Spoilers ahead!

Kirit is a Singer now and she volunteers to perform the ritual of taking the wings (or replacements) of the fallen challengers back to the towers. Rommul agrees and has Sellus accompany her. The first three towers all have different reactions from a big gathering that is almost celebratory to a single person who is indifferent. The last tower is Kirit’s home tower. There she is told Ellna waits for her down tower. Kirit and Sellus go to her and Kirit discovers that in addition to Ellna, her mother Ezrait is there too. They have a bit of a reunion which irritates Sellus because it breaks tradition. When Kirit leaves, she’s feeling melancholy at how much things have changed in her absence and recovering from having to return Nat’s wings when she thinks she’s responsible for his death.

As they start their flight back to the Spire, using echo-location to help since night is starting to fall, they detect several large sky-mouths. Sellus wants to speed back to the Spire and let the Singers know, but Kirit wants to help raise the alarm in the tower. Seems like they should split up, but they feel they need to to one or the other. However, the appearance of more Singers makes the issue moot. Soon, Kirit realizes that the Singers aren’t there to drive away the sky-mouths, but rather are guiding them to attack a tower, Kirit’s home tower. Earlier she had overheard Rommul and some other high-ranking Singers talking about how the towers were getting over-populated and she figures this is how Rommul handles that problem.

When a sky-mouth looks ready to attack Ellna who is tending vegetables on her terrace, Kirit intervenes, using her shout to drive the creature away. Sellus attacks her and damages her wings. Kirit starts to fall, but is grabbed by Wick who was among the Singers guiding the sky-mouths. Rather than returning her to the Spire or dropping her as Kirit thinks he will do, he takes her the broken and dead tower, Lyft. As he drops her there and leaves he tells her he wouldn’t have let the sky-mouth harm Ellna. I wonder what Wick was planning. Unless he’s playing a weird long con, he definitely opposes Rommul and using the sky-mouths against the towers, so I figure he was going to pull something.

Kirit soon discovers she’s not alone. Tobiat is there as well and leads her into the dead tower where she discovers a badly injured Nat. I had a feeling he wasn’t dead. Turns out that, with the help of Tobiat and Ellna, Nat bribed the Windbeaters to save him if he lost the challenge. Nat’s wounds are being tended to by Tobiat and somebody else who isn’t there at the moment. In the morning, Wick returns and brings Ellna. Apparently he’s been bringing her to Lyft to tend to Nat. This seems to mostly convince Kirit that Wick is okay and they start discussing the Spire and Rommul.

Rommul is the one who decided to start using sky-mouths against the towers and therefore breeding more and larger beasts. Tobiat, who was a Singer, challenged the young Rommul and was defeated but survived with injuries. Nat’s father wanted to reveal the secret of the sky-mouths and he was thrown down for that offense. When I left off Nat revealed that he had descended into the clouds at the time of the conclave so he wouldn’t be taken as a sacrifice. While there he discovered many small creatures living on the tower that are kinda like the sky-mouths, but are pretty harmless, living off of waste and weeds. Not sure what the significance of that is, but I’ll probably find out on my commute tonight