Angel-Seeker

by Sharon Shinn

  “I would make sure you were taken care of,” he said. “Even if—I know you think perhaps this emotion between us won’t last—and even if it doesn’t, I would take care of you. I would not abandon you.”

  “I know that,” she said. “I don’t want to come to Cedar Hills.”

  And that was that, this time, anyway. He had followed her home that second night, as he had on the first, having already memorized the overhead view of that square, dour house and its brief desert gardens. He would be able to find it by night or day now, for the rest of his life. Even if he never saw Rebekah again, he would know where she lived; he would be able to throw the shadow of his wings over the roof that sheltered her body.

  Until she married, and moved to another man’s house, slept under another man’s roof.

  He could not bear to think about that.

  But there had been very little he could bear since he had left Breven a week ago. He had found Magdalena’s moods and despondencies even harder to deal with, though he was always kind to her the many times he saw her. She sent for him every day—sometimes twice a day if Nathan was gone—and her attempts to be cheerful in the face of her great fear touched his heart, even while her moping drove him mad.

  She had told Nathan her secret while Obadiah was gone, and Nathan had responded with predictable delight. “Did you hear? Did you hear!” Nathan had demanded the minute Obadiah returned from Breven. “We’re expecting a child! In a few months—I can’t wait—everyone says the time will fly past, but to me it seems like every day is a thousand years long.”

  “Maga seems concerned that the child might be—deformed,” Obadiah said cautiously.

  Nathan nodded, his brown eyes serious. “Yes, and I can’t convince her otherwise. But I just don’t think—” He shrugged. “I don’t think the god would have brought us together like this to create monster children. So I cannot help rejoicing, no matter how much apprehension Maga feels.”

  But Maga’s condition put an extra strain on the hold, already suffering from too few angels and too many demands. It was rare enough for a mortal woman to bear an angel child; it was even rarer for an angel to carry one, and no one wanted to chance a miscarriage. So Nathan and Magdalena agreed that she should fly on no more patrols or weather intercessions, and that she should even limit the work she did, greeting petitioners at the hold.

  Which meant that Obadiah was pressed into service fulfilling the daily responsibilities of the hold and could not even plan for his next trip to Breven.

  After one whole week performing mostly local intercessions, one of his commissions took him north. An early winter had already settled in on the valley between the Plain of Sharon and the northernmost tip of the Caitanas. Two heavy snowfalls were followed by an actual blizzard, and the farmers were begging the angels for a respite. So Obadiah went north on the cold aerial road, spending two days on the journey and another two days at his destination. The people of the northern plains had not been willing to have him leave.

  The big, homely man who seemed to be unofficial mayor of this frozen community had asked most humbly for Obadiah’s continued presence. “If you could stay another day—two days, maybe,” the man had said, ducking his head and looking the very picture of pleading. “It’s just that—the snow’s stopped, but the skies are still overcast, and we’ve seen what clouds like that can hold.”

  How could he say no? “I’ll go aloft again this afternoon, and then tomorrow two or three times. Jovah will surely hear my prayers then,” Obadiah said graciously.

  The ugly man gave him a wide smile, all sincere gratitude. “You’ll stay with me, of course. I’ve got the biggest house in these parts. The food’s plain, but there’s plenty of it. We got the harvest in before the first snowfall—but, sweet Jovah singing! We never expected the bad weather so soon.”

  “No,” Obadiah said. “Storms never come when you expect them.”

  So he flung himself aloft that afternoon, into the crystal air that even he found almost unendurably cold. He had spent too many days in desert luxury, that was it; his blood had grown thin and lazy. When he was as high as he could stand, he dropped into a hover speed and sang again all the prayers he had offered to the god this morning. He could feel the words leave his mouth and careen upward, dodging through the weighted clouds and their unshed bounty, not stopping till they were clamoring at Jovah’s ear. He sang for an hour, supplicant and celebrant, remembering how much he loved this chilled, solitary communion with the god. The clouds bunched around him, drawn by the cadence of his voice, unaware that he was the siren who would lure them to their doom. Mesmerized by that soothing, beseeching tenor, they shivered around him and gave themselves up to dreaming. Once they slept, the god brushed them away with a sweep of his windy hand.

  It was in bright sunlight that Obadiah descended, to find his host and half a dozen of his friends gathered around to await his return. They were all smiling broadly, anxious to thank him personally for his aid, to show him the fruits of their summer labors. There was no hope for it; this would be a feast night.

  And so it was, thirty or forty people crammed into one sturdy farmhouse, the children spilling out into the barn and the dairy house, and coming in covered with the very snow Obadiah had been praying away. The food was, in fact, plain but hearty, stews and breads and casseroles and a home-brewed ale that was more potent than anything he’d had in the streets of Velora. Obadiah actually enjoyed himself, eating far more than he should have and allowing his host’s eight-year-old daughter to sit on his lap for the whole meal and tell him about the neighbor boys that she did and didn’t like. No one dared to ask him for another song, a more social one this time, so he brought it up himself.

