Above the Snowline by Steph Swainston

self-image? ‘It seems that when you were learning Awian and I let you run riot in my manor, you failed to absorb a point of etiquette. One should—’
     
    ‘Never been to Darkling. Never been to Ressond. Never been to Addald Island or Cape Brattice.’
     
    ‘I sailed around Cape Brattice in the year twelve hundred, before it became easy.’
     
    ‘Never even been to Cathee before Savory dragged you there.’
     
    ‘Savory didn’t drag me anywhere,’ I snapped. His wits are quicker than mine, but I know my manor is superior to any of those places. It is layered as thickly with memories as a canvas reworked with many successive paintings. I wanted to sequester myself in Foin, in the midst of them, as if in a gallery, and peruse them to my heart’s content.
     
    ‘Savory was more adventurous than he is,’ Jant said to Tornado, who good-humouredly let the matter drop. He knows me well and recognises, far better than Jant does, when to stop aggravating me.
     
    We passed between the Breckan and Simurgh Wings, following the processional route from the quadrangle. Only a few leaves remained on the poplars bordering the avenue down to the Yett Gate. We walked past the shaded arcade on the ground floor of Breckan. Dellin sprinted to the wall, seized the smooth stone in both hands and pulled herself up. She climbed with such gusto her rucksack with her spear attached bounced on her back. I couldn’t see any handholds; she just spidered up. She reached the roof, flexed her arms and pulled her body over the balustrade. A second later she stood tall on its parapet, backgrounded by the old white buttresses of the Throne Room that soar high behind Breckan. She ran easily along the balustrade until she came to Breckan’s neoclassical pediment, then ran up the side of it and stood on its peak.
     
    Tornado, staring at her, rubbed his neck. ‘What skill! Wish I was that agile.’
     
    ‘Nothing I couldn’t do,’ said Jant.
     
    ‘I’d like to put her against Insects in the amphitheatre.’
     
    ‘Her spear is crude. No balance.’
     
    ‘I wonder what heft it has,’ I said.
     
    Tornado glanced at me. ‘Rhydanne in the amphitheatre, eh, Saker? We’d have the biggest paying crowd of all time. Not least cause she has a body like a lynx!’
     
    Jant shrugged. ‘If they had more human minds they wouldn’t need such lynx-like bodies.’
     
    ‘It’s a good thing they don’t,’ Tornado said. ‘If they had human minds and lynx-like bodies, then most of the places in the Circle would be filled by Rhydanne, mark my words.’
     
    I said, ‘It is a pity they can’t join the fight against Insects. She’d make an excellent scout.’
     
    ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Jant sarcastically. ‘She’d throw rocks at the Insects for - oh, twenty minutes - before getting bored and wandering off.’
     
    I disagreed. Dellin’s determination was obvious to me, if not to him. I said, ‘I bet I could teach her to use a bow.’
     
    ‘She’d just slope away, and you’d achieve no more than to damage the fyrd’s morale. You might as well herd pumas.’
     
    ‘But you’re not like that,’ said Tornado. ‘After all, Jant Shira is a Rhydanne name. If you don’t wander off, why should she?’
     
    ‘Because I’m half Awian!’
     
    Dellin reached the end of Breckan’s roof and crouched on the balustrade. Although she was above a drop of fifteen metres she looked as steady as on the ground. She drew back and disappeared from sight.
     
    ‘Fuck it,’ said Jant. ‘I’ve lost her already.’
     
    She reappeared, sprinting, and jumped into the sky. She seemed to hang there, between the two buildings, falling with one leg and arm stretched out. She landed on the lower roof of Carillon, dropped to her knees, and was up and running again along the tiles. That image is still fixed in my mind: Dellin sailing in the air without wings, her hair flying behind her, in the gap between the two magnificent buildings, against the dazzling