tram out from beneath the triple domes, and the transition left him heavy and tired, like he weighed twice as much as normal. He was glad they were only one flight up, and trailed everyone else up, clumping his lead-lined feet.

"Tell your sisters, be ready an hour before dawn," Josette whispered, passing him.

Before he could even turn toward her, she had trotted up the stair and was gone, and of course Ned asked: "Ready for what?" when he told her and Eleri.

"How would I know? I’m just saying what Josette said."

"Better set an alarm for an hour and a half before, Ned, if we expect to get Himself here up in time."

"I’ll be up before either of you," Griff told them firmly, but ended up being dragged out of bed by Ned, as usual. He never could understand how it worked out that way.

They were eating some of the fruit that had been in a basket in their room when there was a scratch at the door, and Ned opened it to reveal Josette, dressed in trousers.

"They’re old ones of Milo’s," Josette explained, when Griff pointed them out. "He’s waiting downstairs."

"What we doing?" Ned asked, labouring over her pronunciation.

"You’ve seen the Towers at sunset – you need to watch the dawn come in as well, or you haven’t properly seen them."

"You just want to bounce around when your grandmother’s not nearby," Griff said.

Josette ignored this, saying: "We had best hurry."

He repeated what she had said so Ned and Eleri could understand, talking in whispers as they followed Josette down a narrow back stair and out a rear entrance. It had rained, even though the sky had been clear before and was clear again, and the rain had brought a chill that made it properly feel like autumn.

A shadow shifted, but it was only Milo. "Remember to wedge the door," he said, with a resigned note to his voice, and Josette hastily turned back to collect a folded newspaper and used it to stop the door from closing all the way.

"Now we must hurry," she said, shooing Ned and Eleri toward the main street, and keeping them moving at a brisk pace – not heading direct to the Towers, but at an angle that took them to the bank of the Seine, which was wide and paved and handily passed directly beneath a low point of the outermost dome, giving Griff a good opportunity to observe it as they marched steadily into wobbly footing and enormous bounces. They reached a small park not too far from the outer edge, with a good straight view of the south-west Tower and the two inner domes.

"Just don’t try to jump the river," Milo said, and then repeated himself in Latin for Ned and Eleri.

"Do people really try?" Griff asked, eyeing the wide gap to the far bank.

"Tourists," Milo said, shrugging, then gave in to Josette’s insistence that he help toss her into the air.

After a while, they switched to a race across the park, and then a game a bit like crack the whip, where they all joined hands and, using Milo as the anchor, ran around him, trying to keep their momentum up until the person at the end of the string spun dizzily away – and usually the rest of them tumbled over as well.

When it was his turn to be flung, only the embankment railing saved Griff from a dip in the river, and he clung to it laughing, and then caught an unexpected noise nearby, and held his breath to hear it better. Sniffling.

He looked down, and saw the embankment split into a lower walkway, narrower and closer to the water. There were fewer lamp posts down there, and it wasn’t easy to spot the source of the sound, but eventually he made out a hunched figure by one of the chain-linked posts meant to keep people from falling in.

Grinning for what it would look like to Ned and Eleri, he immediately jumped over the railing to the walkway below. The sniffler looked up, and he saw it was a girl, maybe a little younger than him.

"Are you hurt?" he asked. "Do you need help?"

He could see that something was definitely wrong, for the dim light reflected off a slickness at the back of her dress. But she shook her head sharply and muttered something Griff couldn’t work out.

The tone said go away, though. There were times when Griff wanted people to just leave him alone, particularly if he was on a train and his stomach had turned into a knot. But he could say that knowing Ned and Eleri would stay within earshot, while no-one seemed to be around for this girl.

"What are you doing?" Ned asked crossly from above.

"There’s someone hurt down here."

"Ah?" Ned looked about, spotted the girl, and gestured to the others behind her before lifting herself effortlessly over the railing and wafting down. She walked right up to the girl and knelt beside her, keeping it simple by saying: "Je m’appelle Eluned. Et vous?"

"Comment vous appelez-vous?" Griff added helpfully. Ned’s accent was terrible.

The girl shook her head, and in a thick whisper told them to go away. By then, the others had arrived, so Griff explained again, and was surprised when Josette, after a sharp look, simply said: "Chrysalide."

