Windhaven Read online

  "Oh," she said, "no, I'm sorry. I'm afraid I got distracted and let it get cold." She smiled and helped Damen with the plates, then left him to clean up the common room and set off down the dank stone corridors in search of Val's room.

  She found it after only one wrong turning, and her anger grew as she walked; she was determined to have it out with Val. But it was S'Rella who answered her impatient knocking.

  "What are you doing here?" Maris said, startled.

  S'Rella hesitated, shy and uncertain. But Val's voice came from within the room. "She doesn't have to answer that," he said.

  "No, of course not," Maris said, abashed. She had no right even asking, she realized. She touched S'Rella on the shoulder. "I'm sorry. Can I come in? I want to talk to Val."

  "Let her in," Val said, and S'Rella smiled at Maris tentatively and opened the door.

  Like all the rooms in the academy, Val's was small, damp, and cold. He'd lit a fire in the hearth to drive some of the chill away, but so far it had been only partially successful. Maris noticed how bare the room was, completely lacking in the personal touches and trinkets that would tell a visitor something about the person who lived here.

  Val was on the floor before the fire, doing push-ups. He'd thrown his shirt over the bed and was exercising barechested. "Well?" he said, without slackening his pace.

  Maris was staring, sickened by what she saw. The whole of Val's back was crisscrossed by lines and thin white scars, mementoes of long-ago beatings. She had to force her eyes away from them to remember why she had come. "We need to talk, Val," she said.

  He came bounding to his feet, smiling at her and breathing hard. "Hand me my shirt, S'Rella," he said.

  Then, after he had pulled it on, "What do you want to talk about?" His hair, unbound now, fell to his shoulders in a rust-colored waterfall, softening the severity of his face and giving him an oddly vulnerable look.

  "May I sit?" Maris asked. Val gestured toward the only chair in the room, and when Maris sat on it, lowered himself onto the backless stool near the fire. S'Rella sat on the edge of the narrow bed. "I don't want to play games with you, Val," Maris resumed. "We have a lot of work to do together."

  "What makes you think I am playing games?" he asked.

  "Listen to me," she said. "I realize that you are bitter toward the flyers. They made you an outcast, branded you with a mocking, insulting name, and stripped you of your wings, perhaps unfairly, with multiple challenges. But if you let that poison your feelings toward all flyers, forever, you will be the loser for it. Win your wings back in the competition, and you will be living with, competing with, and associating with flyers for much of the rest of your life. If you refuse to allow them to be your friends, then you will have no friends. Is that what you want?"

  Val was unmoved. "Windhaven is full of people, and only a few of them are flyers. Or don't you count the land-bound?"

  "Why are you so determined to be hateful? You waste no time making enemies. Maybe you feel the flyers have wronged you, and maybe you are right. But quarrels are seldom one-sided. Try to understand that. What you did to Ari was not without wrong, either. If you want to be forgiven for that, then forgive the flyers for what they did. Accept and you may be accepted."

  Val smiled his thin-lipped smile. "What makes you think I want to be accepted? Or forgiven? I've done nothing that requires forgiving. I'd challenge Ari again. Unfortunately, she isn't available this year."

  Maris was suddenly speechless with rage.

  " Val," S'Rella said in a small, shocked voice. "How can you say that? She killed herself."

  "Land-bound die every day," Val told her, his voice softening a bit. "Some of them kill themselves too.

  No one makes a cause out of that, or sings about it, or avenges their squalid little suicides. You have to shield your own flank, S'Rella. My parents taught me that. No one else will do it for you." His eyes went back to Maris. "I've met your brother, you know," he said suddenly.

  "Coll?" she said, surprised.

  "He visited South Arren seven years ago, on his way to the Outer Islands. There was another singer with him, an older man."

  "Barrion," Maris said. "Coll's mentor."

  "They stayed a week or two, singing in the dockside taverns, waiting for a ship to take them farther east.

