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Maris must have looked terrified; Val was smiling. “It was never my father’s,” he said. “My father never owned anything. I stole it from Arak.” Across the room their eyes met, and Val laughed painfully. “Get rid of it for me, will you, One-Wing?”

Maris smiled and bent to pick up the pieces.

III
The Fall

She grew old in less than a minute.

When Maris left the side of the Landsman of Thayos she was still young. She took the underground way from his spare rocky keep to the sea, a damp, gloomy tunnel through the mountain. She walked quickly, with a taper in her hand, her folded wings on her back, surrounded by echoes and the slow drip of water. There were puddles on the floor of the tunnel, and the water soaked through her boots. Maris was anxious to be off.

It was not until she emerged into the twilight on the far side of the mountain that Maris saw the sky. It was a dim threatening purple, a violet so dark it was almost black; the color of a bad bruise, full of blood and pain. The wind was cold and unruly. Maris could taste the fury that was about to break, could see it in the clouds. She stood at the foot of the time-worn stairs that led up the sea cliff, and briefly she considered turning back, resting overnight at the lodge house and postponing her flight until dawn.

The thought of the long walk back through the tunnel dismayed her, however, and Maris took no joy in this place. Thayos seemed to her a dark and bitter land, and its Landsman rude, his brutality barely hidden beneath the civilities required between Landsman and flyer. The message he had given her to fly weighed heavily upon her. The words were angry, greedy, full of the threat of war, and Maris was eager to deliver and forget them, to free herself of the burden as quickly as she could.

So she extinguished her taper and started up the stairs, climbing easily with long, impatient strides. There were lines on her face and gray in her hair, but Maris was still as graceful and vigorous as she had been at twenty.

Where the steps opened onto a broad stone platform above the sea, Maris unfolded her wings. They caught the wind and tugged at her as she snapped the last struts into place. The purple gloom of the storm gave a dark cast to the silver metal, and the rays of the setting sun left red streaks of light upon it, like fresh wounds welling full of blood. Maris hurried. She wanted to get ahead of the storm, to use the front for added speed. She tightened the straps around herself, checked the wings a final time, and wrapped her hands about the familiar grips. With two quick steps she flung herself from the cliff, as she had uncounted times before. The wind was her old and true lover. She folded herself into its embrace and flew.

She saw lightning on the horizon, a lingering three-pronged bolt in the eastern sky. Then the wind slackened and went soft on her, and she fell, and banked, and turned, searching for a stronger current until the storm hit her, sudden as the crack of a whip. The wind gusted out of nowhere with terrible force, and as she struggled to ride with it, it changed direction. Then a second time, then a third. Rain stung her face, lightning blinded her, and there was a pounding in her ears.

The storm pushed her backward, then head over heels, as if she were a toy. She had no more choice, no more chance, than a leaf in a gale. She was buffeted this way and that until she was sick and dizzy and aware that she was falling. And she looked over her shoulder and saw the mountain rushing at her, a sheer wall of slick wet stone. She tried to pull away, and managed only to turn herself in the fierce embrace of the wind. Her left wing brushed the rock, collapsed, and Maris fell sideways, screaming, her left wing limp; though she tried to fly one-winged, she knew that it was useless, and was blinded by the rain; the storm had her in its killing teeth, and with her last clear thought, Maris knew this was her death.

The sea took her, and broke her, and spit her out. They found her late the next day, broken and unconscious, but alive, on a rocky beach three miles from Thayos’ flyers’ cliff.

When Maris woke, days later, she was old.

She was seldom more than semi-conscious during that first week, and afterward she remembered little. Pain, when she moved and when she did not; waking and sleeping. She slept most of the time, and her dreams were as real to her as the constant pain. She walked through long tunnels beneath the earth, walked until her legs ached horribly, but she never found the steps that would lead her out to the sky. She fell through still air endlessly, her strength and skill useless in a windless sky. She stood before hundreds in Council and argued, but her words were slurred and too soft, and the people there would not listen. She was hot, terribly hot, and she could not move. Someone had taken her wings and tied her legs and arms. She struggled to move, to speak. She had to fly somewhere with an urgent message. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t speak, she didn’t know if there were tears or rain on her cheeks. Someone wiped her face and made her drink a thick, bitter liquid.

