They stayed on the hidden island until the young could fly again.
Mav cast his Manifestation on the rock outside the master’s hall. He hadn’t meant to, but the young were shaking with cold, and Nia’s lips had turned gray. His dome rose out of the dark, glowing faintly, and its water was warmer than the cloud.
Then he called Two.
"Bring food," he said. "As much as you can carry. Everyone who can hunt, go home and hunt."
Two looked out of the dome at the winged people lying on the rock, and at the bones in the open door of the hall. He didn’t ask any questions. He took the needlefish home, and an hour later, they came back with fish in their jaws. They came back again and again, until there was a pile of fish on the rock as high as Mav’s knee.
The young stared at it. Then they stared at the needlefish, hanging in the water of the dome like silver knives.
"Those are yours?" one of the young men asked.
"They’re my Subjects," Mav said. "They hunt for me. But tonight, they hunt for you."
Ronald made a fire from the dry gray seaweeds that had fallen from the walls of the hall. Nobody liked doing it. But they were dead, they burned well, and the young were cold. Tova knelt by the fire for a moment before it was lit, with her head bowed, as if she were asking the master’s permission.
Then they ate. Mav had never seen anyone eat like the young ate that night. They ate the fish raw before Ronald could cook them, and then they ate the cooked ones too. Nia fell asleep with half a fish in her hand, curled against her sister’s side.
-----
Later, when most of them were asleep, Mav sat by the fire with Tova, Ronald and Tamsin. The key was in his pocket. The anchor lay on the rock in front of him, clear and cold, catching the light of the flames.
"We could stay here," Ronald said. "Nobody can find this place. We could wait until the hawks find a vortex, and go home from here."
"From inside the cloud?" Tamsin shook her head. "The vortices open in the sky. We’d have to go back up to find one."
Ronald glanced at Mav. "Not to the city, though."
Mav looked at Tova. She hadn’t said anything. She was looking at the anchor, and her face was very still. He thought that he knew what she was afraid of, and he felt a cold weight settle in his stomach.
"What happens to your parents?" he asked her. "If the young don’t come back?"
She didn’t answer at first.
"The Speaker will take them," she said at last. "One by one. He’ll put them on the stone, and he’ll tell everyone that it’s our fault. He’ll do it until we come back to stop it." Her voice was steady, but her hands were not. "My father is still in the city. So are the parents of every one of these."
Nobody spoke.
"Then we go back," Mav said.
Ronald let out a long breath, but he didn’t argue. He only nodded, as if he had known the answer all along. Mav was grateful to him, more than he could say.
"I want to go home," Ronald said. "I’m not ashamed of that. But I’d be ashamed of going home like this."
"He has a hundred guards, Mav," Tamsin said quietly.
"He had three guards of rank C, and two of them went into the cloud after us. Now he has one, and himself." Mav picked up the anchor. It was so cold that his fingers ached. "The rest are rank D. In the open, with my whole army, I can fight that. What I couldn’t fight was the wind. My dome would blow off the first terrace that I put it on."
He turned the anchor in his hand.
"’The anchor keeps my ground where I put it,’" Tamsin said slowly. "’Wind, water, a stronger man pushing against it.’"
"Yes."
-----
Tova was looking at the anchor and the key as if she had never seen them before. Then she looked at Mav.
"Do you know what those are, to us?"
"Tools," Mav said. "He made one. He found the other."
"To you, yes." She reached out, and very carefully, without touching it, she traced the shape of the anchor in the air. "In the old hall on the forest island, there are carvings on the walls. Most of them have worn away. But in every one that is left, the master is holding these two things. A clear stone in one hand, and a black key in the other. We sing about them to children. The stone that holds the sky still, and the key to the door below."
"So they’re holy," Tamsin said.
"They are the master’s." Tova’s hollow voice was almost a whisper. "When he went into the cloud, he took them with him. The old ones say that when they come back, he will come back with them."
Mav looked down at the anchor in his hand. It felt heavier than before. He was a little afraid of it now, which he hadn’t been an hour ago.
"If I bring these into the city," he said slowly, "what will your people think?"
"That depends on who speaks first." Tova lifted her chin. "If I speak first, they will hear that you found our master, and that the Speaker lied to them about the Awakened. If the Speaker speaks first, they will hear that a thief has robbed the dead."
"Then you speak first."
"He will be faster than me. He always is."
-----
They flew up at dawn.
The young carried them, as before, in short dashes between the passes of the Old One, with Tamsin keeping the time. It was easier going up than coming down. They knew the way now, and they were no longer starving. Mav still felt his heart jump each time the pressure built in his chest, but he was beginning to hope. Mav held the anchor inside his shirt and the key in his fist.
They came out of the cloud below the city just as the sun rose.
The light hit them all at once, white and blinding, after the dark. Mav squinted up at the mountain. The terraces were full. It was the morning after the ceremony, and the whole city seemed to have come outside to look down into the cloud, as if they had been waiting for something to come out of it.
Something had.
Tova flew straight up the face of the mountain, toward the great terrace in front of the hall, with Mav in her arms. The young came behind her in a long line, carrying Ronald, Tamsin and Nia. As they rose past the lower terraces, people began to shout. Then the shouting stopped.
Mav had taken out the anchor and the key. He was holding them up, one in each hand, where everyone could see them.
The anchor caught the morning sun and blazed like a star. The black key didn’t shine at all.
On the terraces, the old people began to kneel.
It went through the city like a wave. First a few, then dozens, then hundreds, all along the face of the mountain. They didn’t kneel to Mav. They knelt to the two things in his hands. Some of them were crying. Some of them were singing in their hollow, high voices, a slow song with no words that Mav had never heard before. It made the hair stand up on his arms all the same.
Tova set him down on the great terrace in front of the hall. She opened her mouth to speak.
The doors of the hall were already open.
The Speaker stood in them with his staff. His face was gray with fury. Behind him, his guards were pouring out onto the terrace, dozens of them, with spears in their hands.
"Look at him!" the Speaker cried, before Tova could say a word. His thin voice rang across the whole mountain. "The green thief went down into the cloud and robbed our master’s bones! He holds the master’s treasures in his filthy hands! Will you kneel to a thief?"
The singing stopped.
The Speaker raised his staff high above his head.
"Everyone who can fly," he shouted. "Everyone who loves our master! Take back what is ours!"
On the terraces, some of the kneeling people stood up again, slowly, uncertain. Some of them spread their wings.
The Speaker didn’t wait for them. He spread his own wings, white-streaked and huge, and he leaped off the doorstep into the air.