Up this high, the carved stone slabs with their bas-relief panels that made up the side of the Citadel didn't look quite so scaly and ugly. It occurred to Dalliance that from the balconies, these would be viewed as lovely, and all the perspective-warping from viewing them from far below would be missing. These weren't actually ugly; it just seemed that way.

  The bas-relief showed many things: dragons, medicines for kings, crowns on a flag borne by a man with a scepter. He could only be the Chancellor. Even then, when the floating island of Galton was first colonized, the kings had already been a memory. The last one had been impaled by his own subjects, if memory served.

  The silken triangle bobbed one way or another. Dalliance had its measure now. If the cart rocked back and forth just a little along one direction, the kite would want to bob along that direction, too. And the wind blowing sideways kept it tilted slightly, all of which took extra mana and extra attention. So it felt like Dalliance was juggling, but a side wind could stabilize the twist if the rectangular body of the cart caught it.

  And so he rose, pacing himself. Ten minutes. Nine hundred feet. A thousand feet. How many feet are in a mile again? The wind was fiercer up high, and Dalliance hadn't expected it. The distraction of balancing so many factors was exhausting. Even though he wasn't even touching his stamina, his mental fortitude—his ability to focus on what he was doing—was wearing thin.

  A particularly vicious sideways gust caught the front corner of the cart, torquing it and spinning it. Dalliance overdid the retaliatory gust to the side to straighten it, and the whole thing wobbled and shook, spinning slightly as it moved sideways through space.

  Directly into the obdurate cliff-side of stone.

  The lifting immediately brought the squared-off edge of the cart into contact with the horizontal bas-relief lines separating one scene from the next. Rough wood caught for an instant, tipped, and then released its hold on the stone as Dalliance poured on still more mana. Now he was just holding his height, not rising.

  How much time had it been? Two or three minutes of just getting the thing under control again? Maybe almost as much as a third of his total time. Now Dalliance was beginning to worry he wouldn't make it to the top. And while there was no reason to go down with the cart, if it fell this far, it would be splinters.

  With a final surge of updraft, Dalliance brought the cart equal in height to one of the balconies. The mage in attendance looked alarmed at seeing the unattended cart veering sharply toward them, backing into the tower as, with a gust of wind, the cart set down, the kite flattened itself against the tower, and Dalliance became a boy again, safe inside the rails, not going to fall, catching his breath.

  "Well," he said hoarsely, "that wasn't quite right."

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  The caster looked him up and down, noting his uniform and the cart. "I think you have the wrong floor," said the caster, kindly. Dalliance nodded after a bare second's hesitation and stood up.

  "Aye, sir," he said. That was how you were supposed to respond to your superiors on the Wall.

  "Yes, mage," corrected the mage. "I work for a living."

  Dalliance couldn't do anything but nod helplessly. Mages just weren't run-of-the-mill talents. It just wasn't how the System worked. It took too much investment to become a mage, and once you were one, people were persnickety about gaining the recognition they felt they deserved.

  Even Dalliance suspected he would be irritated, he admitted to himself, if someone pretended there wasn't anything special about his class, or belittled his spells.

  He nodded to the man, then jumped back into the form of wind. The flat-against-the-wall position was unwieldy to get started from, but he managed to get the wing of the mage-kite to tilt away from the wall so that he could catch the lift once again. Starting was the hardest part, he decided.

  He'd lost count as the floors passed, not that he knew the total anyway, but it looked to Dalliance like he was about a third of the way up. The people below were incredibly small; the courtyard that hundreds of men could march across in good order was reduced to a patchwork square. He wasn't having fun, and his brief time as a human had given him vertigo, but the actual work of rising was becoming second nature.

  It was, in fact, more comfortable than hauling things around in his own skin.

  Up here, the wind was cold, a high wailing over the protrusions in this mighty tower. He knew it was cold in the same way he knew that red was red. No eyes to see color, no skin to feel the heat, but the awareness was there. And the wind was stronger now. It was no longer a question of 'Can I keep it from turning?'; it was merely a matter of staying on top of it as it turned. His frame of reference revolved slowly, with the cart hanging off nothing as it gently bobbed above the calamitous drop, and they rose.

  Dalliance burned mana freely, the one [Werewind] spell burning through as much as four, then five spells. And then there was no more tower, just empty sky. He lurched sideways over the lip, and abruptly the air was cooler, the rising warmth from the pavement below cut off by the tower itself. The spell circles in the tower's center pulsed, blast upon blast of violet and pink and aquamarine energies roaring over its side.

  His sight fell upon intricate layers of spell circles, and Dalliance's spell form faltered. The boy collapsed beside the wagon as it fell the last four feet to land with a smack and a clatter atop the Citadel.

  Dalliance, as he was, sat still for a moment, head swimming with mana burn. It hurt to move. Too much mana at once, like it was scouring him out, deepening channels in his soul, but differently than when he had tried pulling too deeply from his thaumic token. I have over-expressed my mana, he thought. He wondered if it was like a muscle, and this would make him better at it next time. It felt like it might.

  "What have we here?" said a massive form, his great weapon held forward in habitual menace, looking like he meant nothing in particular by it. Dalliance was having trouble focusing on details.

  [For surpassing concentration, you have been awarded two (2) experience points. Be mindful: the greatest magi need little else.]

  "Potatoes," volunteered Dalliance, voice slightly quavering. He hadn't had any premonition of danger for days.

  But then, perhaps it would just be Earnest's hunts.

  He hoped it would just be the hunts.

  There was a pause.

  "You brought potatoes? Well, it's about time, boy. I'm starving."