Tova found him before the guards did.
It was the evening after the guards came. He heard a soft scrape on the broken roof, and he pressed himself against the wall with Lurk. Then a voice came down through the crack, low and hollow.
"Green one. It’s Tova. If you’re down there, don’t hide from me. I brought food."
He waited a moment longer, to be sure that she was alone. Then he let go of Lurk and stepped into the gray light.
She dropped through the crack with her wings folded tight and landed softly beside him. She had a bag over her shoulder, which she put down in front of him without a word. Inside, there was bread, some of the sticky fruit and a skin of water.
Mav ate while she watched him. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until the first bite.
"How did you find me?" he asked when he could speak.
"A boy on the lowest terrace saw three rocks walk along the cliff at dawn." She almost smiled. "He told his mother that the stones were moving. She told him that he was mad, so he told me."
"Does anyone else know?"
"Not yet. The guards are searching the high terraces first. They think that you climbed up, because that is what we would do." She looked around the cistern. "Nobody would think to look in a hole. We don’t like holes."
"I’ve noticed," Mav said. "You build everything open to the sky."
"The sky is where we can breathe." She shrugged her scarred wing. "Down here, I feel as if the mountain is sitting on my chest."
-----
When he had eaten, she told him what was happening above.
The Speaker had spoken to the city at noon. He had told everyone that the strangers had attacked his guards in the night, and that the green one had fled like a thief. Then he had called a great ceremony for the night when the sky finished its turn. It was six days away. The whole city would gather in the hall of the stone, as it did only once a year.
"He didn’t say who would go to the stone," Tova said. "He didn’t need to. Everyone knows that your friends are in cages beside my sister."
"Are they hurt?"
"Your big friend fought the guards when they put him in. He has a cut on his head. The small one with the slate doesn’t speak." Tova’s voice was careful. "My sister says that the small one holds her hand at night, through the bars."
Mav closed his eyes for a moment. He was so angry that he couldn’t speak. Under the anger, there was something softer, and it hurt more. Tamsin was afraid of heights and serpents and almost everything else. She was sitting in a cage, waiting to die, and she was holding a frightened child’s hand.
"I want to get them out," he said at last. "I can’t do it alone. I need people who can fly and who know this mountain. And I need the hawks."
"The young will help you," Tova said at once. "I asked them last night. Every one of them said yes."
"You can’t promise that for 300 people."
"I didn’t promise. I asked." She met his eyes. "Green one, you brought a rank C beast to the stone. Nobody has done that in a hundred years. My sister is alive because of you. The young saw it. They will follow you."
Mav didn’t know what to say to that. He had never had anyone follow him except Ronald and Tamsin, and they had followed him because they were his friends. These people didn’t know him at all. He wanted to tell her that he wasn’t worth following, but he didn’t, because it wasn’t the time.
"If this goes wrong," he said, "some of them will die."
"Some of them die every month," Tova said. "At least this way, they choose."
-----
They planned through the night.
Tova drew the mountain for him in the dust of the cistern floor with her finger. The city was cut into its lower half. The hall of the stone was deep inside, reached by the long stair and by two other passages that only the guards used. The roost was at the very top, in a great cave that faced the sky.
"The young have no Essence to spare," she said. "We eat only what the gardens give us, and they give very little. None of us are stronger than rank D, and we have never fought. But we know every island, every current of wind and every crack in this mountain. We built half of it."
"How many guards keep the roost?"
"Six, since you came. Two sleep while four watch. They change at midnight." She tapped a spot near the top of her drawing. "Here is the room where they sleep. It has one door."
"And the hall of the stone?"
"On the night of the ceremony, every guard in the city will be there. The Speaker too. Three of them are rank C, the same three who came to your room."
Mav studied the drawing. There were two places, far apart, and two nights.
"The roost first," he said. "I need the hawks before anything else. They can see which vortex leads somewhere. Without them, even if we free your sister, we’ll have nowhere to go."
"And the stone?"
"The night of the ceremony. When everyone is in the hall, everyone will be looking at the cages. Nobody will be looking at the walls."
Tova frowned. "What do you mean, the walls?"
"Your people are builders. How long would it take them to cut a door through rock?"
She was quiet for a moment. Then, slowly, she began to smile. It was the first real smile that he had seen on any of the winged people, and it changed her whole face.
"A small door? Through the old stone at the back of the hall? Three nights," she said. "If we’re quiet."
"You have six."
Tova stood up and brushed the dust from her knees. She looked tired, but her eyes were bright.
"There is something else," she said. "The young aren’t fighters. If the guards catch us cutting that door, they’ll put us in cages too. Some of us have parents who will go to the stone if we fail."
"I know," Mav said. "I’m not asking you to fight. I’m asking you to build. I’ll do the fighting."
"Against three rank C guards?"
"No. Not against them. Around them."
She looked at him for a moment, but she didn’t ask what he meant. Perhaps she didn’t want to know yet.
-----
Before she left, Mav asked her the question that had been in his mind since the Speaker’s hall.
"The hawks at the roost. Who do they belong to?"
Tova didn’t seem to understand.
"They were the master’s," Mav said. "His Subjects. When he died, they stayed here. So whose are they now? Does the Speaker command them?"
"Nobody commands them." Tova shook her head. "The keepers feed them and clean the roost, and the hawks let them. That’s all. They don’t obey anyone. When the master died, they flew around the mountain for a whole day, screaming. After that, they never answered anyone again."
"How strong are they?"
"The keepers say rank D. The oldest might be more, but nobody has ever tried to find out. Nobody would dare."
Mav sat very still.
He had always believed that a seaweed couldn’t take a beast that already belonged to someone. He had never tried, and he had never wanted to know for sure. A Subject had a master, and the Genesis gave each Subject only one.
But these hawks had lost their master 300 years ago. If the Genesis had ever held them, it had let them go.
He touched the canteens at his belt. The two seaweeds inside were rank E now. Against a rank D hawk, that was three steps. The lock would hold, but it would be loose for the first night, and he would have to hold it with his own will.
The hawks belonged to nobody now.