  “Does anyone play a harp or flute? I’d be happy to sing and have you all join in.”

  It was a suggestion that met with universal approbation and resulted, as he knew it would, in various teenage girls and lanky, unformed boys being brought forward to parade their own voices in solos and duets. Music was the coin of their realm; it represented not only a hard-won harmony between individuals but the grace of their god. And so nearly everyone could sing, or play, or try to; and those who had no musical inclinations at all had trained themselves to listen. Obadiah sang, then listened, then joined in when the music became general, and all in all it was not a bad way to pass an evening.

  His allotted bedroom, of course, was inappropriate for an angel in every way: It was too hot, the bed was too narrow to accommodate his wings, and there was not a single chair in the room that he could sit in. But these were common conditions in any small farm town. You didn’t accept an overnight invitation with the expectation of staying in comfort. You stayed because the people needed you.

  In the morning, he was served a breakfast that was nearly as hearty as the dinner the night before, and returned to the heavens to sing away the hours. Yesterday he had halted the snow and banished the clouds; today he would wish away winter, begging Jovah to send warmer breezes from the edges of southern Bethel. He could imagine the currents of air making their slow, playful spiral from the coastline off of the Corinnis, across the banks of the Galilee River, and threading through the pointed peaks of the Caitanas. Well, the year was almost over; he would not be able to keep the season at bay for long. But he could hold it back a week or two. That much strength and skill he had.

  This second evening was not quite as festive as the first one, though a good ten neighbors came calling before dinner was over, eager to thank the angel in person for his excellent work. Obadiah tumbled into his inadequate bed that second night feeling pleased with himself, happy with his role in the world.

  He woke with an overwhelming desire to swoop by Breven on his way back to Cedar Hills.

  Ridiculous, he knew. Such a detour would take him way off course, probably delay his arrival into Cedar Hills by another full day. He argued with himself while he dressed, while he said good-bye to his hosts, while he catapulted himself once more to the skies overhead t
o sing a final prayer for sunshine. He told himself he was needed in Cedar Hills or elsewhere in Jordana, that he could not afford such foolish, romantic gestures. He did not even know how to get in touch with Rebekah, should he be so idiotic as to fly into the city with the hope of seeing her. He had asked her that. How do I get word to you when I return? and she had said, You can’t. But everyone knows everything that happens in Breven. If you are here to meet with Uriah, Hector will know, and then Jordan will know, and thus I will know.

  But if he came to Breven with no plan of meeting Uriah?

  It was pointless. They had invented no system of communication. She was immured in a walled, windowless cell, and he had no way to reach her. There was no reason to fly to Breven to spend a single night, and fly away again, frustrated and disappointed.

  But he flew to Breven anyway.

  He justified it to himself by flying low, following the coastline south and staying on the lookout for plague flags or other signs of trouble. He was actually relieved when he saw a tattered red banner flying over an isolated farmstead on the second morning of his flight. Illness in the house, most likely. He dipped his left wing and coasted down.

  “Angelo! Thank the god!” cried a frantic woman who ran from the house to greet him. “My husband—his leg is broken—and I set it, but then an infection set in. It’s been two days; he’s delirious—”

  “Let me look at him,” Obadiah said, holding his wings together tightly behind him so he could make it through the cramped doorway. Nonetheless, he felt a feather catch on the doorjamb and he had to jerk his wing forward to free it.

  The hurt man lay panting on a narrow cot, two small children standing beside him looking numb and nervous. The room was dark and cold, even though winter had not fully settled in at this latitude. Obadiah suspected this was not a prosperous home. The man’s disability could bring them perilously close to starvation.

  Obadiah was not a healer, but, like all angels, he could recognize the symptoms of the most common diseases and pray for the god to deliver the proper cures. This man, fortunately, looked to be suffering nothing more than infection—serious, yes, but not untreatable—and he hadn’t developed any illness on top of it.

  “I’ll pray for him,” Obadiah said. “We’ll have medicines in an hour or two.”

  And indeed, the god pelted them with dozens of white tablets not thirty minutes after Obadiah returned to the sky to enter his plea. He wanted to be on his way right then, but common kindness kept him in place another two hours, hauling up buckets of water from the nearest stream, chopping two days’ worth of wood, and forking down hay for the animals. None of these chores were made any easier by the presence of his wings, clearly not designed for a man doing manual labor.

  One of the little girls who had been standing by her father’s bed approached him as he put aside the pitchfork and devoutly hoped he had done his duty. She looked like she would be a solemn child on the best of days, which this clearly was not, but she also did not appear to be afraid of the extraordinary apparition come to spend a few hours on her homestead.

  “You dropped this, angelo,” she said. She was offering him one of his own wing feathers, torn from his skin by the splintered doorframe, perhaps, or combed out by the spindly branches that had overhung the path from the creek to the house. It was a pristine white and long as his forearm, one of the bigger feathers to be found toward the very back of his wings. “Do you need it?”

