“Tradition,” he said, sounding desperate. She could tell he was embarrassed also. He wanted to help her, not to make things worse. “We could try it. The wings are mine, but you could use them . . .”
“Oh, Dorrel, don't. The Landsman, your Landsman, would never allow it. It's more than tradition, it's law. They might take your wings away and give them to someone with more respect, like they did to Lind the smuggler. Besides, even if we ran away, to a place without law or Landsmen, to a place by ourselves—how long could you bear to share your wings? With me, with anyone? Don't you see? We'd come to hate one another. I'm not a child who can practice when you're resting. I can't live like that, flying on sufferance, knowing the wings could never be mine. And you would grow tired of the way I would watch you—we would—oh . . .” She broke off, fumbling for words.
Dorrel was silent for a moment. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I wanted to do something—to help you, Maris. It hurts unbearably knowing what is about to happen to you. I wanted to give you something. I can't bear to think of your going away and becoming . . .”
She took his hand again and held it tightly. “Yes, yes. Shh.”
“You do know I love you, Maris. You do, don't you?”
“Yes, yes. And I love you, Dorrel. But—I'll never marry a flyer. Not now. I couldn't. I'd murder him for his wings.” She looked at him, trying to lighten the bleak truth of her words. And failing.
They clung to each other, balanced on the edge of the moment of parting, trying to say now, with the pressure of their bodies, everything they might ever want to say to each other. Then they pulled away, and looked at each other through tears.
Maris fumbled with her wings, shaking, suddenly cold again. Dorrel tried to help, but his fingers collided with hers, and they laughed, haltingly, at their clumsiness. She let him unfold her wings for her. When one of them was fully extended, and the second nearly so, she suddenly thought of Raven, and waved Dorrel away. Puzzled, he watched. Maris lifted the wing like an air-weary elder, and threw the final joint into lock with a clean strong snap. And then she was ready to leave.
“Go well,” he said, finally.
Maris opened her mouth, then closed it, nodding foolishly. “And you,” she said at last. “Take care, until . . .” But she could not add the final lie, any more than she could say goodbye to him. She turned and ran from him, and launched herself away from the Eyrie, out on the nightwinds into a cold dark sky.
It was a long and lonely flight over a starlit sea where nothing stirred. The winds were steady from the east, forcing Maris to tack all the way, losing time and speed. By the time she spotted the light tower of Lesser Amberly, her home island, midnight had come and gone.
There was another light below, turning on their landing beach. She saw it as she coasted in, smooth and easy, and thought it must be the lodge men. But they should have gone off duty long ago; few flyers were aloft this late. She frowned in puzzlement just as she hit the ground with a jarring shock.
Maris groaned, hurried to get up, and set to work on the wing straps. She should know enough not to be distracted at the moment of landing. The light advanced on her.
“So you decided to come back,” the voice said, harsh and angry. It was Russ, her father—stepfather, really—coming toward her with a lantern in his good hand, his right arm hanging dead and useless at his side.
“I stopped by the Eyrie first,” she said, defensively. “You weren't worried?”
“Coll was to go, not you.” The lines of his face were set hard.
“He was in bed,” Maris said. “He was too slow—I knew he'd miss the best of the storm winds. He would have caught nothing but rain, and it would have taken him forever to get there. If he did. He's not good in rain yet.”
“Then he must learn to be better. The boy must make his own mistakes now. You were his teacher, but soon the wings will be his. He's the flyer, not you.”
Maris winced as if struck. This was the man who had taught her to fly, who had been so proud of her and the way she seemed to know instinctively what to do. The wings would be hers, he'd told her more than once, though she was not of his blood. He and his wife had taken her in when it seemed that he would never father a child of his own to inherit the wings. He'd had his accident and lost the sky, and it was important to find a flyer to replace him—if not someone of his blood, then someone he loved. His wife had refused to learn; she had lived thirty-five years as a land-bound, and she did not intend to jump off any cliffs, wings or no. Besides, it was too late; flyers had to be taught young. So it was Maris he had taught, adopted, and come to love—Maris the fisherman's daughter, who would rather watch from the flyers' cliff than play with the other children.