Griff knew the word – even Ned would know the word – though he’d never understood why the French used it, because it was not as if the girl was wrapped in a cocoon. But, just as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, she was growing wings.

Milo had joined them down on the lower walkway, and took the girl’s hands, saying: "Come up. There is no clear thinking in the dark."

The girl obviously didn’t want to budge, but Milo slowly backed away, and she came with him rather than fight. They followed a ramp up, and stopped at a bench under a lamppost.

The girl’s face was like a marrow, but that was because she’d been crying for so long her eyes had swollen up and her skin had gone blotchy. Griff would cry too, if his back was like hers, with two thumb-sized lumps jutting beneath the skin, like boils grown beyond any reasonable size. There were scratch marks all around the top of her shoulders, and she’d torn her dress a little at the back. One of the things had wept a lot of blood and clear liquid, and some of the cloth was stuck to her skin.

Josette leaned forward, peering not at the girl’s back, but at her face. "Aimée Bouchard’s little sister," she said. "I am right, am I not? Nathalie?"

The girl’s flinch was answer enough, and she turned her face away as if that would undo recognition. Milo and Josette exchanged a glance, and then they both looked at the sky. Josette murmured something low, before turning and bouncing away.

The expression on Milo’s face suggested that Josette going off on her own was an unwanted complication. Eleri must have seen that too, because she bounded off in pursuit, not so elegantly, but just as fast. Ned had produced a handkerchief and offered it to the girl.

"Vous…fai…" she began, then grimaced and said in Prytennian: "Ask her if she thinks it would help if we pulled away more of her dress."

The reaction to Griff’s translation was not positive, but Milo promised they would be careful, and eventually Nathalie nodded and bent forward. This allowed Griff to see a sharp, bony tip emerging from the leaking right lump. The left was still swollen to drum-tightness, and he could just imagine how sore and itchy it would be, all at the same time.

Ned and Milo worked carefully together, peeling and tearing, and the girl bit her hand and shuddered, but didn’t make any noise until they were done, and then she curled down even further, so her face was in her knees, and her voice was all muffled when she spoke.

"How far?"

"The left isn’t out yet," Milo said bluntly, though he looked very sorry for the girl. "But soon, I think."

He added something in Latin to Ned, which Griff couldn’t follow so easily, though he got the general idea because he’d already heard how this worked: if both bits of bone poked through before the Towers faded, the girl would vanish as well, returning with the Cour de Lune to their Otherworld. Because she would have become part of the Court, unable to stay in this world during the day.

"Josette has gone for your family," Milo said next, back in French.

"They won’t come. They hate me now. Everyone hates everyone now, and won’t stop shouting and arguing, because of what I am, because of what that shows." She curled even tighter. "Une bâtard."

Griff leaned away from the girl, murmuring to Milo: "What’s a bâtard?"

Milo pulled a wry sort of face, then said to the girl: "None of that is your fault. Your family is still your family, and even if they argue and fight, they would want to be here."

The girl shook her head, and murmured: "Bâtard," again, then added, "I am not Papa’s any more."

Ned, to Griff’s surprise, said softly in Prytennian. "It means a person whose parents didn’t marry."

"Like the children of the Suleviae?" The rulers of Prytennia weren’t allowed to marry, so all their children would be this. But Griff realised his mistake. Nathalie meant that her mother, despite being married to someone else, had had a child to one of the Cour de Lune.

Griff could hardly imagine what it would be like, to be where this girl was. To not only find out his father wasn’t his father, but to be becoming…not himself. Not just taller and hairier, and thinking that perhaps kissing wouldn’t necessarily be like two slugs wrestling, but someone with things coming out of his back. And the children of the Cour de Lune left – became not a proper part of the world – when their wings started. Like all the rest of the Court, they would fade with the night, but they wouldn’t return until their wings finished growing. That could take years and years, so long for some that everyone they knew would be gone before they came back.

It would be like dying before you were dead.

Gingerly, because he didn’t want to disturb her back, Griff touched the girl on her elbow to get her to look up.

"Who taught you to tie your shoelaces?" he asked. "And threw you into the air, and carried you on his shoulders, and clapped the loudest when you came first in a race? Those are the bits that matter. That’s what makes someone your da, not anything else. Nothing changes that."

