He was seated on the wooden throne in his receiving chamber, fingering a heavy bronze knife that lay across his knees. Against a white silk shirt, his silver chain of office gleamed softly in the light of the oil lamps, but his face was at odds with his clothing: pale and drawn and twitching.
The room was full of landsguard; they stood along the walls, silent, impassive. There were no windows in the chamber. Perhaps that was why the Landsman had chosen it. Outside, the black flyers would be wheeling against the scattered evening stars.
“Coll goes free,” Maris said, trying to keep the tension from her voice.
The Landsman frowned and gestured with his knife. “Bring up the singer,” he ordered. A landsguard officer hurried off. “Your brother has caused me great trouble,” the Landsman continued. “His songs are treason. I see no reason to release him.”
“We have an agreement,” Maris said quickly. “I came. Now you must give Coll his freedom.”
The Landsman’s mouth twitched. “Do not presume to tell me what to do. By what conceit do you imagine that you can dictate terms to me? There can be no bargaining between us. I am Landsman here. I am Thayos. You and your brother are my prisoners.”
“S’Rella carried your promise to me,” Maris replied. “She will know if you break it, and soon flyers and Landsmen will know all over Windhaven. Your pledge will be worthless. How will you rule then, or bargain?”
His eyes narrowed. “Oh? Perhaps so.” He smiled. “I made no promise to release him whole, however. How well will your brother sing of Tya, I wonder, when I have had his tongue yanked from his mouth, and the fingers of his right hand cut off?”
A wave of vertigo washed over Maris suddenly, as if she stood on the edge of a great precipice, wingless and about to fall. Then she felt Evan take her hand again, and when his fingers twined within her own, somehow she found the threat she needed. “You wouldn’t dare,” she said. “Even your landsguard might balk at such an atrocity, and flyers would carry word of your crime as far as the wind would take them. All your knives could not long protect you then.”
“I intend to let your brother go,” the Landsman said loudly, “not because I fear his friends and your empty threats, but because I am merciful. But neither he nor any other singer will ever sing of Tya again on my island. He will be sent from Thayos never to return.”
“And us?”
The Landsman smiled and ran his thumb along the blade of the bronze knife. “The healer is nothing. Less than nothing. He can go as well.” He leaned forward on his throne and pointed the knife at Maris. “As to you, wingless flyer, I will even extend my mercy to you. You too shall go free.”
“You have a price,” Maris said with certainty.
“I want the black flyers out of my sky,” the Landsman said.
“No,” said Maris.
“NO?” He shrieked the word, and his hand plunged the point of the knife into the arm of his chair. “Where do you think you are? I’ve had enough of your arrogance. How dare you refuse! I’ll have you hanging at first light, if I so choose.”
“You won’t hang us,” Maris said.
His mouth trembled. “Oh?” he said. “Go on, then. Tell me what I will and will not do. I am anxious to hear.” His voice was thick with barely suppressed rage.
“You might like to hang us,” Maris said, “but you don’t dare. Because of the black flyers you are so anxious to have us remove.”
“I dared hang one flyer,” he said. “I can hang others. Your black flyers do not frighten me.”
“No? Why is it then that you do not go outside your halls these days, even to hunt or walk in your own courtyard?”
“Flyers are pledged not to carry weapons,” the Landsman said. “What harm can they do? Let them float up there forever.”
“For ages no flyer has carried a blade into the sky,” Maris agreed, choosing her words carefully. “It is flyer law, tradition. But it was flyer law to stay out of land-bound politics as well, to deliver all messages without a second thought as to what they meant. Tya did what she did nonetheless. And you killed her for it, in spite of centuries of tradition that said no Landsman might judge a flyer.”
“She was a traitor,” the Landsman said. “Traitors deserve no other fate, whether they wear wings or not.”
Maris shrugged. “My point,” she said, “is only that traditions are poor protection in these troubled days. You think yourself safe because flyers carry no weapons?” She stared at him coldly. “Well, every flyer who brings you a message will wear black, and some of them will carry the grief in their hearts as well. As you hear them out, you will always wonder. Will this be the one? Will this be a new Tya, a new Maris, a new Val One-Wing? Will the ancient tradition end here and now, in blood?”
“It will never happen,” the Landsman said, too shrilly.
“It’s unthinkable,” Maris said. “As unthinkable as what you did to Tya. Hang me, and it will happen all the sooner.”
“I hang who I please. My guards protect me.”
“Can they stop an arrow loosed from above? Will you bar all your windows? Refuse to see flyers?”
“You are threatening me!” the Landsman said in sudden fury.
“I am warning you,” Maris said. “Perhaps no harm will come to you at all, but you will never be sure. The black flyers will see to that. For the rest of your life they will follow you, haunting you as sure as Tya’s ghost. Whenever you look up at the stars, you will see wings. Whenever a shadow brushes you, you will wonder. You’ll never be able to look out a window or walk in the sun. The flyers will circle your keep forever, like flies around a corpse. You will see them on your deathbed. Your own home will be your prison, and even there you will never really be certain. Flyers can pass any wall, and once they have slipped off their wings, they look like anyone else.”
The Landsman sat very still as Maris spoke, and she watched him carefully, hoping she was pushing him the right way. There was a wildness about his puffy eyes, an unpredictability that terrified her. Her voice was calm, but her brow was beaded by sweat, and her hands felt damp and clammy.
The Landsman’s eyes flicked back and forth as if hunting for escape from the specter of the black flyers, until they settled on one of his guards. “Bring me my flyer!” he snapped. “At once, at once!”
The man must have been waiting just outside the chamber; he entered at once. Maris recognized him; a thin, balding, stoop-shouldered flyer she had never really known. “Sahn,” she said aloud, when his name came to her.
He did not acknowledge her greeting. “My Landsman,” he said deferentially, in a reedy voice.
“She threatens me,” the Landsman said angrily. “Black flyers, she says. They will hound me to my death, she says.”
“She lies,” Sahn said quickly, and with a start Maris remembered who he was. Sahn of Thayos, flyer-born, conservative; Sahn who two years ago had lost his wings to an upstart one-wing. Now he had them back, by virtue of her death. “The black flyers are no threat. They are nothing, nothing.”
“She says they will never leave me,” the Landsman said.
“Wrong,” said Sahn in his thin, ingratiating voice. “You have nothing to fear. They will soon be gone. They have duties, Landsmen of their own, lives to live, families, messages to fly. They cannot stay indefinitely.”
“Others will take their place,” Maris said. “Windhaven has many flyers. You will never be out from under the shadow of their wings.”
“Pay her no mind, sir,” Sahn said. “The flyers are not behind her. Only a few one-wings. Trash of the sky. When they leave, no one will take their place. You need only wait, my Landsman.” Something in his tone, beyond his words, shocked and sickened her, and all at once Maris knew why; Sahn spoke as a lesser to a superior, not as equal to equal. He feared the Landsman, and was beholden to him for his very wings, and his voice made it clear that he knew it. For the first time, a flyer had become his Landsman’s creature, through and through.