Coll nodded, looking dazed. “I didn't mean to imply . . . It's just so hard for me to accept. Maris, I can't imagine you grounded!”
He meant well, Maris knew, but his grief and incomprehension grated against her, tore her wounds open again.
“You don't have to imagine it,” she said rather sharply. “This is my life now, for anyone to see. The wings have already been taken back to Amberly.”
Coll said nothing. Maris didn't want to see the pain on his face, so she stared into the fire, and let the silence grow. She heard the sound of a stone bottle being unstoppered, and then Evan was pouring the steaming kivas into three mugs.
“Can I taste?” Bari crouched beside her father, looking up, hopeful. Coll smiled down at her and shook his head teasingly.
Watching the father and daughter together, Maris felt the tension suddenly dissolve. She met Evan's eyes as he put a mug filled with the hot, spiced wine into her hands, and smiled.
She turned back to Coll and was about to speak to him when her eyes fell on his guitar, which lay as always close to hand. The sight of it released a torrent of memories, and suddenly Maris felt that Barrion, dead now for many years, was again in the room with them. The guitar had been his, and he had claimed it had been in his family for generations, passed down from the days of the star sailors. She had never known whether or not to believe him—exaggerations and beautiful lies came from him as easily as breathing—but certainly the instrument was very old. He had entrusted it to Coll, who had been his protégé and the son he'd never had. Maris reached out to feel the smooth wood, dark with many varnishings and constant handling.
“Sing for us, Coll,” she suggested. “Sing us something new.”
The guitar was in his arms, cradled against his chest, almost before the words were out of her mouth. The soft chords sounded.
“I call this ‘The Singer's Lament,' ” he said, a wry smile on his face. And he began to sing a song, melancholy and ironic in turns, about a singer whose wife leaves him because he loves his music too well. Maris suspected it was his own marriage he was singing of, although he had never told her why it had ended, and she had not been around to see much of it first-hand.
The recurring refrain of the song was: “A singer should not marry/A singer should not wed/Just kiss the music as she flies/And take a song to bed.”
Next he sang a song about the turbulent love affair between a proud Landsman and an even prouder one-wing—Maris recognized one of the names, but had not heard the story.
“Is that true?” she asked when the song had ended.
Coll laughed. “I remember you used to ask that same question of Barrion! I'll give you his answer: I can't tell you when or where or if it happened, but it's a true story all the same!”
“Now sing my song,” Bari said.
Coll dropped a kiss on his daughter's nose and sang a tuneful fantasy about a little girl named Bari who makes friends with a scylla who takes her to find treasure in a cave beneath the sea.
Later, he sang older songs: the ballad of Aron and Jeni, the song about the ghost flyers, the one about the mad Landsman of Kennehut, his own version of the Woodwings song.
Later still, when Bari had been put to bed and the three adults were working on the third bottle of kivas, they spoke about their lives. More calmly now, Maris could talk to Coll about her decision to stay with Evan.
The first shock past, Coll knew better than to express pity for her, but he let her know he did not understand the choice she had made.
“But why stay here, in Eastern, far from all your friends?” Then with drunken courtesy he added, “I don't mean to slight you, Evan.”
“Anywhere I chose to live would be far from someone,” Maris said. “You know how widely my friends are scattered.” She sipped the hot, intoxicating drink, feeling detached.
“Come with me back to Amberly,” he coaxed. “Live in the house we grew up in. We might wait awhile, for spring when the sea is calmer, but the voyage is not so bad between here and there, truly.”
“You can have the house,” she said. “You and Bari can live there. Or sell it if you like. I can't go live there again—there are too many memories there. Here on Thayos I can start a new life. It will be hard, but Evan helps me.” She took his hand. “I can't stand idleness; it's good to be useful.”
“But as a healer?” Coll shook his head. “It's odd, to think of you doing that.” He looked to Evan. “Is she any good? Truthfully.”
Evan held Maris' hand between his own, stroking it.
“She learns quickly,” he said after a few moments' thought. “She has a strong desire to help, and does not balk at dull or difficult tasks. I don't know yet whether she has it in her to be a healer—if she will ever be truly skilled.
“But I must admit, quite selfishly, I am glad she is here. I hope she'll never want to leave me.”
A flush rose to her cheeks, and Maris bent her head and drank. She was startled, yet gratified, by his last words. There had been very little in the way of love-talk between her and Evan—no romantic promises or extravagant claims or compliments. And, although she had tried to put it out of her mind, somewhere within she feared that she had given Evan no choice in their relationship—that she had installed herself in his life before he could have any second thoughts. But there had been love in his voice.
There was a silence. To fill it, Maris asked Coll about Bari. “When did she start traveling with you?”
“It's been about six months,” he said. He set his mug down, drained, and picked up his guitar. He stroked the strings, producing faint chords as he spoke. “Her mother's new husband is a violent man—he beat Bari once. Her mother wouldn't say no to him, but she had no objections to my taking her away. She told me he might be jealous of Bari—he's been trying to get a child of his own.”
“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 no 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 walke
d 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. Reni 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.