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Dedication

To
Rick Fenton
and
Gordon Lundrigan,

my companions in
spiritual, moral, and philosophical searches
and my exemplars in shepherdry

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

1. Flying Children

2. The Morning After

3. Intervention

4. Captive

5. Assassins

6. Angry Gate

7. Amulets

8. Search

9. Visitors

10. Confession

11. Reunions

12. Mittlegard

13. Trust

14. Loyalty

15. Running on Automatic

16. Frostinch

17. Ka and Ba

18. Clear Memory

19. Treachery

20. Worries

21. Intimacy

22. The Queen

23. Resolution

By Orson Scott Card from Tom Doherty Associates

About the Author

Copyright

Flying Children

1

FLYING CHILDREN

On a certain day in November, in the early afternoon, if you had just parked your car at Kenney’s burger place in Buena Vista, Virginia, or maybe you were walking into Nick’s Italian Kitchen or Todd’s Barbecue, you might have cast your gaze up the hill toward Parry McCluer High School. It could happen. You have to look somewhere, right?

You might have noticed something shooting straight up out of the school. Something the size and shape of, say, a high school student. Arms waving, maybe. Legs kicking—count on that. Definitely a human being.

Like a rocket, upward until he’s a mile above Buena Vista. He hangs in the air for just a moment. Long enough to see and be seen.

And then down he goes. Straight down, and not falling, no, shooting downward just as fast as he went up. Bound to kill himself at that speed.

You can’t believe you saw it. So you keep watching for a moment longer, a few seconds, and look! There it is again! Too far away to be sure whether it’s the same kid or a different one. But if you’ve got someone with you, you grab them, you say, “Look! Is that a person? Is that a kid?”

“Where?”

“In the sky! Above the high school, look up, I’m saying straight up, you seeing what I’m seeing?”

Down comes the kid, plummeting toward the school.

“He’s got to be dead,” you say. “Nobody could live through that.”

And there it is again! Straight up!

“That’s one hell of a trampoline,” somebody says.

If you noticed it early enough, you’d see it repeated about thirty times. And then it stops.