Windhaven - Страница 24

Like all the rooms in the academy, Val’s was small, damp, and cold. He’d lit a fire in the hearth to drive some of the chill away, but so far it had been only partially successful. Maris noticed how bare the room was, completely lacking in the personal touches and trinkets that would tell a visitor something about the person who lived here.

Val was on the floor before the fire, doing push-ups. He’d thrown his shirt over the bed and was exercising barechested. “Well?” he said, without slackening his pace.

Maris was staring, sickened by what she saw. The whole of Val’s back was crisscrossed by lines and thin white scars, mementoes of long-ago beatings. She had to force her eyes away from them to remember why she had come. “We need to talk, Val,” she said.

He came bounding to his feet, smiling at her and breathing hard. “Hand me my shirt, S’Rella,” he said. Then, after he had pulled it on, “What do you want to talk about?” His hair, unbound now, fell to his shoulders in a rust-colored waterfall, softening the severity of his face and giving him an oddly vulnerable look.

“May I sit?” Maris asked. Val gestured toward the only chair in the room, and when Maris sat on it, lowered himself onto the backless stool near the fire. S’Rella sat on the edge of the narrow bed. “I don’t want to play games with you, Val,” Maris resumed. “We have a lot of work to do together.”

“What makes you think I am playing games?” he asked.

“Listen to me,” she said. “I realize that you are bitter toward the flyers. They made you an outcast, branded you with a mocking, insulting name, and stripped you of your wings, perhaps unfairly, with multiple challenges. But if you let that poison your feelings toward all flyers, forever, you will be the loser for it. Win your wings back in the competition, and you will be living with, competing with, and associating with flyers for much of the rest of your life. If you refuse to allow them to be your friends, then you will have no friends. Is that what you want?”

Val was unmoved. “Windhaven is full of people, and only a few of them are flyers. Or don’t you count the land-bound?”

“Why are you so determined to be hateful? You waste no time making enemies. Maybe you feel the flyers have wronged you, and maybe you are right. But quarrels are seldom one-sided. Try to understand that. What you did to Ari was not without wrong, either. If you want to be forgiven for that, then forgive the flyers for what they did. Accept and you may be accepted.”

Val smiled his thin-lipped smile. “What makes you think I want to be accepted? Or forgiven? I’ve done nothing that requires forgiving. I’d challenge Ari again. Unfortunately, she isn’t available this year.”

Maris was suddenly speechless with rage.

“Val,” S’Rella said in a small, shocked voice. “How can you say that? She killed herself.”

“Land-bound die every day,” Val told her, his voice softening a bit. “Some of them kill themselves too. No one makes a cause out of that, or sings about it, or avenges their squalid little suicides. You have to shield your own flank, S’Rella. My parents taught me that. No one else will do it for you.” His eyes went back to Maris. “I’ve met your brother, you know,” he said suddenly.

“Coll?” she said, surprised.

“He visited South Arren seven years ago, on his way to the Outer Islands. There was another singer with him, an older man.”

“Barrion,” Maris said. “Coll’s mentor.”

“They stayed a week or two, singing in the dockside taverns, waiting for a ship to take them farther east. That was the first time I heard about you, Maris of Lesser Amberly. You were my hero for a time. Your brother sings a pretty little song about you.”

“Seven years ago,” Maris said. “That must have been right after the Council.”

Val smiled. “It was the first we had heard of it. I was around twelve, just short of the age when a flyer child would be taking up his wings, but of course I had no hope of that. Until your brother came to my island and sang about you and your Council and your academies. When Airhome opened a few months later, I was one of the first students. I still loved you then, for making it all possible.”

“And what happened?”

Val half-turned on his stool, stretching his hands out toward the fire. “I grew disillusioned. I thought that you’d opened the world to everyone, where once it had belonged only to flyers. I felt such a kinship with you. I was naive.”

He turned back again, and Maris shifted uncomfortably under his intense, accusing gaze. “I thought we were alike,” he continued. “I thought you wanted to break open the rotten flyer society. I found out I was wrong. All you ever wanted was to be a part of the whole thing. You wanted the fame and the status and the wealth and the freedom, you wanted to party on the Eyrie with the rest of them and look down on the dirt-digging land-bound. You embrace what I despise.

“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.