  That was the first time I heard about you, Maris of Lesser Amberly. You were my hero for a time. Your brother sings a pretty little song about you."

  "Seven years ago," Maris said. "That must have been right after the Council."

  Val smiled. "It was the first we had heard of it. I was around twelve, just short of the age when a flyer child would be taking up his wings, but of course I had no hope of that. Until your brother came to my island and sang about you and your Council and your academies. When Airhome opened a few months later, I was one of the first students. I still loved you then, for making it all possible."

  "And what happened?"

  Val half-turned on his stool, stretching his hands out toward the fire. "I grew disillusioned. I thought that you'd opened the world to everyone, where once it had belonged only to flyers. I felt such a kinship with you. I was naive."

  He turned back again, and Maris shifted uncomfortably under his intense, accusing gaze. "I thought we were alike," he continued. "I thought you wanted to break open the rotten flyer society. I found out I was wrong. All you ever wanted was to be a part of the whole thing. You wanted the fame and the status and the wealth and the freedom, you wanted to party on the Eyrie with the rest of them and look down on the dirt-digging land-bound. You embrace what I despise.

  "The irony of it, though, is that you can't be a flyer, no matter how much you want to. No more than I can be a flyer, or S'Rella here, or Damen, or any of the rest of them."

  "I am a flyer," Maris said quietly.

  "They let you play at it," Val said, "because you try so very hard to fit in, to be just like them. But both of us know that they don't really trust you, or accept you as they'd accept one of their own. You have your wings, but you're still suspect, aren't you? Whether you admit it or not, you were the first One-Wing, Maris."

  Maris stood up. His words had made her furious, but she didn't want to lash out at him, or lose her dignity by quarreling with him in front of S'Rella. "You're wrong," she said as calmly and quietly as she could manage. But then she found she had no words to refute him with. "I feel sorry for you, Val," she continued. "You hate the flyers and you have contempt for the land-bound. For everyone who is not yourself. I don't want your respect or your gratitude. It's not just the privileges of flyer society you're rejecting, it's the responsibilities as well. You're totally selfish and self-absorbed. If I hadn't promised Sena, I'd have nothing more to do with helping you get your wings. Good night."

  She left the room. Val didn't move or call her back. But as the door swung shut behind her, she heard him speaking to S'Rella. "You see," he said flatly.

  And that night the dream came to Maris again, and she twisted and fought and woke with the bedclothes wrapped about her, soaked with sweat. It had been worse than before. She had been falling, falling endlessly through still air, and all around were other flyers, soaring on their silver wings and watching, and not one of them moved to help.

  Day after day the practice continued.

  Sena grew hoarse and intense and short-tempered, and presided over all like a tyrannical Landsman.

  Damen sharpened his turns and heard long lectures every day on flying with his head and not just his arms. S'Rella worked on launchings and landings and acrobatics, looking for grace to match her stamina.

  Sher and Leya, already graceful, stayed in the air for hours at a time in high winds, trying to build endurance. Kerr worked on everything.

  And Val One-Wing did what he would. Maris watched him from afar, as she watched all of them, and said little. She answered what questions he had, gave advice on the rare occasions that he asked for it, and treated him always with careful, distant courtesy.

/>   Sena, absorbed entirely in the flying of her proteges, noticed none of it, but the Woodwingers picked up their cues from Maris, and carefully kept their distance from Val. He aided the process himself; he had a sharp tongue and no compunction about making enemies. He told Kerr to his face that he was hopeless, sending the boy into a fit of sulking, and he mocked proud, stubborn Damen endlessly, defeating him again and again in informal races. The students, led by Damen and Liane and a few others, soon began calling Val "One-Wing" openly. But if that bothered him, he gave no sign.

  Val's isolation was not quite total. If the others shunned him, he at least had S'Rella. She was more than merely polite to Val; she sought him out, asking for his advice, ate with him, and always, when Sena paired students off to race, S'Rella was the first to challenge Val.

