Windhaven

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.

About the Authors

George R. R. Martin is the award-winning author of five novels, including Fever Dream and The Armageddon Rag. For the last ten years, he has been a screenwriter for feature films and television and was the producer of the TV series Beauty and the Beast as well as a story editor for The Twilight Zone. After a ten-year hiatus, he has now returned to writing novels full-time and is presently at work on A Dance with Dragons, the fourth book of his A Song of Fire and Ice series.

Lisa Tuttle won the John W. Campbell award for best new writer in 1974 and has since gone on to author numerous short stories and novels, including Lost Futures, which was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and The Pillow Friend. More recently, she has written several books for children.

Texas-born, she now lives with her husband and daughter in a remote area on the west coast of Scotland where the scenery and weather are very similar to the seascapes of Windhaven.