And then, against all probability, Coll had been born. His mother had died after the prolonged and difficult labor—Maris, very much a child, remembered a dark night full of people running, and later her stepfather crying alone in a corner—but Coll had lived on. Maris, suddenly a child-mother, came to care for him, love him. At first they didn't expect him to live. She was happy when he did; and for three years she loved him as both brother and son, while she practiced with the wings under their father's watchful eyes.
Until the night when the same father told her that Coll, baby Coll, must have her wings.
“I am a far better flyer than he will ever be,” Maris told him now, on the beach, her voice trembling.
“I do not dispute that. It makes no difference. He is my own blood.”
“It's not fair!” she cried, letting out the protest that had been lodged inside her since the day she had come of age. By then Coll had been strong, healthy; still too small to bear the wings, but they would be his on his coming-of-age day. Maris had no claim, no right at all. That was the law of the flyers, stretching back through generations to the star sailors themselves, the legendary wing-forgers. The first-born child of each of the flying families would inherit the wings of the parent. Skill counted for nothing; this was a law of inheritance, and Maris came from a fishing family who had nothing to leave her but the scattered wreckage of a wooden boat.
“Fair or no, it is the law, Maris. You've known it for a long time, even if you chose to ignore it. For years you've played at being a flyer, and I've let you, because you loved it, and because Coll needed a teacher, a skilled one, and because this island is too big to rely on only two flyers. But you knew all the while this day would come.”
He could be more kind, she thought wildly. He must know what it means, to give up the sky.
“Now come with me,” he said. “You'll not fly again.”
Her wings were still fully extended; only one strap was undone. “I'll run away,” she said madly. “You'll never see me again. I'll go to some island where they don't have a flyer of their own. They'll be glad to have me, no matter how I got my wings.”
“Never,” her father said, sadly. “The other flyers would shun the island, as they did after the mad Landsman of Kennehut executed the Flyer-Who-Brought-Bad-News. You would be stripped of your stolen wings no matter where you went. No Landsman would take the risk.”
“I'll break them, then!” Maris said, riding the edge of hysteria. “Then he'll never fly either, any more than . . . than . . .”
Glass shattered on rock and the light went out as her father dropped the lantern. Maris felt his grip on her hands. “You couldn't even if you wanted to. And you wouldn't do that to Coll. But give me the wings.”
“I wouldn't . . .”
“I don't know what you wouldn't do. I thought you'd gone out to kill yourself this morning, to die flying in the storm. I know the feelings, Maris. That's why I was so frightened, and so angry. You mustn't blame Coll.”
“I don't. And I would not keep him from flying—but I want to fly so badly myself—Father, please.” Tears ran down her face in the dark, and she moved closer, reaching for comfort.
“Yes, Maris,” he said. He could not put his arm about her; the wings got in the way. “There is nothing I can do. T
his is the way of things. You must learn to live without wings, as I have. At least you've had them for a time—you know what it is like to fly.”
“It's not enough!” she said, tearful, stubborn. “I used to think it would be, when I was a little girl, not even yours yet, just a stranger, and you were Amberly's greatest flyer. I watched you and the others from the cliff and I used to think—if I could have wings, even for a moment, that would be life enough. But it isn't, it isn't. I can't give them up.”
The hard lines were all gone now in her father's face. He touched her face gently, brushing away tears. “Perhaps you're right,” he said, in a slow heavy voice. “Perhaps it was not a good thing. I thought if I could let you fly for a while, a little bit—that would be better than nothing, it would be a fine bright gift indeed. But it wasn't, was it? Now you can never be happy. You can never be a land-bound, really, for you've flown, and you'll always know how you are imprisoned.” His words stopped abruptly and Maris realized that he was talking of himself as much as her.
He helped her unstrap and fold the wings and they walked back home together.
Their house was a simple wood frame, surrounded by trees and land. A creek ran through the back. Flyers could live well. Russ said goodnight just inside the door and took the wings upstairs with him. Has he really lost all trust? Maris thought. What have I done? And she felt like crying again.