  Maris saw sense in her actions; pitting her skills against those of a stronger flyer would help her learn and overcome her weaknesses faster than anything else. And S'Rella, Maris knew, was determined to win her wings this year. There were other, less practical, reasons why S'Rella might be drawn to Val as well.

  The shy Southern girl had always been a bit out of place among the Woodwingers, all of whom were Westerners; she cooked differently, dressed differently, wore her hair differently, spoke with a slight accent, even told different tales when the students gathered together for storytelling. Val One-Wing, from Eastern, was similarly displaced, and it was natural, Maris told herself, that the two odd birds would fly together.

  Still, it made Maris uneasy to see the two talking together. S'Rella was young and impressionable, and Maris did not want her picking up Val's ideas. Besides, too close an association with One-Wing would make her unpopular among the other flyers, and S'Rella was vulnerable enough to be hurt by that.

  But Maris pushed those worries to the back of her mind and did not interfere. There was no time now for personal fretting; she had to train these Woodwingers for the real thing.

  At the end of every day of training Maris raced each student individually. On the second day before the scheduled departure for the competition, the wind was strong from the north, and its cold edge seemed to slice through the shivering students. It grew colder by the minute.

  "You don't need to wait," Maris told them. "It's too cold for standing around. After I race you, help the next student with the wings, and then you can go on inside."

  The exertion of flying kept Maris warm, but it also tired her. Finally, bone weary and beginning to really feel the cold, Maris saw that she was alone on the flyers' cliff with Val.

  Her shoulders slumped. She had not expected him to wait. And to race him now, when he was fresh and she was so tired… She looked up at the swirling purple sky and licked dried salt from the corners of her mouth.

  "It's late for flying," she said. "The winds are wild and it's getting dark. We can race another time."

  "The winds will make it that much more of a challenge," Val said. His eyes rested coolly on hers, and Maris knew, with a sinking heart, that he'd been waiting a long time for this moment.

  "Sena may worry," she began weakly.

  "Of course, if flying against the Woodwingers has worn you out…"

  "I once flew thirty hours without a rest," she said, stung. "An afternoon of play doesn't wear me out."

  His smile mocked her; she saw that she had fallen into his trap.

  "Get your wings on," she said.

  She did not offer to help him, but it was obvious that he was accustomed to putting on his wings unaided.

  Maris tried unobtrusively to flex some resilience back into her muscles, telling herself that a victory for him, with her as tired as she was and the winds so capricious, would mean nothing. And he must know that.

  "The usual? Twice out and back?"

  Maris nodded, glancing across the gray, churning waves to the distant spire of rock they all used as a marker. How many times had she flown out there today? Thirty? More? It didn't matter. She would fly the last two laps as if they were the first; her pride insisted.

  "Who will judge us?" she asked.

  Val snapped the last two joints of his wings into place. "We'll know," he said. "That's all that matters. I'll launch first. You call ready. Agreed?"

  "Yes." She watched as, with a few swift steps, Val moved to the edge of the cliff and leapt outward. His body bobbed on the conflicting winds like a small boat on rough water until he took command, veered off to the right, and began to climb.

  Maris took a breath and let her mind clear. She ran lightly forward and pushed off. For one brief moment she fell; then her wings caught the winds and she was buoyed upward. She took her time coming to Val's level, climbing in a ragged spiral, needing those few moments to get the feel back, so her tired body would know how best to use the winds.

  When she came up to him, the two of them circled warily, around and around each other, struggling to hold position amid the restless winds. Her eyes met his, and then she looked away, straight ahead, toward the rock that was their marker.

  "Ready… go," she shouted, and they were off.

  The winds were strong but turbulent, the prevailing north wind interrupted by gusts from one direction, then from another. The whole eastern sky was a mass of darkening clouds, towering shapes that threatened a storm. Maris gave them an uneasy glance and started to climb again, looking for a steadier, faster wind in the heights. She fought constantly to keep on course; the gusts pushed her first one way, then another, demanding constant attention and frequent half-turns and corrections. She could not afford any detours.

