Windhaven

Epilogue

The old woman woke when the door opened, in a room that smelled of sickness. There were other odors as well: salt water, smoke, sea mold, the lingering scent of the spice tea that had gone cold by her bedside. But over them all was the smell of sickness, overpowering, cloying, making the room seem thick and close.

In the doorway a woman was holding a smoking taper. The old woman could see its light, a shifting yellowish blur, and she could make out the figure holding it, and another figure beside her, although their faces were lost to her. Her vision was not what it once was. Her head throbbed terribly, as it often did when she woke. It had been like that for years. She raised a soft, blue-veined hand to her forehead, and squinted. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Odera,” said the woman with the taper, in a voice the old woman recognized as the healer’s. “He’s here, the one you asked for. Are you strong enough to see him?”

“Yes,” the old woman said. “Yes.” She struggled to sit up in her bed. “Come closer,” she said. “I want to see you.”

“Shall I stay?” Odera asked uncertainly. “Do you need me?”

“No,” said the old woman. “No, I’m past healing. Just him.”

Odera nodded—the old woman could make out the gesture, though the face was a blur to her—lit the oil lamps carefully with the taper, and shut the door when she left.

The other visitor pulled a straight-back wooden chair across the room, and sat down close to the bedside, where she could see him quite well. He was young. A boy, really, not even twenty, beardless, with a few pale wisps of blond hair trying to pass as a mustache on his upper lip. His hair was very pale and very curly, his eyebrows almost invisible. But he carried an instrument—a kind of rude guitar, square and with only four strings—and he began to tune it as soon as he was seated. “Would you like me to play something for you?” he asked. “Some special song?” His voice was pleasant, lilting, with just the hint of an accent.

“You are a long way from home,” the old woman said.

He smiled. “How did you know?”

“Your voice,” she said. “It’s been years and years since I’ve heard a voice like that. You’re from the Outer Islands, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “My home is a little place right at the edge of the world. You’ve probably never heard of it. It’s called Stormhammer—the-Outermost.”

“Ah,” she said. “I remember it well. Eastwatch Tower, and the ruins of the one that preceded it. That bitter drink you people brew from roots. Your Landsman insisted I try some, and laughed at the expression on my face when I swallowed. He was a dwarf. I never met an uglier man, or a cleverer one.”

The singer looked briefly startled. “He’s been dead some thirty years,” he said, “but you’re right, I’ve heard the stories. Then you’ve been there?”

“Three or four times,” she said, savoring his reaction. “It was many years ago, before you were born. I used to be a flyer.”

“Oh,” he said, “of course. I should have guessed. Seatooth is full of flyers, is it not?”

“Not really,” she replied. “This is Woodwings Academy, and those here are mostly dreamers who have yet to win their wings, or teachers who have long since set theirs down. Like me. I was a teacher, until I got sick. Now I lie here and remember, mostly.”

The singer touched his strings, bringing forth a bright burst of sound that faded quickly into silence. “What would you like to hear?” he asked. “There’s a new song that’s the rage of Stormtown.” His face fell. “It’s a bit bawdy, though. Maybe you wouldn’t like it.”

The old woman laughed. “Oh, I might, I might. You might be surprised at the things I remember. I didn’t call you here to sing for me, though.”

He stared at her from wide green eyes. “What?” he said, puzzled. “But they told me—I was in an inn in Stormtown, just arrived in fact, the ship from Eastern put in the day before yesterday, and suddenly this boy came up and told me a singer was needed on Seatooth.”

“And you came. Left the inn. Weren’t you doing well enough there?”

“Well enough,” he said. “I’d never been to the Shotans before, after all, and the customers weren’t deaf or miserly. But—” He stopped abruptly, panic writ large on his face.

“But you came anyway,” the old woman said, “because they told you that a dying woman had asked for a singer.”

He said nothing.

“Don’t feel guilty,” she said. “You aren’t revealing any secrets. I know I’m dying. Odera and I are frank with each other. I probably should have died several years ago. My head hurts constantly, and I fear I’m going blind, and I already seem to have outlived half the world. Oh, don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want to die. But I don’t especially want to go on like this either. I don’t like the pain, or my own helplessness. Death frightens me, but at least it will free me from the smell in this room.” She saw his expression and smiled gently. “You don’t have to pretend you can’t smell it. I know it’s there. The sick smell.” She sighed. “I prefer cleaner scents. Spices and salt water, even sweat. Wind. Storm. I still remember the smell that lightning leaves in its wake.”

