Oliver shook his head. “Thank you,” he said with regret. “But no. I can’t hide. I have to find Great-uncle Gilbert.”
Ilia opened her mouth again, then closed it and turned away.
She stepped over to one of the crates and rummaged. At last she found a piece of fabric, which she handed to Oliver. “If you ever do find my Oliver, will you give him this? It’s a piece of the tail from a kite his great-uncle flew to win the Festival Grand Prize, decades ago. It was a gift to him, and it was his proudest possession. I … I want him to have a memory of home. I want him to know that I miss him.”
Oliver accepted the aged piece of silk reverently. “I will,” he promised.
“One more thing,” said Ilia. She rummaged again. This time she produced a kite charm. “For luck,” she said.
Oliver looked at the charm.
He stayed at the treehouse until dark, he and Ilia taking turns watching the skies through telescopes. While he took a much-needed nap, Ilia ran into town for food to replenish his supplies.
“The whole town is in chaos,” she giggled when she returned. “They’re saying the kites are back, and everyone’s hiding indoors.”
Oliver laughed.
When night drew near, Ilia led him up through the oak to a place where he could climb onto the Crest Wall. “This is where I come to watch the sun rise,” she told him. “It’s where I first saw you.”
Oliver stood on the wall, shivering. He could feel the night winds coming. Because Ilia was watching, he took Great-uncle Gilbert’s handvane from his pack and snapped it on his wrist. Wearing it did make him feel better, even if it was pointing perpendicular to the winds. His kite seemed to sense the night winds too, its silks rustling as the winds grew stronger and whirls of oak leaves filled the purple twilight.
“You’d better go,” he said to Ilia.
She nodded and leapt into her oak, swinging down toward the safety of her treehouse as she went. “Goodbye!” she shouted over the rising wind. “Goodbye! Goodbye!”
Soon Oliver could no longer hear her voice, and then she was lost from sight. “Goodbye,” said Oliver.
He listened to the wind’s roar gathering around the edges of the Crest Wall, pouring up toward him with an animal howl. He shivered again. On his wrist, the handvane still pointed resolutely west, no matter how the winds shifted.
“West,” Oliver said to the kite. “Why not?” It seemed better to have some kind of plan, even if it relied on a broken handvane.
The kite shook and tugged, ready to fly.
Oliver faced west, kneeling, gripping an outcrop on the wall.
When the sun finally fell, and the full force of the night winds struck, Oliver cast the kite up and flew into the night.
FLASH
FLASH
FLASH
Together, the crimson kite and Oliver flew through inky darkness. As raggedly as it was flying, the kite still summoned the energy to wrap its tail around Oliver’s arm.
Soon they were descending into gentler winds.
He waited for it to get lighter, as it had for his other landings, but everything remained dark. When he glimpsed the grassy crest at last, it was alarmingly close. He lifted his knees and rolled, coming to a perfect sitting position on the grass.
The perfect sitting position did not last long. Night winds blasted, knocking him onto his hands, taking his breath away. He pressed flat against the grass, unable to stand, his arm pulled hard by the wildly bouncing kite.
And it was terribly dark, much darker than it had any right to be at midsummer.
He looked up, searching for a hint of sunrise … and gasped.
Above him, the stars winked in their familiar constellations in their midsummer array. Aspin, the small Second Moon, shone faintly down.
But Aspin was alone.
Nahfa, the larger First Moon and Aspin’s companion, was missing from the sky.
The night winds threw Oliver about as he tried to crawl in the direction of the oakline. He spent most of the time rolling helplessly. Fortunately, he could still feel his kite, tail tight around his numbing arm as he tumbled.
After a great deal of rolling and smashing, something occurred to Oliver—it didn’t hurt at all. So many other things had hurt, like getting knocked into trees and slashed by talons, that Oliver was becoming an expert on ways to experience pain. He would have guessed that getting rolled down the crest by the night winds would have ranked toward the top. But it didn’t hurt in the slightest.
The answer came when the winds picked him up and tossed him through two complete flips onto his back. By all rights, he should have broken something—his neck, his back, maybe a leg. But he noticed when he finished the second flip that he didn’t hit so much as bounce. He felt around with his hand and discovered that the grass, thin and tough on his own crest, was here thick, lush, and springy, so much so that you could really enjoy the experience once you got over the terror.
This reminded him of the previous night, fleeing the hunters, throwing himself fearlessly into the night winds on his way to the peak. He might be able to do it again. The next time the winds flipped him, he landed on his feet and began running immediately, boots pounding grass, bouncing down the crest.
Oliver was beginning to laugh when he slipped and fell and the winds grabbed him and—
Something cracked him in the small of his back. He screamed. The wind took his scream and carried it off. Little bright stars of pain sparked in his eyes.
He grabbed fistfuls of grass and clung stubbornly, waiting for dawn.
He did not have long to wait. The sky lightened, and with it the winds slacked and he was able to relax his death grip. He looked to see what had cracked him.
At first the thing was only a pale spot, buried deep under the thick, waving green. With a little more light, the pale spot became an old stone, an ancient piece of weathered granite. With a bit more light, he realized the stone was fixed into the ground.
The granite jumping marker, worn small and smooth by wind and time, and much too near the crest. By putting his face very close, Oliver could just make out what was left of the inscription:
WIL M STV, Oliver knew, was a name. It was missing some letters, but in any case, it was a flier whom Oliver had never heard of.
2 0 was the record itself, which was definitely missing some numbers.
55 was the year. The year since the founding of Windblowne. This bit was less weathered, and none of the numbers were missing. In Oliver’s world, that number was 405—the date fifty years ago when the record had last been broken.
Here, it was 55.
Which was precisely four centuries ago.
Oliver shivered. In this world, no one had broken the jumping record in all that time. “They must be terrible