Instead she wandered into the kitchen, found cheese and cold meat and tea, and took them back into the dining room. A bowl-shaped sand candle sat in the center of the table. She lit it, ate, and watched the flame dance.
Coll entered just as she finished, and stood awkwardly in the doorway. “'Lo, Maris,” he said uncertainly. “I'm glad you're back. I was waiting.” He was tall for a thirteen-year-old, with a soft, slender body, long red-blond hair, and the wispy beginnings of a mustache.
“'Lo, Coll,” Maris said. “Don't just stand there. I'm sorry I took the wings.”
He sat down. “I don't mind, you know that. You fly a lot better than me, and—well—you know. Was Father mad?”
Maris nodded.
Coll looked grim and frightened. “It's only one week away now, Maris. What are we going to do?” He was looking straight down at the candle, not at her.
Maris sighed, and put a gentle hand on his arm. “We'll do what we must, Coll. We have no choice.” They had talked before, she and Coll, and she knew his agony as much as her own. She was his sister, almost his mother, and the boy had shared with her his shame and his secret. That was the ultimate irony.
He looked up at her now, looking to her again as the child to the mother; although he knew now that she was as helpless as he, still he hoped. “Why don't we have a choice? I don't understand.”
Maris sighed. “It's law, Coll. We don't go against tradition here, you know that. We all have duties put upon us. If we had a choice I would keep the wings, I would be a flyer. And you could be a singer. We'd both be proud, and know we were good at what we did. Life will be hard as a land-bound. I want the wings so much. I've had them, and it doesn't seem right that they should be taken from me, but maybe—maybe the rightness in it is something I just don't see. People wiser than we decided that things should be the way they are, and maybe, maybe I'm just being a child about it, wanting everything my own way.”
Coll wet his lips, nervous. “No.”
She looked a question at him.
He shook his head stubbornly. “It's not right, Maris, it just isn't. I don't want to fly, I don't want to take your wings. It's all so stupid. I'm hurting you and I don't want to, but I don't want to hurt Father either. How can I tell him? I'm his heir and all that—I'm supposed to take the wings. He'd hate me. The songs don't say anything about flyers who were scared of the sky like I am. Flyers aren't afraid—I'm not meant for a flyer.” His hands were shaking visibly.
“Coll, don't worry. It will be all right, really it will. Everyone is frightened at first. I was, too.” She wasn't thinking about the lie, only saying words to reassure him.
“But it's not fair,” he cried. “I don't want to give up my singing, and if I fly I can't sing, not like Barrion, not like I'd like to. So why are they going to make me? Maris, why can't you be the flyer, like you want to be? Why?”
She looked at him, so close to crying, and felt like joining him in tears. She didn't have an answer, not for him or for herself. “I don't know,” she said, her voice hollow. “I don't know, little one. That is the way things have always been done, though, and that is the way they must be.”
They stared at each other, both trapped, caught together by a law older than either and a tradition neither understood. Helpless and hurt, they talked long in the candlelight, saying the same things over and over again until, late, they parted for bed, nothing resolved.
But once in bed alone, the resentment came flooding back to Maris, the sense of loss, and with it, shame. She cried herself to sleep that night, and dreamt of purple storm-skies that she would never fly.
The week went on forever.
A dozen times during those endless days Maris walked up to the flyers' cliff, to stand helplessly with her hands in her pockets looking out over the sea. Fishing boats she saw, and gulls, and once a hunting pack of sleek gray seacats far, far off. It made her hurt the more, the sudden closing of the world she knew, the way the horizons seemed to shrink about her, but she could not stop coming. So she stood there, lusting for the wind, but the only thing that flew was her hair.
Once she caught Coll watching her from a distance. Afterward neither of them mentioned it.
Russ had the wings now, his wings, as they had always been, as they would be until Coll took them. When Lesser Amberly needed a flyer, Corm answered the call from the far side of the island, or gay Shalli who had flown guard when Maris was a child first learning simple sky sense. As far as her father was concerned, the island had no third flyer, and would have none until Coll claimed his birthright.
