The Folk Of The Air

Passing a high school that looked like a Moorish air-base, he drove slowly, growling at the adolescents who drifted across his path without ever looking up, clearly rendered invulnerable by their Walkmans. Four girls in long skirts were coming toward him, walking abreast, advancing like a curtain of bright rain. One girl was Aiffe. She walked in the middle of the group, giggling and fooling, leaning on one friend to adjust her sandal, on another to yelp with laughter, shoving them with her hips and flinging her arms over their shoulders. Farrell heard her whoop, “But he’s so dorky! He thinks you get hot if he bumps up against you on the lunch line!” The yellow-brown mane flared constantly across the faces of her companions.

Farrell shouted, “Lady Aiffe!” several times, but she did not turn until he tried calling her by her real name. Then she turned, frowned, hesitated, said something to her friends, and crossed the street as he pulled to the curb, blocking a driveway. Briseis whimpered impatiently, but he got out of the bus and stood waiting as the girl approached him.

“Hey,” she said, “The old Knight of Whatever. Ghosts and Dragons.” She might have been a little paler than the child who had changed herself into a bird; otherwise, she looked no different at all. Farrell said, “I heard you got sick after the Whalemas Tourney. Are you okay now?”

Aiffe looked briefly puzzled, then nodded. “I was sick. I’m fine now. I was really sick.” The recognition in her eyes went no further than his face; there was no indication that she co

“Do you remember Nicholas Bo

Her face went utterly blank, empty past pretense. She had never heard the name before. She said, “Actually, there’s a whole lot of people in the League I don’t know anymore. I’m not as much into that whole thing as I used to be.”

“Your father still is, though.”

She laughed, hugging her book bag and leaning against Madame Schuma

“I didn’t mean to make you late,” he said. “I just want to ask you one thing.” Aiffe waited, her smile only slightly wary. Farrell asked, “What did she say to you? In that room, putting your mind back together with everything else coming apart, what did she say?” He had meant to keep his voice conversational and unthreatening, but Aiffe took one small step backward. “Come on, you have to remember that much,” he coaxed her. “Even if you don’t remember how you got there, or what was going on, you have to remember being there with her, she must have talked to you. Did she say where she was going, what was happening to her? Will you tell me what she said, God damn you?”

There was a moment when he was absolutely certain that some part of her, some red-gold fleck in her eyes, understood perfectly what he was saying and sat back laughing at him, like Nicholas Bo