Tara could not take notes on Shale’s surging back, and as the moon arced through the sky, the angle from which the road sigils were visible changed too. The night ran long and late with flight and rest. They landed on an ivied university battlement at 1:00 A.M. and Shale brooded northward as Tara scratched lines in her black notebook.

“Lady of the skies?”

“Lady of the skies,” he confirmed.

“All the skies?”

“She could not be Lady of all the skies. Each sky has its own Lady. But she is Lady of all skies over us.”

“I always thought that was weird. I mean, if we have three women of different faiths in the same army and they look up, they’re looking into the same sky.”

“Same space,” Shale said. “Different sky.”

“And this is her oldest epithet.”

He nodded.

She heard whispers from the tower to her left, and a scrape of lockpick over tumblers and teeth, and drunken laughter not quite stifled. She doubted students were supposed to climb up here—schools probably had to make rules about this sort of thing when students couldn’t fly—but explanations would be awkward. She hurried her notes. Shale’s religious signeurage did not quite mesh with modern ownership models, but she could bridge the gap. She’d learned how in the Hidden Schools, back when she wasn’t doing the same thing these kids were: breaking into places she shouldn’t be, and climbing towers not made for climbing.

“Are you done?”

“Done enough.” She capped her pen and slipped pen and notebook into her purse. Behind them the lockpick raked again, and a latch clicked open. “Let’s go.” She grabbed Shale. His wings spread, squeezing her ribs, and he lunged out over the city. Drunken students screamed as a half-seen shape swept above them through the dark.

“You were angry this morning,” she said as they gained altitude. She’d hesitated on this conversation’s edge all night, unwilling to bring up a subject fraught for them both. But they had worked well enough, and she did not want to leave the wound unstitched.

“I still am.”

“I told the truth. We’re weak. Exposed. We need to be careful.”

“We were made to guard this city. It is hard to hide and serve. You ask us to deny what we are. And your use of ‘we,’ there—you aid us, but you are not us. You are more at home in our own city than we are. You do not have to hide.”

“I suppose not,” she said, remembering.