His attitude toward Maris had changed too. Sometimes he raged at her when he found her brooding, sometimes he put his good arm around her and all but wept. He could not find a middle ground between anger and pity; so, helpless, he tried to avoid her. Instead he spent his time with Coll, acting excited and enthusiastic. The boy, a dutiful son, tried to catch and echo the mood. But Maris knew that he too went for long walks, and spent a lot of time alone with his guitar.
On the day before Coll was to come of age, Maris sat high on the flyers' cliff, her legs dangling over the edge, watching Shalli wheel in silver arcs across the noonday sky. Spotting seacats for the fishermen, Shalli had said, but Maris knew better. She'd been a flyer long enough to recognize a joy-flight when she saw one. Even now, as she sat trapped, she could feel a distant echo of that joy; something soared within her whenever Shalli banked, and a shaft of silvered sunlight blazed briefly from a wing.
Is this the way it ends? Maris asked herself. It can't be. No, this is the way it began. I remember.
And she did remember. Sometimes she thought she had watched the flyers even before she could walk, though her mother, her real mother, said that wasn't so. Maris did have vivid memories of the cliff, though; she'd run away and come here almost weekly when she was four and five. There—here—she'd sit, watching the flyers come and go. Her mother would always find her, and she would always be furious.
“You are a land-bound, Maris,” she'd say, after she had administered a spanking. “Don't waste your time with foolish dreams. I won't have my daughter be a Woodwings.”
That was an old folktale; her mother told it to her anew each time she caught her on the cliff. Woodwings was a carpenter's son who wanted to be a flyer. But, of course, he wasn't in a flying family. He did not care, the story said; he did not listen to friends or family, he wanted nothing but sky. Finally, in his father's shop, he built himself a beautiful pair of wings: great butterfly wings of carved and polished wood. And everyone said they were beautiful, everyone but the flyers; the flyers only shook their heads si
lently. Finally Woodwings climbed to the flyers' cliff. They were waiting for him up there, wordless, circling and banking bright and quiet in the dawn light. Woodwings ran to meet them, and fell tumbling to his death.
“And the moral,” Maris' mother would always say, “is that you shouldn't try to be something you're not.”
But was that the moral? The child Maris didn't worry about it; she just dismissed Woodwings as an oaf. But when she was older, the story came back to her often. At times she thought her mother had gotten it all wrong. Woodwings had won, Maris thought. He had flown, if only for an instant, and that made it all worthwhile, even his death. It was a flyer's death. And the others, the flyers, they had not come out to mock him, or warn him off—no, they flew guard for him, because he was just a beginner, and because they understood. The land-bound often laughed at Woodwings; the name had become a synonym for fool. But how could a flyer hear the story and do anything but cry?
Maris thought of Woodwings then, as she sat in the cold watching Shalli fly, and the old questions came back. Was it worth it, Woodwings? she thought. An instant of flight, then death forever? And for me, was it worth it? A dozen years of stormwinds, and now a life without?
When Russ had first begun to notice her on the cliff, she was the happiest child in the world. When he adopted her and pushed her proudly into the sky, she thought she would die from joy. Her real father was dead, gone with his boat, killed by an angry scylla after a storm had blown him far off course; her mother was gladly rid of her. She leapt at the new life, at the sky; it seemed that all her dreams were coming true. Woodwings had the right idea, she thought then. Dream anything hard enough, and it can be yours.
Her faith had left after Coll came, when she was told.
Coll. Everything came back to Coll.
So, lost, Maris brushed all thought aside, and watched in melancholy peace.
The day came, as Maris knew it must.
It was a small party, though the Landsman himself was the host. He was a portly, genial man, with a kind face hidden by a full beard that he hoped would make him fierce. When he met them at the door, his clothes dripped wealth: rich embroidered fabrics, rings of copper and brass, and a heavy necklace of real wrought iron. But the welcome was warm.