"How does Bari feel?"
"She's glad to be with me, I think. She's a quiet little thing. She misses her mother, I know, but she's glad to be out of that household, where nothing she did was right."
"Are you making a singer of her, then?" Evan asked.
"If she wants to be. I knew when I was younger than she, but Bari doesn't know yet what she wants to do with her life. She sings like a little chime-bird, but there's more to being a singer than singing other people's songs, and she's shown no talent yet for making up her own."
"She's very young," said Maris.
Coll shrugged and set his guitar aside again. "Yes. There's time. I don't press her." He blinked and yawned hugely. "It must be past my bedtime."
"I'll show you to a room," Evan said.
Coll laughed and shook his head. "No need," he said. "After four days, I feel quite at home here."
He stood, and Maris also rose, gathering up the empty mugs. She kissed Coll goodnight and then lingered as Evan banked the fire and straightened the furniture, waiting to walk hand in hand with him to the bed they shared.
For the next few days Coll kept Maris' spirits high. They were together constantly and he told her stories of his adventures and sang to her. In all the years since Coll had first gone wandering with Barrion, and Maris had become a full-fledged flyer, they had not spent much time together. Now, as the days passed and Coll and Bari lingered, they grew closer than they had been since Coll's boyhood. He spoke for the first time of his failed marriage and his feeling that it was his fault for being so much away from home.
Maris did not speak of her accident, or her unhappiness, but there was no need. Coll knew all too well what the wings had meant to her.
As the days merged almost imperceptibly into weeks, Coll and Bari stayed on. Coll traveled abroad to sing at the inns in Thossi and Port Thayos, while Bari began trailing after Evan. She was quiet, unobtrusive, and attentive, and Evan was pleased by her interest. The four of them lived comfortably together, taking turns with the chores and gathering together in the evenings for stories or games before the fire. Maris told Evan, told Coll, told herself, that she was contented. She thought of no other life.
Then, one day, S'Rella arrived.
Maris was alone in the house that afternoon, and she answered the knocking on the door. Her first response was one of pleasure at the sight of her old friend, but even as she opened her arms to embrace, Maris felt her eyes drawn to the wings S'Rella carried slung over one arm, and her heart lurched painfully.
As she led S'Rella to a chair near the fire, and put the kettle on for tea, she was thinking dully, soon she'll fly away again and leave me.
It required a great effort for her to seat herself beside S'Rella and ask, with a show of interest, for news.
S'Rella's face was shining with barely repressed excitement. "I've come here on business," she said. "I've come with a message for you. I've come to ask you, to invite you, to make the voyage to Seatooth, and live there as the new head of the Academy. They need a strong, permanent teacher at Woodwings, not like the ones who have come and gone over the past six years. Someone committed, someone knowledgeable. A leader. You, Maris. Everyone looks up to you — there could be no one better than you for the job. We all want you there."
Maris thought of Sena, dead nearly fifteen years now, as she had been in the last years of her very long life. The fallen, crippled flyer, standing on the cliff at Woodwings, shouting herself hoarse as she tried to convey her knowledge of flight to the young Woodwingers circling in the air above her. Never to fly again herself, permanently grounded with one almost useless leg and one blind, milkwhite eye. Forever standing below, staring fiercely into the storm-winds, watching the Woodwingers fly away from her, year after year. All those years until she finally died. How had she borne it?
A deep shudder went through Maris, and she shook her head wildly.
"Maris?" S'Rella sounded bewildered. "You've always been the staunchest supporter of Woodwings — of the whole system. There's still so much you could do… What's wrong?"
Maris stared at her, goaded, wanting to scream. She said, very softly, "How can you ask that?"
"But…" S'Rella spread her hands. "What can you do here? Maris, I know how you feel — believe me.
But your life isn't over. I remember that once you told me that we, we flyers, were your family. We still are. It's foolish to exile yourself like this. Come back. You need us now, and we still need you.
