Windhaven

"Breakfast soon, Maris," she said, the slight slurring of her speech reflecting her origins. "Sena wants to see you before, though. Up in her room."

"Thanks," Maris said, smiling. She liked S'Rella, perhaps best of all the students at the Woodwings academy. The island in the Southern Archipelago where S'Rella had been born was a world away from Maris' own Lesser Amberly, but despite their differences Maris saw a lot of herself in the younger girl.

S'Rella was small but determined, with a stamina that belied her size. At the moment she was still graceless in the sky, but she was stubborn enough to give hope of quick improvement. Maris had been working with Sena's flock of would-be flyers for nearly ten days now, and she had come to regard S'Rella as one of the three or four most promising.

"Shall I wait and show you the way?" the girl asked when Maris climbed off the bed to wash at the basin of water in the far corner of the room.

"No," Maris said. "Off to breakfast now. I can find Sena well enough myself." She smiled to soften the dismissal, and S'Rella smiled back, a little shyly, before she left.

A few minutes later Maris was having second thoughts as she groped along a narrow, dank corridor in search of Sena's cubbyhole. Woodwings academy was an ancient structure, a huge rock shot through with tunnels and caves, some natural, others hollowed out by human hands. Its lower chambers were perpetually flooded, and even in the upper, inhabited portions, many of the rooms and all of the halls were windowless, cut off from sun and stars. The sea smell was everywhere. In the old days it had been a fortress, built during Seatooth's bitter revolt against Big Shotan and afterward unoccupied until the Landsman of Seatooth had offered it to the flyers as a site for a training academy. In the seven years since, Sena and her charges had restored much of it, but it was still easy to take a wrong turning and get lost in the abandoned sections.

Time passed without a trace in the corridors of Wood-wings. Torches burned down in wall-sockets and lamps ran short of oil, and days often passed before anyone noticed. Maris felt her way carefully along one such dark stretch of corridor, nervous and a bit oppressed by the weight of the old fortress on her.

She did not like being underground and enclosed; it quarreled with all her flyer's instincts.

With relief Maris saw the dim glow of a light ahead. One last, sharp corner and she found herself back in familiar territory. Unless she had gotten turned around completely, Sena's room was the first to the left.

"Maris." Sena looked up and smiled. She was sitting in a wicker chair, carving a soft block of wood with a bone knife, but now she set it aside and motioned Maris to enter. "I was about to call for S'Rella again and send her looking for you. Did you get lost in our maze?"

"Almost," Maris said, shaking her head. "I should have thought to carry a light. I can get from my room to the kitchen or the common room or the outside, but beyond that it is a less certain proposition."

Sena laughed, but it was only polite laughter, masking a mood that was far from light. The teacher was a former flyer, three times Maris' age, made land-bound a decade ago in the sort of accident all too common among flyers. Normally her vigor and enthusiasm cloaked her age, but this morning she looked old and tired. Her bad eye, like a piece of milky sea-glass, seemed to weigh down the left side of her face. It sagged and trembled beneath its burden.

"You sent S'Rella to me for a reason," Maris said. "News?"

"News," Sena said, "and not good. I thought it best not to talk about it at breakfast until I had discussed it with you."

"Yes?"

"Eastern has closed Airhome," Sena said.

Maris sighed and leaned back in her chair. Suddenly she too felt weary. The news was no great surprise, but it was still disheartening. "Why now?" she asked. "I spoke to Nord three months ago, when they sent me out with a message to Far Hunderlin. He thought they would keep the doors open at least through the next competition. He even told me that he had several promising students."

"There was a death," Sena said. "One of those promising students made a misjudgment, and struck a cliffside with her wing. Nord could only watch helplessly as she fell to the rocks below. Worse, her parents were there too. Wealthy, powerful people — traders from Cheslin with more than a dozen ships.

The girl had been showing off for them. The parents went to the Landsman, of course, asking for justice.

They said Nord was negligent."

"Was he?" Maris said.