Windhaven

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."