Windhaven - Страница 16

The tips of her boots brushed the water first, and then her body shattered the gray, smooth mirror of the ocean. The impact of the cold water seared her like a flame, and she sank…

… and woke, wet and gasping for breath.

Silence pounded in her ears. The sweat on her body dried in the cool air, and she sat up, disoriented and blind. Across the room she could see a thin red line of banked coals, but they were at the wrong side of the bed to be the Eyrie, and too far away for her fireplace at home. The air smelled faintly of damp and sea mold.

The smell gave it away. She was at the academy, she thought with relief, at Woodwings; suddenly all the shadows resolved themselves into the mundane and familiar. The tension drained slowly from her body, and now Maris was fully awake. Pulling a roughly woven shift over her head, she moved carefully across the dark room to the fireplace, where she took a woven taper from the pile and lit a sand candle.

In the light she saw the little stone jug beside her low bed, and smiled. Just the thing to wash away the nightmares.

She sat cross-legged on the bed as she sipped the cool, woody wine, staring at the flickering candle flame all the while. The dream disturbed her. Like all flyers, Maris feared still air, but until now she had not had nightmares about it. And the peace of it all, the sense of surrender and acceptance—those were the worst parts. I am a flyer, she thought, and that was not a true flyer’s dream.

Someone knocked on her door.

“Enter,” Maris said, setting the wine jug aside.

S’Rella stood in the doorway, a slight, dark girl with her hair cropped short in the Southern fashion. “Breakfast soon, Maris,” she said, the slight slurring of her speech reflecting her origins. “Sena wants to see you before, though. Up in her room.”

“Thanks,” Maris said, smiling. She liked S’Rella, perhaps best of all the students at the Woodwings academy. The island in the Southern Archipelago where S’Rella had been born was a world away from Maris’ own Lesser Amberly, but despite their differences Maris saw a lot of herself in the younger girl. S’Rella was small but determined, with a stamina that belied her size. At the moment she was still graceless in the sky, but she was stubborn enough to give hope of quick improvement. Maris had been working with Sena’s flock of would-be flyers for nearly ten days now, and she had come to regard S’Rella as one of the three or four most promising.

“Shall I wait and show you the way?” the girl asked when Maris climbed off the bed to wash at the basin of water in the far corner of the room.

“No,” Maris said. “Off to breakfast now. I can find Sena well enough myself.” She smiled to soften the dismissal, and S’Rella smiled back, a little shyly, before she left.

A few minutes later Maris was having second thoughts as she groped along a narrow, dank corridor in search of Sena’s cubbyhole. Woodwings academy was an ancient structure, a huge rock shot through with tunnels and caves, some natural, others hollowed out by human hands. Its lower chambers were perpetually flooded, and even in the upper, inhabited portions, many of the rooms and all of the halls were windowless, cut off from sun and stars. The sea smell was everywhere. In the old days it had been a fortress, built during Seatooth’s bitter revolt against Big Shotan and afterward unoccupied until the Landsman of Seatooth had offered it to the flyers as a site for a training academy. In the seven years since, Sena and her charges had restored much of it, but it was still easy to take a wrong turning and get lost in the abandoned sections.

Time passed without a trace in the corridors of Wood-wings. Torches burned down in wall-sockets and lamps ran short of oil, and days often passed before anyone noticed. Maris felt her way carefully along one such dark stretch of corridor, nervous and a bit oppressed by the weight of the old fortress on her. She did not like being underground and enclosed; it quarreled with all her flyer’s instincts.

With relief Maris saw the dim glow of a light ahead. One last, sharp corner and she found herself back in familiar territory. Unless she had gotten turned around completely, Sena’s room was the first to the left.

“Maris.” Sena looked up and smiled. She was sitting in a wicker chair, carving a soft block of wood with a bone knife, but now she set it aside and motioned Maris to enter. “I was about to call for S’Rella again and send her looking for you. Did you get lost in our maze?”

“Almost,” Maris said, shaking her head. “I should have thought to carry a light. I can get from my room to the kitchen or the common room or the outside, but beyond that it is a less certain proposition.”