  Although she did not look for him, she often caught sight of Val. He sometimes flew below her, but more often he was beside her, disconcertingly close. He flew well, and it did not help Maris to reflect that he was using the advice she had given him. There would be nothing easy or simple about defeating him, she thought.

  Then Val surged ahead.

  A shock of adrenaline coursed through Maris and she flung her body to the left to catch the changing wind that had given him his push. They might call him One-Wing, but he knew how to use both wings in the air. Flying races against Woodwingers had made her soft, Maris thought. Her responses were dulled.

  Ahead of her, just barely out of reach, Val's wings swept around the spike of rock. He turned downwind, Maris noted, coming around wide and rocking just a little, but picking up speed as he did so.

  Then he was headed back toward the cliff.

  Determined to overtake him, Maris flew dangerously close to the rock. Her wingtip grazed the spire and that slight scraping threw her sideways, off balance for a crucial moment. She sheared downward crookedly, the wind lost to her, stalling, her heart pounding in her throat, before she finally gained control again. Val had put more distance between them. She was only grateful that he hadn't seen her blunder.

  She had lost altitude, but she caught a strong updraft above the rocks, and suddenly Maris was rising again. She flew recklessly, thinking only of the immediate need for speed, searching and shifting until she found a steady current she could use.

  It moved her close to Val, but she was so intent on passing him that she barely noticed the approach of land, and abruptly she was clutched by a sinker, a cold pocket of air that yanked her down like an icy hand from below. Val somehow flew clear of it, found some impossible lift that shoved him up and further ahead while Maris checked her abrupt descent and banked to free herself from the down-draft. He circled above the fortress, gauging the winds by the thin smoke rising from the academy's chimneys, and was on his way back out again, higher and higher, before Maris had finished her recovery.

  It was as if the sky itself favored Val this evening, Maris thought resentfully as she came around. The winds toyed with her and stalled her, gusting unpredictably every time she tried to ride them, but let Val fly them freely. He seemed almost unaware of the dangerous uncertainty of the gales, somehow finding, amid the constant shifting, the sure and fluid wind on which to glide.

  Maris knew then that she ha
d lost the race. Val was high above her, knowing that altitude often meant speed, and it would take her too long to reach his height, even if she should find the winds she needed to take her there. She tried to make up the distance between them, but the struggle against the ragged gusts wore her out, and the awareness that already it was too late took the heart out of her efforts. Val lost some time descending for his landing, but still passed above the cliff the second, final time more than a full wing-span ahead of her. Clearly, he had won.

  Maris was too drained by the flight to smile at him when they had both come down in the soft sand of the landing pit, too depressed to pretend that it didn't matter. In silence, she removed her wings as hastily as she could, her numbed fingers often slipping and fumbling uselessly at the straps. At last, still without a word having passed between them, Maris slung her wings over her shoulder and turned toward the weathered fortress.

  Val blocked her way.

  "I won't tell anyone," he said.

  Her head jerked up, and she felt a hot flush of embarrassment rise in her cheeks. "I don't care what you say — about anything — to anyone!"

  "Oh?" His faint smile taunted her, made her realize how hollow her words rang. Obviously she did care.

  "It wasn't a fair trial," she snapped, and instantly regretted the feeble, childish complaint.

  "No," Val agreed, his tone flat enough so Maris had no clue as to whether irony was intended. "You were flying all day, while I was well-rested. I could never have beaten you if we were both fresh. We all know that."

  "I've lost before," Maris said, trying hard to control her emotions. "It doesn't bother me."

  "I see," said Val. "Good." He smiled again.

  Maris shrugged irritably, feeling the wings scrape her back. "I'm very tired," she said. "Please excuse me."

  "Certainly." Val moved out of her way and she trudged past him, crossed the sand wearily, and began climbing the flight of worn, moss-covered steps that led to the fortress's seaward entrance. But at the top, some impulse made her hesitate and turn before ducking inside.