At some point Maris knew she was lying in a big bed, a hearth nearby that always had a blazing fire in it, and she was covered with heavy layers of furs and blankets. She was hot, terribly hot, and she struggled to push off the blankets but could not.

There seemed to be people in the room, coming and going. She recognized some of them—they were her friends—but although she asked them to remove the blankets, they never did. They didn’t seem to hear her, but they would often sit at the foot of the bed and talk to her. They spoke of things gone by as if they were present still, which confused her, but everything was confused, and she was glad to have her friends with her.

Coll came, singing his songs, and Barrion was with him, Barrion of the quick grin and the deep, rumbly voice. Old, crippled Sena sat on the edge of the bed and said nothing. Raven appeared once, dressed all in black and looking so bold and beautiful that her heart ached with unspoken love for him all over again. Garth brought her steaming hot kivas, then told her jokes so that she laughed and forgot to drink. Val One-Wing stood in the doorway, watching, cold-faced as ever. S’Rella, her dear friend, came often, speaking of old times. And Dorrel, her first love and still a trusted friend, came again and again, his presence a familiar comfort to her through the pain and confusion. Others came as well: old lovers she had never thought to see again appeared before her to speak, to plead, to accuse, and then vanished, leaving all her questions unanswered. There was chubby blond Timar, bringing her gifts he’d carved from stone, and Halland the singer, strong, black-bearded, looking just as he had when they had lived together on Lesser Amberly. She remembered then that he had been lost at sea, and she wept, her tears blotting out the sight of him.

There was another visitor, a man strange to Maris. And yet he was not a stranger: She knew the touch of his gentle, sure hands, and the sound of his almost musical voice speaking her name. Unlike her other visitors, he came close to her and held up her head and fed her hot milky soups and spice tea and a thick, bitter potion that made her sleep. She could not think how or when she had met him, but she felt glad to see him. He was thin and small but sinewy. Pale skin was stretched taut over the bones and planes of his face, freckled with age. Fine white hair grew well back from a high forehead. His eyes, beneath prominent brows and in a webwork of tiny wrinkles, were brilliantly blue. But although he came so often, and knew her, Maris could not bring his name to mind.

Once, as he stood beside her and watched her, Maris struggled out of her half-sleep and told him how hot it was, and asked him to take away the blankets.

He shook his head. “You’re feverish,” he said. “The room is chilly and you are very sick. You need the warmth of the blankets.”

Startled by this phantom who had finally answered her, Maris struggled to sit up and get a better look at him. Her body responded sluggishly, and a sickening pain seared her left side.

“Easy,” said the man. His cool fingers were on her brow. “Your bones must knit before you can move. Here, drink this.” He lifted her head and pressed the smooth, thick rim of a cup to her lips. She tasted familiar bitterness, swallowed obediently. The tension and pain drained out of her as her head sank back on the pillow.

“Sleep and don’t worry,” said the man.

With difficulty she managed to speak: “Who… ?”

“My name is Evan,” he said. “I’m a healer. You’ve been in my care for weeks now. You are healing, but still very weak. You must sleep now, and conserve your strength.”

“Weeks.” The word frightened her. She must be terribly sick, horribly injured, to spend weeks in the house of a healer. “Wh—where?”

He put his strong, thin fingers against her mouth to hush her. “On Thayos. No more questions now. I’ll tell you everything later, when you are stronger. Now sleep. Let your body heal itself.”

Maris stopped fighting the coming sleep. He had said she was mending and must conserve her strength. She wished only, as she sank into sleep, that she would not dream again about that brief, terrible flight through the storm, and the awful crushing of her body.

Later, when she awoke, the world was dark, with only dim embers alive in the hearth to give shape to the shadows. As soon as she stirred, Evan was there. He prodded the fire into new life, felt her brow, and then sat lightly on the bed.

“The fever has broken,” he said, “but you are not well yet. I know you want to move—it will be hard to keep still. But you must. You are still very weak, and your body will mend better if you do not tax it. If you cannot keep still by yourself I must give you more tesis.”

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