Tinder Stricken Read Online Free Page B

voice; it
was drowned out by the liberation of letting go and stretching her
hands, her arms, her ever-troublesome ankles.
    “I could throw until Martyrs' Day and not
get the rope around it,” Gita grumbled.
    “We tried, sister.”
    Gita flicked tongue over her lower lip,
considering. “Let’s not give up. We’ve done enough giving up. What
if I just climb down and grab it?”
    “What?!”
    “We're good mountain children: we brought
ropes.” She looked to her own hand resting on the top fence rail.
“And the Empire provides us with somewhere to tie them. I'll just
climb down there. We've come this far, Esha.”
    This wasn't a leisurely trip down-mountain
on climbing spires: there was an enormity of open air below them,
hundreds of meters to the edge of Betel Plateau far below and far
more open space below that. But the phoenix was only a few
arm-lengths away. Well within a selfrope's reach. In the bitterest
crevice of her heart, Esha agreed: she didn’t want to give up
anymore. She didn't want to carry a burden of disappointment back
to the clerk's office, to file a truthful report of their
failure.
    “Fine.” Esha unwound selfrope from her own
body. “Fine. Use two ropes, though.”
    Their shadows stretched in the golden
evening. Gita tied a stout knot around her waist; Esha looped and
tied Gita's rope around the fence's two rails. The bamboo poles
looked unblemished and the iron nails untouched by rust — but to
ease her mind, Esha tied her own selfrope on the next pair of rails
over.
    “I’ll tie the phoenix onto your rope,” Gita
said. “Pull it up and get it inside a sack, then give me back your
rope.”
    “Will that work? It can’t burn though jute
rope, can it?”
    “Not unless we sit here like lard lumps,
letting it strike sparks.”
    Clever plans were sounding less clever by
the moment. Esha pressed her mouth, and pulled her knot tighter.
“You know best, sister. Be careful.”
    “Always.” With her selfrope tied between the
fence post and her own body, Gita wound Esha’s rope around her arm.
She set her pouch aside, and toed off her sandals. For a moment,
she met Esha's eyes like a real sister, as honest as their shared
sweat.
    And then with bare feet spread for grip,
Gita stepped onto the fence and over it, off the edge of
civilization. The ropes pulled taut. Esha could only watch as Gita
dangled, creeping downward in the open air. The phoenix stared hot
steel at her, huffing through an open beak, its warning keen rising
louder than the wind. Gita shifted, leaning, and testing her own
balance. Her earth-brown hand stretched toward the phoenix’s fiery
feathers and its snapping beak.
    Then Esha's feet slid from under her, the
fence rail catching her and stunning her breathless as the earth
roared. She gasped and struggled upright, grabbing the tied loops
of Gita's ropes. Another earthquake was upon them — with no warning
this time, not so much as a humming in the soles of Esha's feet,
this couldn't be .
    “Gita! Gita! Hold on!”
    She grunted — but she held fast, her limbs
wound into a knot around the rope and her gaze still fixed on the
damned bird.
    Esha looked down past them — only for an
instant, all the way down at the bucking void of green below, the
wilds of the lower plateau. No one could survive a fall like that.
She tore her eyes away and she was cold inside, aware of her
fragile life hammering in her chest, until she looked back to Gita
because Gita was the only one who mattered.
    But Gita was throwing herself into her
reach, swinging on the ropes and managing to snatch the phoenix by
its forked tail. The bird screeched, its wings thrown open, beating
at the air and at Gita’s head so she bent, flinching.
    Rope creaked against fence bamboo — and
under Esha's feet, rock cracked like a cannon shot. The fence
sagged, a feeling like molten metal in Esha's veins but the tremors
were fading, settling away into the deep earth while the fence
yanked farther over the worldedge.