Chapter 979: Another Kind of Genius
Everyone on the cliff saw it.
The glider dropped off the edge and vanished before anyone could move. It happened that fast.
Roland had prepared for accidents. He’d prepared multiple prototypes specifically to allow for them, knowing that flight was a discipline that taught only through failure. But he hadn’t expected the first failure to come so quickly.
In theory, the Mark I was forgiving: slow, lightly loaded, responsive to small corrections. A gentle wind was enough to maintain its airtime—it was about as friendly to a new pilot as a glider could be made. There were only a handful of errors that could cause a loss of control, and Roland had emphasized each of them during his lectures. This time Wendy had committed the most common of the handful: she’d raised the nose too steeply, let the speed bleed away, and the glider had stalled.
Even that wasn’t necessarily fatal.
Wendy could generate wind. If she’d reduced the lift under the main wings and added a downward push at the tail, the nose would have come down, speed would have returned, and the glider would have recovered. The sequence was simple in description. In practice, with the horizon inverted and the water coming up and no simulator to fall back on, she’d overcorrected—too much wind, too abruptly—and the glider rolled over.
After that there was no saving the aircraft. Only the people.
And Tilly did not leave them waiting long.
A few seconds after the glider disappeared, she appeared at the cliff’s edge with Wendy’s arm held under hers, both of them intact and breathing.
“Are you hurt?” Roland reached them in a few strides.
“No.” Tilly smiled, though she was breathing harder than she’d have admitted. “I flew down to get clear of it, then came back up. It wasn’t difficult.”
He knew it wasn’t quite that simple. Lightning, when she carried a passenger, bled speed significantly; the Stone of Flight didn’t work that way, but the load cost was paid in magic and made the stone harder to govern. That Tilly had managed a rescue in that short window—aircraft flipping, thirty seconds of chaos—was a credit to a level of control over the stone that most witches couldn’t touch.
She made it sound like a minor errand.
“I’m sorry.” Wendy’s voice was quiet, and the apology was aimed at him, and at the wreckage she couldn’t see from here. “You spent all that time—all that material—and I—”
“Stop.” Roland shook his head. “No one is born knowing how to fly. That’s exactly the point. The material is valuable, yes, but the glider’s value is in the data it gives us. As long as we can recover the wreckage, the loss is acceptable.”
Wendy looked at him carefully, as if checking whether he believed what he was saying.
“He’s telling the truth,” Nightingale said from somewhere to his left, her voice arriving before she appeared from the grey. She was looking at Wendy the way she sometimes looked at people who needed a concrete fact rather than reassurance.
Wendy exhaled. “Then—I want to go again.”
Roland laughed despite himself. He always felt that Wendy had taken the responsibilities of running the Witch Union too personally, as if every imperfection in the union’s performance were hers to carry.
“Do you need to rest first?”
“No!”
“Then safety first,” he said. “That’s the only rule.”
“I have her,” Tilly said, already smiling.
The second trial lasted less than three minutes.
But it was a different three minutes.
Wendy raised the glider to nearly fifty meters—a real altitude, not a flicker of lift before a drop—and held it there while she worked the control surfaces. She was learning them in real air now, the feel of each one distinct from how the simulator had presented it. When she turned, though, she let the bank deepen without compensating, and the wings rolled past the angle where the glider could self-correct.
Roland watched her fighting it from the ground. He could see her adjusting the wind direction, pushing, trying to read the aircraft’s response—and the aircraft telling her something slightly different from what she expected every time. It wasn’t failure. It was the first genuine dialogue between pilot and machine.
Then the glider overrolled and dropped, and Tilly pulled her out of the seat an instant before the aircraft hit, leaving both wings buckled in the grass, the frame twisted into an unflyable shape.
Tilly and Wendy walked back up the slope together.
The man who had made the first sustained powered flight in the other world had managed three meters of altitude and twelve seconds of air. By any measure that counted, the two women who had just walked back up that hill deserved a place in the same story—whatever story this world would eventually tell about the conquest of its sky.
That was cold comfort at the moment. Roland needed more than altitude records. He needed aircraft that could carry soldiers, carry supplies, carry the war to the demons before the demons carried it to Neverwinter.
Three gliders in a morning. He was beginning to understand, in his body rather than his head, why aviation’s history had been so expensive.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Crosswind.” Tilly shrugged. “We lost speed coming around, and then there wasn’t time.”
“I panicked.” Wendy’s voice was steady but the words came out flat, as if she were reporting something she’d observed about someone else. “If I’d focused on the glider’s own controls instead of trying to correct with wind, I might have been able to recover. But I didn’t.”
The observation surfaced something Roland had been letting sit unexamined. Witches had to concentrate to use their abilities—precise, calibrated focus. In a crisis, when the body was making its own demands, that focus wavered. When it wavered, a witch’s power didn’t diminish; it became imprecise. And imprecise wind applied to an aircraft was worse than no wind at all. The same skill that was supposed to be her advantage became, under pressure, her most dangerous variable.
The only solution was more practice. More hours in the air until flight was as automatic as breathing.
“Let me try,” Tilly said.
Roland looked at her. “You?”
“I attended the same lectures.” The corners of her mouth had lifted—not a smile exactly, more the expression of someone who has spotted a solution and is deciding whether to say it plainly. “If I take the controls, Wendy doesn’t have to divide her attention. She can focus entirely on the wind. And—” the expression settled into something more open— “I believe I can fly this.”
Wendy didn’t object. That, more than anything, told Roland the trial had been harder on her than she was showing.
He thought it through. He’d chosen Wendy for the test because her ability was directly relevant: she could sense air currents and generate them, keeping the glider aloft in conditions where engine power alone wouldn’t suffice. But it was turning out that managing a glider and managing wind at the same time was a different skill from either one alone—and the panic variable was real.
There was only one prototype left.
“All right,” he said.
The third glider took off level with the sea and rose steadily.
Roland watched from the concrete. The glider climbed, turned away from the sun, turned back—and then something changed in the rhythm of its movement. He noticed it before he could name it.
The turns were different. Not the careful, slightly delayed arc of someone working through a checklist, but something more continuous, more intuitive—a glider that moved the way certain things move when they’ve found the right medium, the way a fish changes direction in water, without announcement, without visible effort.
It swept across the sky in long curves. It swooped toward the water and pulled back up. It turned into the wind and used the resistance to climb, and then eased off and let the speed carry it. Wendy was providing wind only when the glider had exhausted both its altitude and momentum—and even then, the request was small, precisely timed, and Tilly had already positioned the aircraft to receive it at the best angle.
She was flying it on the control surfaces alone. The wind was a supplement, not the method.
And she had accumulated perhaps thirty minutes of piloting experience in her life.
Roland found himself thinking about what Agatha had said once—that Magic Stones were difficult to govern because a witch felt them as discrepancy, as an extra limb that wasn’t quite hers. Tilly had mastered multiple stones, and mastered them faster than anyone else of her generation. Was that the nature of what an Extraordinary became when they crossed the threshold? A nervous system that could incorporate new inputs as if they’d always been there? A body that said yes to unfamiliar things instead of wait?
It would explain this.
It would also explain something he hadn’t let himself think about yet—a certain type of machine that existed in his memory and would be built, eventually, when the metallurgy caught up. A machine built around a single pilot with a nervous system fast enough to use it.
He let the thought go. There was no point mourning the absence of what wasn’t possible yet.
An hour after it had taken off, the glider came back around, slowed its approach, pressed its tail gently downward, and touched the grass in a clean landing. The watching soldiers went still for a moment—and then broke into noise, the kind that came out of people before they’d decided to cheer, when the body responds before the mind catches up.