Windhaven

"Signs?" Maris felt confused and embarrassed. She could memorize the things Evan told her easily enough, but applying the knowledge was so much harder. "He was complaining about aches in his bones," she said. "I thought — he was old, after all, and old people often—"

Evan made an impatient noise. "Bari," he said, "how did you know he was dying?"

"I felt in his elbows and knees, like you showed me." she said eagerly, proud of the things she learned from Evan. "They were lumpy, getting hard. Under his chin, too. Behind the whiskers. And his skin felt cold. Did he have the puff?"

"The puff," Evan said, pleased. "Children often recover from it, but not adults, never."

"I–I didn't notice," Maris said.

"No," Evan said. "You didn't."

They walked on in silence, Bari skipping along happily, Maris feeling inordinately tired.

There was the faintest breath of spring in the air.

Maris felt her spirits lift as she walked through the clean dawn air with Evan. The Landsman's grim keep waited at the end of the journey, but the sun was out, the air was fresh, and the breeze felt almost caressing through the cloak she wore. Red, blue, and yellow flowers gleamed like jewels amid the gray-green moss and dark humus alongside the road. Birds, like quick glimpses of flame or sky, flew through the trees and sang. It was a day when being alive and moving was a pleasure in itself.

Beside her, Evan was silent. Maris knew he was puzzling over the message that had brought them out.

They had been awakened before it was light by a pounding at the door. One of the Landsman's runners, out of breath, had blurted out the need for a healer at the keep. He could say no more, knew no more — just that someone was injured and needed aid.

Evan, warm and bemused from bed, his white hair standing up like a bird's ruffled feathers, was not eager to go anywhere.

"Everyone knows the Landsman keeps his own healer by him for his family and servants," he objected.

"Why can't he deal with this emergency?"

The runner, who obviously knew no more than he had been told, looked confused. "The healer, Reni, has lately been confined for treason, suspected treason," he said in his soft, breathless voice.

Evan swore. "Treason! That's madness. Rent would not — oh, very well, stop chewing your lip, boy.

We'll come, my assistant and I, and see about this injury."

All too soon they reached the narrow valley and saw the Landsman's massive stone keep looming ahead of them. Maris pulled her cloak, which she had worn loosely open, more tightly around her. The air was colder here: spring had not ventured past the mountain wall. There were no flowers or bright tendrils of ivy to relieve the dull-colored rock and lichen, and the only birds that sounded were the harsh-voiced scavenger gulls.

An elderly, scar-faced landsguard with a knife in her belt and a bow strapped to her back met them before they had advanced more than a few feet into the valley. She questioned them closely, searched them, and took charge of Evan's surgical kit, before escorting them past two checkpoints and through the gate into the keep. Maris noticed that there were even more landsguard patrolling the high, wide walls than on her last visit, and saw a new fierceness, a repressed excitement, in the drilling troops within the courtyard.

The Landsman met them in an outer hall, alone except for his omnipresent guards five steps behind him.

His face darkened when he saw Maris, and he addressed Evan harshly.

"I sent for you, healer, and not for this wingless flyer."

"Maris is my assistant now," Evan said calmly. "As you yourself should know very well, she is not a flyer."

"Once a flyer, always a flyer," growled the Landsman. "She has flyer friends, and we do not need her here. The security—"

"She is a healer's apprentice," Evan said, interrupting. "I vouch for her. The code that binds me will also bind her. We will not gossip of anything we learn here."

The Landsman still frowned. Maris was rigid with fury — how could he speak of her like that, ignoring her as if she were not even present?

Finally the Landsman said, grudgingly, "I do not trust this 'apprenticeship,' but I will take your word on her behalf, healer. But bear in mind, if she should carry tales of what she sees here today, both of you will hang."

"We made haste to get here," Evan said coldly. "But I judge by your manner that there is no cause for hurry."

The Landsman turned aside without replying and sent for another brace of landsguard. Then, without a backward glance, he left them.

The landsguard, both young and heavily armed, escorted Evan and Maris down steep stone steps into a tunnel carved out of the solid rock of the mountain, far below the living quarters of the fortress. Tapers burned smokily on the walls at wide intervals, providing a shifting, uncertain light. The air in the narrow, low-ceilinged tunnel smelled of mold and of acrid smoke. Maris felt a sudden wave of claustrophobia and clutched Evan's hand.