Val’s expression was as guarded as ever. “I see,” he said.
Emboldened, Maris raised a touchier subject. “Something else. I saw that you wore your knife again today during practice.”
“Yes.”
“Next time, don’t,” Maris said. “I don’t think you understand. No matter what the knife means to you, this is a matter of flyer law. No blades may be worn in the sky.”
“Flyer law,” Val said icily. “Tell me, who gave the flyers the right to make laws? Do we have farmers’ law? Glassblowers’ law? The Landsmen make the law. The only law. When my father gave me that knife, he told me never to put it aside. But I did put it aside, during the year I had my wings. I obeyed your flyer law. It did nothing but shame me. I was still One-Wing. Well, I was a boy then, and cowed by flyer law, but I am not a boy now. I choose to wear my knife.”
S’Rella looked at him wonderingly. “But, Val—how can you disregard flyer law, if you’re going to be a flyer?”
“I never said I was going to be a flyer,” Val replied. “Only that I intend to win wings, and fly.” His eyes moved from Maris to S’Rella. “And, S’Rella, you are not going to be a flyer either, even if you should win. Remember that, if it comes to pass. You’ll be as I was—a One-Wing.”
“That’s not true!” Maris said angrily. “I was not born of flyers, but they’ve accepted me all the same.”
“Have they?” Val said. He smiled a thin, ironic smile, and rose from the bench. “You’ll excuse me. I have to rest. Tomorrow I must practice my upwind turns, and I’ll need all my strength for that.”
When he was gone, Maris reached across the table to take S’Rella by the hand, but the girl gave her a troubled look and pulled away. “I have to go too,” she said, and Maris was left alone.
She sat for a long time, thinking, and it was not until Damen approached her that she remembered the half-eaten meal on her plate. “Everyone else is gone,” he said softly. “Are you going to finish, Maris?”
“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.