Woodwings is your place — without you, it could never have existed. Don't turn your back on it now."
"You don't understand," Maris said. "How could you? You can still fly."
S'Rella reached out and took Maris' hand, and held it even though it remained limp, not answering her pressure.
"I'm trying to understand," she said. "I know how you must be suffering. Believe me, ever since I heard the news I've thought about what my life would be if I were injured. I have been grounded for a year at times, you know, so I have some idea, even though I've never had to come to terms with the idea of its being permanent. Everyone has to think about it. The end comes for all flyers, you know. Sometimes it comes in competition, sometimes in injury, often just in age."
"I always thought I would die," Maris said quietly. "I never thought about going on living and being unable to fly."
S'Rella nodded. "I know," she said. "But now it has happened, and you have to adjust to it."
"I am," Maris said. "I was." She pulled her hand away. "I've made a new life for myself here. If you hadn't come — if I could just forget—" She saw by the quick flash of pain in S'Rella's face that she had wounded her friend.
But S'Rella shook her head and looked determined. "You can't forget," she said. "That's hopeless. You have to go on, to do the things you can do. Come and teach at Woodwings. Stay close to your friends.
Hiding here— you're just pretending…"
"All right, it's pretense," Maris said harshly. She stood up and walked to the window where she looked blindly out at the wet blur of brown and green that was the forest. "It's a pretense I need, in order to go on living. I can't bear the constant reminder of what I've lost. When I saw you standing in the doorway all I could think of was your wings, and how I wished I could strap them on and fly away from here. I thought I'd stopped thinking about that. I thought I had settled down here. I love Evan, and I'm learning a lot as his assistant. I'm doing something useful. I've been enjoying having Coll around, and getting to know his daughter. And the sight of one pair of wings sweeps it all away, turns my life to dust."
Silence filled the cabin. Finally Maris turned away from the window to look at S'Rella. She saw the tears on her friend's face, but also the look of stubborn disapproval.
"All right," Maris said, sighing. "Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me what you think."
"I think," said S'Rella, "that what you are doing is wrong. I think you are making things harder for yourself in the long run. You can't wipe out your life as if it never was; you don't live in a world without flyers.
You may hide here and pretend to be an assistant healer, but you can never really forget that you were, that you are a flyer. We still need you — there's still a life for you. You haven't come to terms with your life yet — you're still avoiding it. Come to Woodwings, Maris."
"No. No. No. S'Rella — I couldn't bear it. You may be right, and what I am doing may be wrong, but I've thought about it, and it's the only thing I can do. I can't bear the pain. I have to go on living, and to do that I must forget what I've lost, or I'll go mad. You don't know — I couldn't bear to see them all flying around me, rejoicing in the air, and to know that I could never again join them. Forever to be reminded of what I've lost. I can't. Woodwings will survive without me. I can't go back there." She stopped, shaking with intensity, with fear, with the renewed reminder of her loss.
S'Rella rose and held her until the shaking passed.
"All right," S'Rella said softly. "I won't press you. I have n
o right to tell you what you should do. But… if you should change your mind, if you think about it again when more time has passed, I know the position would always be open to you. It's your decision. I won't mention it again."
The next day she and Evan rose early, and spent the morning humoring a sick, querulous old man in his lonely forest hut. Bari, who had been up and playing at first light, tagged along after them, since her father was still asleep. She had better luck than either of them in bringing a smile to the old man's thin lips. Maris was glad. She herself was depressed and out of sorts, and the ancient's whining complaints only made her more irritable. She had to suppress the urge to snap at him.
"You'd think he was dying, the way he carried on," Maris said as they started the walk back home.
Little Bari looked at her strangely. "He is," she said in a small voice. She looked at Evan for support.
The healer nodded. "The child's right," he said grumpily. "The signs are clear enough, Maris. Haven't you listened to anything I've taught you? Bari is more attentive than you've been of late. I doubt that he'll last three months. Why do you think I made him the tesis?"
