Windhaven

"Don't look smug," she said. "You got all the words right."

"And my singing?"

"Good," she admitted. "Good. And you'll get better, too."

He was satisfied with that. "I see you did not exaggerate — you do recognize good singing." They grinned at each other. "It's odd that I'd never heard that song before. I've done all the others about her, of course, but never that one. I never even knew that Maris died that way." His green eyes were fixed on her, and the light reflected in them gave his face a pensive, thoughtful cast.

"Don't be sly," she said. "You know perfectly well that I'm she, and I haven't died that way or any way.

Not yet, diat is. But soon, soon."

"Will you really steal wings again, and leap from a cliff?"

She sighed. "That would waste a pair of wings. I don't expect I could really pull off Raven's Fall, not at my age. Though I've always wanted to. I saw it done a bare half-dozen times in my life, and the last time it was tried the girl had a strut break on her, and she died. I never did it myself. But I dreamed about it, Daren, yes I did. It was the one thing I wanted to do that I never managed. Not a bad thing to say of a life as long as mine."

"Not bad at all," he said.

"As for my death," she said, "well, I expect I'll die here, in this bed, in the not too distant future. Maybe I'll make them carry me up outside, so I can see a last sunset. Or maybe not. My eyes are so bad that I wouldn't see the sunset very well anyway." She made a tsking sound. "In either case, after I'm dead some flyer will sling my body into a harness, and struggle to get aloft with my dead weight added to his own, and I'll be flown out to sea and given what is widely known as a flyer burial. Why, I don't know. The corpse certainly doesn't fly. When it's cut loose it drops like a stone, and sinks or gets eaten by scyllas. It makes no sense, but that's the tradition." She sighed. "Val One-Wing had the right idea. He's buried right here on Seatooth, in a huge stone tomb with his statue on top. He designed it himself. I never could quite disregard tradition the way Val could, however."

He nodded. "So you would rather have them remember this song than the way you'll really die?"

She looked at him scornfully. "I thought you were a singer," she said. She looked the other way. "A singer should understand. The song — that is the way I really die. Coll knew that, when he made the song for me."

The young singer hesitated. "But—"

The door to the room opened again, and Odera the healer was back in the doorway, with a taper in one hand and a glass in the other. "Enough singing," she said. "You'll wear yourself out. It's time for your sleeping draught."

The old woman nodded. "Yes," she said. "My head is getting worse. Don't ever fall onto rocks from a thousand feet up, Daren. Or if you do, don't land on your head." She took the tesis from Odera's hand, and drained it straightaway. "Terrible," she said. "You could at least flavor it."

Odera began to pull Daren toward the door. He stopped before he was quite there. "The song," he said, "I'll sing it. Others will sing it too. But I won't sing it until — you know — until I hear."

She nodded, drowsiness already stealing into her limbs, the small slow paralysis of tesis. "That would be appropriate," she said.

"What is it called?" he said. "The song?"

"'The Last Flight,'" she told him, smiling. Her last flight, of course, and Coll's last song. That seemed appropriate too.

'"The Last Flight,'" he repeated. "Maris, I understand, I think. The song is true, isn't it?"

"True," she agreed. But she was not sure he heard her. Her voice was weak, and Odera had dragged him outside and was shutting the door between them. Some time later the healer returned to snuff the oil lamps, and she was left alone in a small dark room that smelled of sickness, beneath the ancient bloodsoaked stone of Woodwings Academy.

Despite the tesis, she found she could not sleep. A kind of excitement was on her, a dizzy, giddy feeling she had not known in a long time.

Somewhere far above her head, she thought she could hear the storm beginning, and the sound of rain drumming against weathered rock. The fortress was strong, strong, and she knew it would not collapse.

Still, somehow she felt that tonight might be the night when, finally, after all these years, she would go to see her father.