Chapter 23
I dug my toes into the sand and stared up at the silk ribbons. I had mastered the routine a foot off the ground, and tomorrow, we'd be adding magik. That left me with today to overcome my fear of heights because tomorrow, I'd need my focus for the magik.
“The nest is safer, but that’s not why birds have wings. They are meant to fly,” Rowan was telling me. “You can’t stay on the floor forever.”
“I know,” I said.
“And we’ll both be here to spot you,” Wrenley added. “At least for the next little while, so if you want me to be the co-spotter for the first time you reach twenty feet, then you better hurry.”
Madge, the enchantress, was helping a couple of other muses who still struggled with the choreography. When she finished with them, she returned to fine-tuning Wrenley's more complicated primamusa performance.
“Right, right,” I said and took a deep breath. I did feel better with Wrenley here, even if xe couldn’t do much to help me from the ground.
I took the silk in my hand and reminded myself that this action was simple. My body could do this if I kept moving, hand over hand, and I kept my eyes on the sky.
As I climbed upward, I couldn’t tell how far I had gone. The sky stayed blue and unreachable, beyond my grasp, and the silk seemed to stretch on forever.
Beneath me, Wrenley and Rowan shouted words of encouragement, and I made the horrible decision of looking back down at them. There were over ten feet between me and the floor, but it might as well have been miles.
My stomach lurched, and I froze. I had a foot-lock so I wouldn’t fall, and my hands gripped the silk too tightly to move.
“Izzy, are you doing okay?” Wrenley called up to me. “Or are you panicking?”
“Panicking, I think,” I replied.
“Yeah, you’re panicking,” xe agreed grimly.
“Hold on, Izzy!” Rowan yelled. “I’m coming up!”
“No, Rowan, she has to work through it herself,” Wrenley argued.
"She will," Rowan insisted, running at the silk closest to me.
In a flash, he was up the silk at the same height directly across from me.
“Hi.” He leaned on the fabric, smiling crookedly at me. “How are you doing?”
“Stuck,” I admitted, feeling embarrassed and sick.
"Nah, you're not stuck," he corrected me gently. "You can go up or down or even twirl around whenever you are ready."
“Isadore, what seems to be the trouble?” Madge asked loudly, and I looked down, braving the dizzying peek to see the enchantress standing just below me.
“I need a minute!” I yelled down and squeezed my eyes shut.
"On the first practice together, I told you that I knew you were physically capable of doing this, but that if your heart wasn't in it, you'd never be able to do it," Madge reminded me. "You told me then that your heart was in it."
“It is,” I insisted, but my voice came out weak.
My heart was in it, though. I knew it as much as I knew anything. I loved performing and the connection I felt to the magik and the muses, with the earth and everyone in it.
So why was this so hard for me? Why, when there was nothing I wanted more than to complete this aerial conduction?
I wasn’t afraid of falling, at least not as in losing my grip. My hands and feet were secure, and my muscles were holding strong. After all this time, I trusted my body to do what it needed to do.
But there was something so overwhelming about the thought of falling and the unbearable futility of flailing powerlessly in the air as one plummeted to the ground below.
I closed my eyes and pretended I was only a few inches from the ground to slow my racing heart.
“Rowan, you are close enough. Can you help her?” Madge asked, her words heavy with disappointment.
Rowan swung closer to me to grab the silk just above my hand. I felt his thumb gently on the back of my wrist.
“Izzy,” he said, and I finally opened my eyes. “You made it this far all on your own. Why don’t you go the rest of the way?”
I looked up to the sky and then to myself, I whispered, "Hand over hand."
Finally, as if saying the words aloud commanded the action, my hand moved, and I began the climb upwards.
My eyes stayed fixed on the sky and the glittering hook that secured the silk to the ceiling, the goal I was climbing toward.
Wrenley, Rowan, and Madge began shouting in excitement, and that was how I knew I had made it.
But getting up this high was only half the battle. I still had to do my acrobatics and soon add magik, so there wasn’t time to celebrate. I had to keep up my momentum.
I didn’t look down – my eyes stayed fixed toward the ceiling – and I moved my body through the motions into the half-moon.
Then, I took a deep breath and moved on to the next stage of choreography. I didn't stop until I ran all the way through the routine.
I could do this.