"Signs?" Maris felt confused and embarrassed. She could memorize the things Evan told her easily enough, but applying the knowledge was so much harder. "He was complaining about aches in his bones," she said. "I thought — he was old, after all, and old people often—"
Evan made an impatient noise. "Bari," he said, "how did you know he was dying?"
"I felt in his elbows and knees, like you showed me." she said eagerly, proud of the things she learned from Evan. "They were lumpy, getting hard. Under his chin, too. Behind the whiskers. And his skin felt cold. Did he have the puff?"
"The puff," Evan said, pleased. "Children often recover from it, but not adults, never."
"I–I didn't notice," Maris said.
"No," Evan said. "You didn't."
They walked on in silence, Bari skipping along happily, Maris feeling inordinately tired.
There was the faintest breath of spring in the air.
Maris felt her spirits lift as she walked through the clean dawn air with Evan. The Landsman's grim keep waited at the end of the journey, but the sun was out, the air was fresh, and the breeze felt almost caressing through the cloak she wore. Red, blue, and yellow flowers gleamed like jewels amid the gray-green moss and dark humus alongside the road. Birds, like quick glimpses of flame or sky, flew through the trees and sang. It was a day when being alive and moving was a pleasure in itself.
Beside her, Evan was silent. Maris knew he was puzzling over the message that had brought them out.
They had been awakened before it was light by a pounding at the door. One of the Landsman's runners, out of breath, had blurted out the need for a healer at the keep. He could say no more, knew no more — just that someone was injured and needed aid.
Evan, warm and bemused from bed, his white hair standing up like a bird's ruffled feathers, was not eager to go anywhere.
"Everyone knows the Landsman keeps his own healer by him for his family and servants," he objected.
"Why can't he deal with this emergency?"
The runner, who obviously knew no more than he had been told, looked confused. "The healer, Reni, has lately been confined for treason, suspected treason," he said in his soft, breathless voice.
Evan swore. "Treason! That's madness. Rent would not — oh, very well, stop chewing your lip, boy.
We'll come, my assistant and I, and see about this injury."
All too soon they reached the narrow valley and saw the Landsman's massive stone keep looming ahead of them. Maris pulled her cloak, which she had worn loosely open, more tightly around her. The air was colder here: spring had not ventured past the mountain wall. There were no flowers or bright tendrils of ivy to relieve the dull-colored rock and lichen, and the only birds that sounded were the harsh-voiced scavenger gulls.
An elderly, scar-faced landsguard with a knife in her belt and a bow strapped to her back met them before they had advanced more than a few feet into the valley. She questioned them closely, searched them, and took charge of Evan's surgical kit, before escorting them past two checkpoints and through the gate into the keep. Maris noticed that there were even more landsguard patrolling the high, wide walls than on her last visit, and saw a new fierceness, a repressed excitement, in the drilling troops within the courtyard.
The Landsman met them in an outer hall, alone except for his omnipresent guards five steps behind him.
His face darkened when he saw Maris, and he addressed Evan harshly.
"I sent for you, healer, and not for this wingless flyer."
"Maris is my assistant now," Evan said calmly. "As you yourself should know very well, she is not a flyer."
"Once a flyer, always a flyer," growled the Landsman. "She has flyer friends, and we do not need her here. The security—"
"She is a healer's apprentice," Evan said, interrupting. "I vouch for her. The code that binds me will also bind her. We will not gossip of anything we learn here."
The Landsman still frowned. Maris was rigid with fury — how could he speak of her like that, ignoring her as if she were not even present?
Finally the Landsman said, grudgingly, "I do not trust this 'apprenticeship,' but I will take your word on her behalf, healer. But bear in mind, if she should carry tales of what she sees here today, both of you will hang."
"We made haste to get here," Evan said coldly. "But I judge by your manner that there is no cause for hurry."
