It was a cold, starry night on the far side of the mountain. The sea moved restlessly below them, a vast, dark, melancholy presence. Maris climbed the stairs to the flyers’ cliff. She climbed slowly, and when she reached the top her thighs ached and her breathing was labored.
Evan took her hand briefly. “Can I persuade you not to fly?”
“No,” she said.
He nodded. “I thought not. Fly well, then.” He kissed her, and stepped away.
The Landsman stood against the cliff, flanked by his landsguard. Tya and Jem unfolded her wings. Corina hung back until Maris called to her. “I’m not angry,” Maris said. “This is not your doing. A flyer isn’t responsible for the messages she bears.”
“Thank you,” Corina said. Her small, pretty face was pale in the starlight.
“If I fail, you are to bring my wings back to Amberly, yes?”
Corina nodded reluctantly.
“Do you know what the Landsman intends to do with them?”
“He will find a new flyer, perhaps someone who has lost his wings by challenge. Until someone is found… well, Mother is ill, but Father is still fit enough to fly.”
Maris laughed lightly. “There’s a wonderful irony in that. Corm has always wanted my wings—but I’m going to do my best to keep them from him once again.”
Corina smiled.
Her wings were fully extended; Maris could feel the familiar, insistent push of the wind against them. She checked her straps and struts, motioned Corina out of her way, and walked to the brink of the precipice. There she steadied herself and looked down.
The world reeled dizzily, drunkenly. Far below, breakers crashed against black rocks, sea and stone locked in eternal war. She swallowed hard, and tried to keep from lurching off the cliff. Slowly the world grew solid and steady again. No motion. It was just a cliff, like any other cliff, and below the endless ocean. The sky was her friend, her lover.
Maris flexed her arms, and took the wing-grips in hand. Then she took a deep breath and leaped.
Her kick sent her clean away from the cliff, and the wind grabbed her, supporting her. It was a cold, strong wind; a wind that cut through to the bone, but not an angry wind, no, an easy wind to fly. She relaxed and gave herself to it, and she glided down and around in a long graceful curve.
But the current pushed around again toward the mountain, and Maris glimpsed the Landsman and the other flyers waiting there—Jem had unfolded his own wings and was preparing to launch—before she decided to turn away from them. She twisted her body, tried to bank.
The sky lurched and turned fluid on her. She banked too far, stalled, and when she tried to correct by throwing her weight and strength back in the other direction, she tilted wildly. Her breath caught in her throat.
The feel was gone. Maris closed her eyes for an instant, and felt sick. She was falling, her body screamed at her. She was falling, her ears rang, and the feel was gone from her. She had always known: subtle changes in the wind, shifts she had to react to before she was half-aware of them, the taste of a building storm, the omens of still air. Now it was all gone. She flew through an endless empty ocean of air, feeling nothing, dizzy, and this strange savage wind she could not understand had her in its grasp.
Her great silver wings tilted back and forth wildly as her body shook, and Maris opened her eyes again, suddenly desperate. She steadied herself and tried to fly on vision alone. But the rocks moved, and it was too dark, and even the bright cold stars above seemed to dance and shift and mock her.
Vertigo reached up and swallowed her whole, and Maris released her wing-grips—she had never done that before, never—and now she was not flying, but only hanging beneath her wings. She doubled over in the straps, retching, and sent the Landsman’s dinner down into the ocean. She was trembling violently.
Jem and Corina were both airborne and coming after her, Maris saw, but she did not care. She was weak, drained, old. There were boats below her, gliding across the black ocean. She took her wing grips in hand again, tried to pull up, but all she accomplished was a sharp downwind turn that sheered into a plunge. She tried to correct, and couldn’t.
She was crying.
The sea came up at her. Shimmering. Shirting.
Her ears hurt.
She could not fly. She was a flyer, had always been a flyer, windlover, Woodwinger, skychild, alone, home in the sky, flyer, flyer, flyer—and she could not fly.
She closed her eyes again, so the world would stand still.
With a slap and a spray of salt water, the sea took her. It has been waiting, she thought. All those years.
“Leave me alone,” she said that night, when they finally returned to his home. Evan took her at her word.
Maris slept most of the next day.
The following day Maris woke early, when the ruddy light of dawn first broke across the room. She felt terrible, cold and sweaty, and a great weight pressed across her chest. For a moment, she could not think what was wrong. Then she remembered. Her wings were gone. She tried to think about it, and the despair welled up inside her, and the anger, and the self-pity, and soon she curled up under the blankets once again and tried to go back to sleep. When she slept, she did not have to face it.
But sleep would not take her. Finally she rose and dressed. Evan was in the next room, cooking eggs. “Hungry?” he asked her.
“No,” Maris said dully.
Evan nodded, and cracked two more eggs. Maris sat at the table and, when he set a plate of eggs before her, she picked at them listlessly.
It was a wet, windy day, marked by frequent violent storms. When he had finished his breakfast, Evan went about his business. Near noon he left her, and Maris wandered aimlessly through the empty house. Finally she sat by the window and watched the rain.
Well after dark Evan returned, wet and dispirited. Maris was still sitting by the window, in a cold and darkened house. “You might at least have started a fire,” Evan grumbled. His tone was disgusted.
“Oh,” she said. She looked at him blankly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”
Evan built the fire. Maris moved to help him, but he snapped at her and chased her out of the way. They ate in silence, but the food seemed to restore Evan’s mood. Afterward he brewed some of his special tea, set a mug down in front of her, and settled into his favorite chair.
Maris tasted the steaming tea, conscious of Evan’s eyes on her. Finally she looked up at him.
“How do you feel?” he asked her.
She thought about it. “I feel dead,” she said, finally.
“Talk about it.”
“I can’t,” she said. She began to weep. “I can’t.”
When the weeping would not stop, Evan fixed her a sleeping draught, and put her to bed.
The next day Maris went out.
She took a road that Evan had shown her, a well-worn path that led not to the cliffs but down to the sea itself, and she spent the day walking alone on a cold pebble beach that seemed endless. When she wearied, she rested at the water’s edge and flung pebbles into the waves, taking a small, melancholy pleasure in the way they skipped, then sank.
Even the sea was different here, she thought. It was gray and cold, without highlights. She missed the flashing blues and greens of the waters around Amberly.
Tears ran down her cheeks and she did not bother to wipe them away. At times she became aware that she was sobbing, without remembering just when or why she had started to cry.
The sea was vast and lonely, the empty beach went on forever, and the wild, cloudy sky was all around, but Maris felt hemmed in, suffocated. She thought of all the places in the world that she would never see again, the memory of each one a fresh pain to her. She thought of the impressive ruins of the Old Fortress on Laus. She remembered Woodwings Academy, vast and dark, carved into the rock of Seatooth. The Temple of the Sky God on Deedi. The drafty castles of the flyer-princes of Artellia. The windmills of Stormtown, and the Old Captain’s House, ancient beyond telling. The tree-towns of Setheen and Alessy, the boneyards and battlegrounds of Lomarron, the vineyards of the Amberlys, and Riesa’s warm, smoky alehouse on Skulny. All lost to her now. And the Eyrie—ships might take her elsewhere, but the Eyrie was a flyer’s place, now closed to her forever.