Hands That Shape the Open Sky

Dawn had a taste in the sky over the western terraces — a thin silver that mouths at the edges of cloudwork as if it were trying to lick the city awake. Tamsin Varo felt it on her palms before she noticed the air. Her gloves had been oiled the night before; the leather smelled faintly of lemon and storm-salt, a small ritual she kept because it calmed the clattering in her shoulders. She hauled herself up a service rung, legs burning, and leaned into the iron lip to listen to the hull of the Guild hall. The building thrummed like a throat that had been living with a tune for too long.

Below, gull-sellers hawked boiled-sugar buns from baskets that clung to awnings like pale moons; the smell braided itself with the scent of hot tar and the faint copper of a hundred windwires. Tamsin could have walked that market blindfolded: she knew where to find a baker who folded lavender into the crust, who made buns that cracked like tiny clouds. Such details were not useful in a council chamber, but they were part of the city’s balance. You could tell the mood of a neighborhood by how many smoke-kites the children launched on market mornings.

She straightened and felt the old ache in her knuckles — a productive ache, the kind that meant she’d done something with her hands rather than with plans on paper. “You look worse than the scaffold,” Kae said from behind, her boots clanking as she climbed with the easy cadence of someone who’d learned how to carry a toolbox without announcing it to the world.

Tamsin spat a laugh and twisted a loose rivet with her thumbnail. “That is high praise coming from you.”

Kae grinned, the way friends do when they have both seen a person at their worst and at their most ridiculous. “I meant it. I once saw you fall off a practice girder and land on a hamper of guest plumcakes. Neither you nor the hamper forgave me.”

There was a warmth that came from being reminded of fallibility; it pried her chin down from a line of stubborn pride. Tamsin wiped her palms on her trousers and tied the leather strap of a small case she always carried — a bell, a short tuning rod, a handful of pins. The bell was not an heirloom she had found in an attic: it had been given to her on the day she finished a wet apprenticeship sweep, when Master Joryn declared that a skywright who could hear what the structure wanted was better than one who merely followed diagrams. She ran her thumb along its rim now as if testing for a seam in an argument.

Master Joryn arrived with the measured gait of someone who never allowed a rush to make his joints hurry. He smelled faintly of iron filings and mint; there was a tiny leather smear at his temple where he habitually rested a palm while thinking. “Council comes with noise,” he said without preamble, surveying the high arc of the new Hollow Span sketches pinned in the loft. “Noise and politics. You ready for both?”

Tamsin set her jaw. “I am.” She stepped forward and spread the sketches, fingers spreading like a craftsman who sets out tools: the curve of the Span, the new lighter geometry she’d argued for, the calculated fall of tension lines. Around the designs, tiny ink marks noted the type of clamps she wanted and where to place a redundant strut — not for show, but to make space for the method she’d practiced in secret tuning sessions: a way to use harmonic dampening to take stress off the main guys when gusts strike at odd rhythms.