Nathalie’s swollen eyes filled with tears, and she began to cry again, in floods. Ned somehow got herself in the way, so the girl could clutch her around the waist, though there didn’t look to be any non-painful way for Ned to hug her in return. The sobbing finally caused the left lump to burst, and unpleasant liquid gooshed down the girl’s back.

This was properly revolting, but Griff hoped it would at least make it a little less sore. He didn’t know if he’d helped at all, or just made things worse, and joined Milo in looking awkward and peering up at the curving filigree arching over them, marking the progress of the sky lightening beyond the distinctly faded domes.

"Nathalie!"

Swarms of people, quite far away, shouting. They should look funny, trying to run-swim as quickly as possible across the park, but they were too frantic, and too upset. Nathalie looked up, then shuddered into Ned’s lap again, but Milo uncurled her.

"Not enough time," he said. "Come. Let them say goodbye."

He and Ned each took one of the girl’s hands, and bounced toward the swarm. Griff, following behind, could already see a difference, a strange greyness and lack of definition to the figure in the middle.

Then the leading edge of the trail of people met them, and there were hugs and kisses and an awful lot of crying. Nathalie was already markedly less there, but still, there was enough remaining for her to hear, to look up, when a man – too far behind to hope to reach them – bellowed across the park:

"Nathalieeeee! Papa will always be Papa. Papa will always love you!"

Then the last of the glow faded from the Towers, and left the park with just a lot of weighted-down wingless people, crying.

Milo, solemn-faced but practical, located Eleri and Josette, red-faced and panting in the trailing pack. "One drama is enough for the morning," he said, and diverted them back in the direction of the hotel.

There were an unexpected number of people out and about, looking tired and worn as they, too, headed back to their hotels. People who had been up all night, bouncing or watching the fliers or the special acrobatic performances, or just being light. Griff watched faces, and noticed that hardly anyone was smiling.

The Towers were magical and wonderful, and yet even when you weren’t losing one of your family to them you would feel this flatness, this disappointment every morning, when the normal world pressed down on you.

"She won’t know anyone there," Griff said, as they passed beneath the outer dome.

"They say the chrysalides are cared for most kindly, at least until their wings have developed enough to determine what Tower they belong to. Then…" Josette shrugged eloquently. "Then it would depend on how well you match your Tower, I suppose." She sighed. "I own, I am glad, after all, that my wings never came."

When Griff stared at her, she laughed, though not particularly cheerfully. "It is supposed to be a wondrous gift, after all, to discover yourself part of the Court. You live for centuries, you stay young, and you can fly. Everyone checks for the start of their wings, and twice as often if they happen to be angry at their parents."

The newspaper wedge was gone from the back entrance of the hotel, but Milo simply strolled around to the front and came through to let them in. They slipped upstairs, Josette vanishing with a wave. Griff, hungry once again, sat by the window picking over their fruit basket until Ned came and rubbed his shoulder.

"Buck up," she said. "We made things a little better for her. I’m sure we did."

"There needs to be a way to stop things changing all the time," he muttered.

"Things stopped changing, you’d never get any new buildings," Eleri said.

"Might be worth it," Griff said, since there were plenty of buildings already that he had yet to see.

France made change obvious and inevitable. Every day the Towers glowed and the Court came and went. Four times each century the Towers swapped control, and supposedly all the people started caring about different things, and if their king wasn’t good at the new things, they got a new king, and… It made Griff tired just thinking about French kings, let alone girls who grew up and sprouted wings and stopped being part of their families.

He glanced at Eleri, and saw she was staring out of the window again with that expression she’d never worn until a few weeks ago. And they were all supposed to just get used to the new Eleri, like the French were supposed to swap from debating competitions, to the things that the Gilded Court did that people spoke about in hushed whispers.

Was Eleri still Eleri? She at least was right in front of him, and not faded into an Otherworld. If he could change anything back, it would be his parents, not his sister, and a whole summer spent wanting to do that hadn’t made any difference.

Griff sighed, and opened the window, and then started planning the places Aunt Arianne could take them all, now that he knew airships wouldn’t make him sick. If everything was going to inevitably be different, he’d best grab at the different things he liked, in case they too faded out of reach.