“Twenty miles northeast,” she said automatically, then: “Wait, how do you know Lark’s Ridge?”

“We passed through on the way to the wars. There was not much ridge to speak of.”

“Yeah, well, we didn’t have much mont to edge on either—just enough for the quarry.” The city wheeled below, the Business District clocking around to three and six and nine and back to midnight or noon. “Lark’s Ridge in the God Wars. Weird. What was it like back then?” That would have been forty years ago, around the time Tara’s mom’s folks fled the siege of Alt Selene west to Edgemont.

“Small.” His deep voice cut through the buffeting wind. Stars hung overhead—more stars the farther they rose, but still too few for Tara’s comfort. Cities of the Craft were more careful about light pollution. “Wooden. We were not comfortable there. They had a high temple to their earth goddess, with a clock tower. Aev tried to perch on the tower, but its wood was weak, and she broke through.” He chuffed a laugh.

“I know that church! They rebuilt the roof. They said it was God Wars damage but not—that was you?”

Shale leveled out to glide over the university. Postage-stamp quadrangles lined by fake battlements interrupted the crumpled streets. “If you ever tell Aev I told that story, I will deny it.”

“Your secret’s safe with me. Do we really have to be this high to see your poems?”

“The oldest ones,” he said. “Can you read our glyphs?”

“Almost. I’ve only had a year to work on Stone, and human vocal cords aren’t shaped right for the phonemes. I might need your help.”

“It is difficult to translate poetry.”

“I just need the meaning.”

“Just the meaning?” He turned to look at her over his shoulder, which made them tangle into a roll. She screamed a little—understandable given the circumstances, dammit—and clutched his sides with her knees like he was a horse in full gallop. Her grip on his neck tightened enough to crush a human trachea. Good thing Shale didn’t have one.

“Don’t do that!”

“Meaning,” he said, righting their course, “comes from rhyme and rhythm and form. You can’t just fill a page with words that have the same definition as the original. True translation requires understanding the associations and contexts of the source language, then shifting all that into the target tongue. The greater the poet, the harder the translation. And Stone’s not even—how would you render a second-voice bass tonal shift rhyme in Kathic?”

“Come again?”

He demonstrated: two syllables with the same tenor voicing, but the first she felt as a steady rumble in Shale’s skin, while in the second the rumble started faster but slowed. “The first word renders in Kathic as turtle. The second is a second-person-plural pronoun addressing a subgroup of a collective.”

“This is awfully technical.”