Sena laughed, but it was only polite laughter, masking a mood that was far from light. The teacher was a former flyer, three times Maris’ age, made land-bound a decade ago in the sort of accident all too common among flyers. Normally her vigor and enthusiasm cloaked her age, but this morning she looked old and tired. Her bad eye, like a piece of milky sea-glass, seemed to weigh down the left side of her face. It sagged and trembled beneath its burden.

“You sent S’Rella to me for a reason,” Maris said. “News?”

“News,” Sena said, “and not good. I thought it best not to talk about it at breakfast until I had discussed it with you.”

“Yes?”

“Eastern has closed Airhome,” Sena said.

Maris sighed and leaned back in her chair. Suddenly she too felt weary. The news was no great surprise, but it was still disheartening. “Why now?” she asked. “I spoke to Nord three months ago, when they sent me out with a message to Far Hunderlin. He thought they would keep the doors open at least through the next competition. He even told me that he had several promising students.”

“There was a death,” Sena said. “One of those promising students made a misjudgment, and struck a cliffside with her wing. Nord could only watch helplessly as she fell to the rocks below. Worse, her parents were there too. Wealthy, powerful people—traders from Cheslin with more than a dozen ships. The girl had been showing off for them. The parents went to the Landsman, of course, asking for justice. They said Nord was negligent.”

“Was he?” Maris said.

Sena shrugged. “He was a mediocre flyer even when he had his wings, and I cannot believe he was better than that as a teacher. Always too eager to impress. And he constantly overpraised and overestimated his students. Last year, in the competition, he sponsored nine in challenges. They all failed, and most had no business trying. I sponsored only three. This girl that died, I’m told, had been at Airhome only a year. A year, Maris! She had talent perhaps, but it was like Nord to let her go too far too soon. Well, it is too late now. You know the academies have been a drain, a useless drain to hear some Landsmen talk. All they needed was an excuse. They dismissed Nord and closed the school. End. And all the children of Eastern can give up their dreams now, and content themselves with their lot in life.” Her voice was bitter.

“Then we are the last,” Maris said glumly.

“We are the last,” Sena echoed. “And for how long? The Landsman sent a runner to me last night, and I hobbled up to get this joyous news, and afterward we talked. She is not happy with us, Maris. She says that she has given us meat and hearth and iron coin for seven years, but we have given her no flyer in return. She is impatient.”

“So I gather,” Maris said. She knew the Landsman of Seatooth only by reputation, but that was enough. Seatooth lay close by Big Shotan but had a long, fierce history of independence. Its present ruler was a proud, ambitious woman who was deeply resentful that her island had never had a flyer of its own. She had campaigned hard to make Seatooth the home of the training academy for the Western Archipelago, and once she had been lavish in her support. But now she expected results. “She doesn’t understand,” Maris said. “None of the land-bound understand, really. The Woodwingers come to the competitions almost raw, to vie with seasoned flyers and flyer-children who have been bred and reared to wings. If only they would give you time …” I

“Time, time, time,” said Sena, a hint of anger in her voice. “Yes, I said as much to the Landsman. She said that seven years was enough time. You, Maris, you are a flyer. I was a flyer once. We know the difficulties, the need for training year after year, for practice until your arms tremble with the effort and your palms come away bloody from the wing grips. The land-bound know none of that. Too many of them thought the fight was over seven years ago. They thought that next week the sky would be full of fisherfolk and cobblers and glassblowers, and they were dismayed when the first competition came and went and the flyers and flyer-children defeated all land-bound challengers.

“At least then they cared. Now they are only resigned, I fear. In the seven years since your great Council, the seven years of the academies, only once has a land-bound taken wings. And he lost them back again a year later, at the very next competition. These days I think the island folk come to the meets only to see flyer siblings compete for the family wings. The challenges from my Woodwingers are talked about as a kind of a comic interlude, a brief performance by some jesters to lighten up the moments between the serious races.”

“Sena, Sena,” Maris said with concern. The older woman had poured all of the passion of her own broken life into the dreams of the young people who came to Woodwings asking for the sky. Now she was clearly upset, her voice trembling despite herself. “I understand your distress,” Maris said, taking Sena’s hand, “but it isn’t as bad as you say.”