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The lines of his face were set hard.
    “He was in bed,” Maris said. “He was too slow—I knew he'd miss the best of the storm winds. He would have caught nothing but rain, and it would have taken him forever to get there. If he did. He's not good in rain yet.”
    “Then he must learn to be better. The boy must make his own mistakes now. You were his teacher, but soon the wings will be his. He's the flyer, not you.”
    Maris winced as if struck. This was the man who had taught her to fly, who had been so proud of her and the way she seemed to know instinctively what to do. The wings would be hers, he'd told her more than once, though she was not of his blood. He and his wife had taken her in when it seemed that he would never father a child of his own to inherit the wings. He'd had his accident and lost the sky, and it was important to find a flyer to replace him—if not someone of his blood, then someone he loved. His wife had refused to learn; she had lived thirty-five years as a land-bound, and she did not intend to jump off any cliffs, wings or no. Besides, it was too late; flyers had to be taught young. So it was Maris he had taught, adopted, and come to love—Maris the fisherman's daughter, who would rather watch from the flyers' cliff than play with the other children.
    And then, against all probability, Coll had been born. His mother had died after the prolonged and difficult labor—Maris, very much a child, remembered a dark night full of people running, and later her stepfather crying alone in a corner—but Coll had lived on. Maris, suddenly a child-mother, came to care for him, love him. At first they didn't expect him to live. She was happy when he did; and for three years she loved him as both brother and son, while she practiced with the wings under their father's watchful eyes.
    Until the night when the same father told her that Coll, baby Coll, must have her wings.
    “I am a far better flyer than he will ever be,” Maris told him now, on the beach, her voice trembling.
    “I do not dispute that. It makes no difference. He is my own blood.”
    “It's not fair!” she cried, letting out the protest that had been lodged inside her since the day she had come of age. By then Coll had been strong, healthy; still too small to bear the wings, but they would be his on his coming-of-age day. Maris had no claim, no right at all. That was the law of the flyers, stretching back through generations to the star sailors themselves, the legendary wing-forgers. The first-born child of each of the flying families would inherit the wings of the parent. Skill counted for nothing; this was a law of inheritance, and Maris came from a fishing family who had nothing to leave her but the scattered wreckage of a wooden boat.
    “Fair or no, it is the law, Maris. You've known it for a long time, even if you chose to ignore it. For years you've played at being a flyer, and I've let you, because you loved it, and because Coll needed a teacher, a skilled one, and because this island is too big to rely on only two flyers. But you knew all the while this day would come.”
    He could be more kind, she thought wildly. He must know what it means, to give up the sky.
    “Now come with me,” he said. “You'll not fly again.”
    Her wings were still fully extended; only one strap was undone. “I'll run away,” she said madly. “You'll never see me again. I'll go to some island where they don't have a flyer of their own. They'll be glad to have me, no matter how I got my wings.”
    “Never,” her father said, sadly. “The other flyers would shun the island, as they did after the mad Landsman of Kennehut executed the Flyer-Who-Brought-Bad-News. You would be stripped of your stolen wings no matter where you went. No Landsman would take the risk.”
    “I'll break them, then!” Maris said, riding the edge of hysteria. “Then he'll never fly either, any more than . . . than . . .”
    Glass shattered on rock and the light went out as