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and ships below.
    They fell.
    *
    Flying isn’t easy, and falling is harder than most people think. Fortunately, Tara had practice at both. The last time she fell, on the occasion of her so-called graduation from the Hidden Schools, she had time to prepare; three days of excruciating confinement preceded her quite literal downfall. On the other hand, her prison cell had weakened her, as did her struggle against her former professors. Perhaps those effects cancelled the advantages of foreknowledge.
    Blind, unreasoning terror is the first obstacle to be overcome if one wishes to survive a fall from a great height, but it is by no means the most dangerous. Fear can cloud the mind, but if one is on good terms with fear, as Tara was, it can also aid concentration.
    Wind whipped past her face and the ocean accelerated toward her. Tara saw a glint of starshine out of the corner of her eye—Ms. Kevarian, no doubt, saving herself. Was this another test? A potentially fatal one, if so, but Ms. Kevarian did not seem a tender or forgiving person.
    Suspicion later, though. Falling now.
    The second, and far more insidious, obstacle to surviving such a fall is the pleasant inevitability of death. The brain shuts down, and the soul watches from a distance as the body tumbles at ever-increasing speed toward doom. This is because, though instinct is good at many things, it’s stupid about death. The body knows that any monkey falling thousands of feet to a distant sea would be dead in short order, so it starts to relax. There’s an enlightenment to be attained in these plummeting moments that men and women spend years in monasteries trying to achieve.
    But Tara wasn’t a monkey. She wasn’t even precisely a human being anymore, and whatever her body’s opinion on the matter, she would not give up.
    Eight hundred feet. Falling faster.
    Ms. Kevarian no doubt knew an elegant solution to this problem, something grand and complicated, involving perilous pacts with demonic entities. Tara had no such resources at her disposal. All but the strongest stars had fled the rising sun, and what little of their light remained was weak. She could only rely upon her own mind. She hoped that would be enough.
    Ignoring the chemical acceptance inundating her brain, Tara extended her awareness beyond the limits of her skin and made her soul flat and broad as a geometric plane, infinite in reach. She became aware of Ms. Kevarian’s falling body, of a flock of gulls a mile to the south, of flitting wisps of cloud and vapor.
    When her senses were broad as the surface of a great lake, she closed them off, made them impenetrable and solid as old wood.
    Some people thought matter and spirit were different substances engaged in a delicate dance. The first principle of Craft, which had taken thousands of scholars an embarrassing length of time to comprehend, was that matter and spirit were in truth different aspects of the same substance, and there were tricks for making one act like the other. If a broad piece of cloth, stretched taut by the wind, could slow her fall, so, too, could spirit.
    Spirit, of course, is more permeable than matter under normal conditions. If one were foolish enough to rework one’s soul completely into matter, one would become a limp sack of flesh, a drooling idiot who might barely qualify as alive for the moment it took her to forget to breathe. There was a fine line to tread: concentrate, but don’t destroy, your consciousness. Spread your soul wider than any parachute, and slowly, slowly, slowly (but maybe a little faster than that, because now you’re only five hundred feet up) congeal your thoughts and feelings until they can affect physical matter, and a few square miles of empty air start to resist the passage of your body and soul.
    Few people have felt their soul billow out behind them like a parachute. During Tara’s previous fall, she was numb from battle and imprisonment, and hadn’t appreciated how much it hurt.
    She