The Landsman turned aside without replying and sent for another brace of landsguard. Then, without a backward glance, he left them.
The landsguard, both young and heavily armed, escorted Evan and Maris down steep stone steps into a tunnel carved out of the solid rock of the mountain, far below the living quarters of the fortress. Tapers burned smokily on the walls at wide intervals, providing a shifting, uncertain light. The air in the narrow, low-ceilinged tunnel smelled of mold and of acrid smoke. Maris felt a sudden wave of claustrophobia and clutched Evan's hand.
At last they came to a branching corridor, set with heavy wooden doors. At one of these doors they stopped, and the guards removed the heavy bars that locked it. Inside was a small stone cell with a rough pallet on the floor and one high, round window. Leaning against the wall was a young woman with long, pale blond hair. Her lips were swollen, one eye blackened, and there were bloodstains on her clothes. It took Maris a few moments to recognize her.
"Tya," she said, wondering.
The landsguard left them, bolting the door behind them, with the assurance they would be right outside if anything was needed.
While Maris still stared, uncomprehending, Evan went to Tya's side. "What happened?" he asked.
"The Landsman's bullies were none too gentle about arresting me," Tya said in her cool, ironic voice. She might have been speaking about someone else. "Or maybe it was my mistake to fight them."
"Where are you hurt?" Evan asked.
Tya grimaced. "From the feel of it, they broke my collarbone. And chipped a tooth. That's all — just bruises, otherwise. All that blood came from my lips."
"Maris, my kit," said Evan.
Maris carried it to his side. She looked at Tya. "How could he arrest a flyer? Why?"
"The charge is treason," Tya said. Then she gasped as Evan's fingers probed around her neck.
"Sit," said Evan, helping her down. "It will be better."
"He must be mad," Maris said. The word called up the ghost of the Mad Landsman of Kennehut. In grief, hearing of his son's death in a far-off land, he had murdered the messenger who flew the unwelcome news. The flyers had shunned him afterward, until proud, rich Kennehut became a desolation, ruined and empty, its very name a synonym for madness and despair. No Landsman since would dream of harming a flyer. Until now.
Maris shook her head, gazing at Tya but not really seeing her. "Has he lost his reason so far as to imagine that the messages you carry from his enemies
come from your own heart? To call it treason is wrong in itself. The man must be mad. You aren't subject to him — he knows that flyers are above petty local laws.
As his equal, how could you do anything treasonous? What does he say you did?"
"Oh, he knows what I did," Tya said. "I don't claim I was arrested on false pretenses. I simply didn't expect him to find out. I'm still not sure how he knew, when I thought I'd been so careful." She winced.
"But now it's all for nothing. There will be war, just as fierce and bloody as if I'd stayed out of it."
"I don't understand."
Tya grinned at her. Her black eyes were still sharp and aware despite her bruises and her obvious pain.
"No? I've heard that some old-time flyers could carry messages without knowing what they said. But I always knew— each belligerent threat, each tempting promise, each potential alliance for war. I learned things I had no intention of saying. I changed the messages. Slightly, at first, making them a little more diplomatic. And returned with responses that would delay or sidestep the war he was after. It was working — until he found out about my deception."
"All right, Tya," Evan said. "No more talking just now. I'm going to set your collarbone, and it will hurt.
Can you hold still, or do you want Maris to help hold you down?"
"I'll be good, healer," Tya said. She took a deep breath.
Maris stared blankly at Tya, hardly believing what she had just heard. Tya had done the unthinkable — she had altered a message entrusted to her. She had meddled in land-bound politics, instead of staying above them as a flyer always did. The mad act of jailing a flyer no longer seemed so mad — what else could the Landsman have done? No wonder he had been so disturbed by Maris'
presence. When word reached other flyers…
"What does the Landsman plan to do with you?" Maris asked.
For the first time, Tya looked somber. "The usual punishment for treason is death."
Windhaven Page 28
