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 silently. 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.
Inside the lodge was a great party room. Bare wooden beams above, torches flaming bright along the walls, a scarlet carpet underneath. And a table, groaning under its burden—kivas from the Shotans and Amberly’s own wines, cheeses flown in from Culhall, fruit from the Outer Islands, great bowls of green salad. In the hearth, a seacat turned on a spit while a cook basted it with bitter-weed and its own drippings. It was a big one, half again the size of a man, its warm blue-gray fur skinned away to leave a barrel-shaped carcass tapering to a pair of powerful flippers. The thick layer of fat that protected the seacat against the cold had begun to crackle and hiss in the flames, and the curiously feline face had been stuffed full of nuts and herbs. It smelled wonderful.