“There are songs I could sing,” the youth said carefully. “Glad songs to lighten your mood. Funny songs, or sad ones if you prefer. It might make the pain less.”

“Kivas makes the pain less,” the old woman replied. “Odera makes it strong, and sometimes laces it with sweetsong or other herbs. She gives me tesis to make me sleep. I don’t need your voice for my hurts.”

“I know I’m young,” the singer said, “but I am good. Let me show you.”

“No.” She smiled. “I’m sure you’re good, really I am. Though I probably wouldn’t appreciate your talents. Maybe my ears are going too, or perhaps it’s just a trick of old age, but no singer I’ve heard in the last ten years has seemed as good to me as the ones I remember from years ago. I’ve listened to the best. I heard S’Lassa and T’rhennian sing duets on Veleth a long time back. Jared of Geer has entertained me, and homeless Gerri One-Eye, and Coll. I once knew a singer named Halland who sang me songs a good deal bawdier than the one you were about to perform, I’d wager. When I was young, I even heard Barrion sing, not once but many times.”

“I’m as good as any of them,” the singer said stubbornly.

The old woman sighed. “Don’t pout,” she said sharply. “I’m sure you sing splendidly. But you’ll never get someone as old as me to admit it.”

He strummed his instrument nervously. “If you don’t want a song for your deathbed,” he said, “then why did you send to Stormtown for a singer?”

“I want to sing to you,” she said. “It won’t hurt too much, although I can’t play or carry a tune. Mostly I’ll recite.”

The singer set aside his instrument and folded his arms to listen. “A strange request,” he said, “but I was a listener long before I was a singer. My name is Daren, by the way.”

“Good,” she said. “I am pleased to know you, Daren. I wish you could have known me when I was a bit more vigorous. Now listen carefully. I want you to learn these words, and sing this song after I’m gone, if you think it’s good enough. You will.”

“I know a great many songs already,” he said.

“Not this one,” she replied.

“Did you make it up yourself?”

“No,” she said, “no. It was sort of a gift to me, a farewell gift. My brother sang it to me as he lay dying, and forced me to learn all the words. He was in a great deal of pain at the time, and death was a kindness for him, but he would not go until he was satisfied that I had all the words committed to memory. So I learned them quickly, crying all the while, and he died. It was in a town on Little Shotan, not quite ten years ago. So you can see that the song means a great deal to me. Now, if you would, please listen.”

She began to sing.

Her voice was old and worn, painfully thin, and her attempt to sing strained it to its uttermost, so that sometimes she coughed and wheezed. She had no sense of key, she knew, and she could not carry a tune any more in her old age than in her youth. But she knew the words, she did know the words. Sad words set to simple, soft, melancholy music.

It was a song about the death of a very famous flyer. When she grew old, the song said, and the days of her life grew short, she found and took a pair of wings, as she had done once in her legendary youth. And she strapped them on, and ran, and all of her friends came running after, shouting for her to stop, to turn back, for she was very old and very weak, and she had not flown for years, and her mind was so addled that she had not even remembered to unfold her wings. But she would not listen. She reached the cliff before they could catch her, and plunged over the edge, falling. Her friends cried out and covered their eyes, not wanting to see her dashed against the sea. But, at the last moment, suddenly her wings unfolded, springing out taut and silver from her shoulders. And the wind caught her, lifted her, and from where they stood her friends heard her laughter. She circled high above them, her hair blowing in the wind, her wings bright as hope, and they saw that she was young again. She waved farewell to them, dipped her wing in salute, and flew off toward the west, to vanish against the setting sun. She was never seen again.

There was silence in the room when the old woman had finished singing her song. The singer sat tilted back in his chair, staring at the flickering of an oil lamp, his eyes gone far away and thoughtful.

Finally the old woman coughed irritably. “Well?” she said.

“Oh.” He smiled and sat up. “I’m sorry. It’s a nice song. I was just thinking how it would sound with some music behind it.”

“And with a voice singing it, no doubt—one that didn’t wheeze and strain quite so much.” She nodded. “Well, it would sound very good, that’s how it would sound. Did you get all the words?”

“Of course,” he said. “Do you want me to sing it back to you?”

“Yes,” said the old woman. “How else would I know if you got it right?”

The singer grinned and took up his instrument. “I knew you’d come around,” he said pleasantly. He touched his strings, his fingers moving with deceptive slowness, and the little room filled with melancholy. Then he sang her song back to her, in his high, sweet, vibrant voice.

He was smiling when he had done. “Well?”

“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.