Windhaven

The following day Maris woke early, when the ruddy light of dawn first broke across the room. She felt terrible, cold and sweaty, and a great weight pressed across her chest. For a moment, she could not think what was wrong. Then she remembered. Her wings were gone. She tried to think about it, and the despair welled up inside her, and the anger, and the self-pity, and soon she curled up under the blankets once again and tried to go back to sleep. When she slept, she did not have to face it.

But sleep would not take her. Finally she rose and dressed. Evan was in the next room, cooking eggs.

"Hungry?" he asked her.

"No," Maris said dully.

Evan nodded, and cracked two more eggs. Maris sat at the table and, when he set a plate of eggs before her, she picked at them listlessly.

It was a wet, windy day, marked by frequent violent storms. When he had finished his breakfast, Evan went about his business. Near noon he left her, and Maris wandered aimlessly through the empty house.

Finally she sat by the window and watched the rain.

Well after dark Evan returned, wet and dispirited. Maris was still sitting by the window, in a cold and darkened house. "You might at least have started a fire," Evan grumbled. His tone was disgusted.

"Oh," she said. She looked at him blankly. "I'm sorry. I didn't think."

Evan built the fire. Maris moved to help him, but he snapped at her and chased her out of the way. They ate in silence, but the food seemed to restore Evan's mood. Afterward he brewed some of his special tea, set a mug down in front of her, and settled into his favorite chair.

Maris tasted the steaming tea, conscious of Evan's eyes on her. Finally she looked up at him.

"How do you feel?" he asked her.

She thought about it. "I feel dead," she said, finally.

"Talk about it."

"I can't," she said. She began to weep. "I can't."

When the weeping would not stop, Evan fixed her a sleeping draught, and put her to bed.

The next day Maris went out.

She took a road that Evan had shown her, a well-worn path that led not to the cliffs but down to the sea itself, and she spent the day walking alone on a cold pebble beach that seemed endless. When she wearied, she rested at the water's edge and flung pebbles into the waves, taking a small, melancholy pleasure in the way they skipped, then sank.

Even the sea was different here, she thought. It was gray and cold, without highlights. She missed the flashing blues and greens of the waters around Amberly.

Tears ran down her cheeks and she did not bother to wipe them away. At times she became aware that she was sobbing, without remembering just when or why she had started to cry.

The sea was vast and lonely, the empty beach went on forever, and the wild, cloudy sky was all around, but Maris felt hemmed in, suffocated. She thought of all the places in the world that she would never see again, the memory of each one a fresh pain to her. She thought of the impressive ruins of the Old Fortress on Laus. She remembered Woodwings Academy, vast and dark, carved into the rock of Seatooth. The Temple of the Sky God on Deedi. The drafty castles of the flyer-princes of Artellia. The windmills of Stormtown, and the Old Captain's House, ancient beyond telling. The tree-towns of Setheen and Alessy, the boneyards and battlegrounds of Lomarron, the vineyards of the Amberlys, and Riesa's warm, smoky alehouse on Skulny. All lost to her now. And the Eyrie — ships might take her elsewhere, but the Eyrie was a flyer's place, now closed to her forever.

She thought of her friends, scattered over Windhaven like the many islands. Some of them might visit her, but so many others had been snatched out of her world as if they no longer existed. The last time she had seen him, Timar had been fat and happy in his little stone house on Hethen, teaching his granddaughter to draw the beauty out of a lump of rock. Now he was as dead to her as Halland; a memory, nothing more.

She would never see Reid again, nor his beautiful, laughing wife. Never again could she pass the night away drinking Riesa's ale and sharing memories of Garth. She'd buy no more wooden trinkets from S'mael, nor joke with the cook in that little inn on Poweet.

Never again would she watch the flying at the great annual competitions, or sit, gossiping and singing, among flyers at a party.

The memories cut her like a thousand knives, and Maris cried out her pain, sobbing until she could scarcely breathe. She knew how she must look: a ridiculous old woman, weeping and moaning alone on a beach. But she could not stop.