“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.