  He was about to say no when an idea occurred to him. “Yes,” he said, reaching for it. “Thank you.”

  “There’s another one, back by the creek,” she said, jerking her thumb in that direction. “Shall I get that one, too?”

  He had tucked the feather into an inside pocket of his leather vest, where it barely fit. He would have to move carefully to avoid snapping it. “No, I just need this one,” he said. “You can keep the other if you like.”

  Her sober face broke into a delighted smile. “That’s luck for me, isn’t it?” she asked. “An angel’s feather.”

  He came close enough to pat her on the tangled curls at the top of her head. “I hope so,” he said. “And my prayers for you. That’ll bring you luck, too.”

  “Mama says Daddy’s better already, since he took those funny white pills.”

  “He’ll be well in a day or two. Trust me.”

  “I’m glad you came, angelo.”

  And that, thought Obadiah as he took wing again a few minutes later, was all the justification he needed for this small detour, this illicit but surely harmless jaunt back into Breven. He had brought a little girl luck and quite possibly saved her father’s life. That would satisfy Nathan, if he even asked what had kept Obadiah on the road so long. That would satisfy the god himself, if Jovah were keeping accounts.

  Shortly before nightfall, he was in Breven and hovering over Hector’s house. In Velora and major cities of Samaria, citizens had trained themselves to glance skyward now and then, desirous of seeing an angel, but in Breven, he thought, such traditions were not common. For one thing, angels were rare in this part of the world. For another, the Jansai did not think it such a grand sight to view an angel on the wing.

  Still, it would not do for some bored and restless member of Hector’s household to look up and begin pointing, and bring the whole attention of the neighborhood to the occupied skies overhead. So Obadiah circled quite high, flicking in and out of thin streamers of cloud, hoping to blend with the haze of afternoon. He could see very little from this vantage point, of course, mostly small sticklike figures that floated down the boulevards around this house, indistinguishable from each other. Now and then shadowy shapes moved in and out of the back gardens of Hector’s house, but Obadiah had no way of knowing if one of them was Rebekah. Those who left the gardens for the street he presumed to be men; those who stayed within its walls he guessed to be women.

  He thought that at one point he saw someone bend over and pick up an object from the ground, and study it, and slip it inside a pocket; but he could not be sure. If so, he hoped that that person had been Rebekah, and that she had found the wing feather he had tied to a stone and dropped in her stepfather’s garden. And that, if it had been Rebekah, she knew how to interpret the treasure she had found.

  He stayed above the house till well after dark, not sure what he expected to observe, just loath to tear himself away. In case she had not found his clue, in case she could not get free, in case this was the closest he would be able to get to her this night. But she would never be able to find him if he remained airborne, endlessly wheeling overhead, so he eventually forced himself to cross the city and drop to land on the street before the Hotel Verde.

  The young woman he had seen before was sitting at her desk in the center of the atrium, and she smiled as he approached.

  “Good evening, angelo,” she said. “Would you like a room?”

  “Yes, please. And I’d like to have food sent to me as soon as possible.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Also, I may be expecting company tonight. I’m not sure. It might be quite late. But if someone could make sure this visitor is admitted to my room—”

  “I shall be at this station until midnight,” she said gravely. “I can escort your visitor to you.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “Is it the same young woman who’s visited before?”

  His mouth had already shaped the word yes before he took in the enormity of what she’d said. Then all he could do was stare at her, shock making him stupid and voiceless.

  She smiled. “I’m sorry. The m’kash who’s been here.”

  “How did you know?” he asked quietly.

  “The disguise is not that good, angelo. Anyone paying much attention would also know.”

  “But she—no one has guessed but you.”

  “I hope for her sake that is true.”

  He still watched her. She was a quiet, well-mannered, beautiful girl whose patrician face spoke of centuries of wealth and
breeding. Not someone he would expect to be entirely in sympathy with a runaway Jansai rebel. “Have you told anyone?” he asked.

  “No, angelo. I would not do that. My family maintains the discretion of all the guests at its establishment.”

  “Does your brother know?”

  “I have not discussed it with him.”

  The next words to come from his mouth surprised him. “It is possible she could stand to have a friend in this city.”

  “If I ever have a chance to be her friend, I will be.”

  He watched her a moment longer. His instinct was to trust her—indeed, at this point he had almost no choice but to trust her—and yet, Rebekah’s safety was at stake, and that was a gift almost too great to lay in the hands of any stranger. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Zoe.”

  “Not a name from the Librera,” he commented.

  She smiled. “Not a name found there, perhaps, but a word in the great book. It means abundance and grace. My mother named me.”

  “I hope your mother would approve of this secret you are willing to keep for me.”

  “My mother was a woman of many secrets herself. I think she would agree that this one was worth keeping.”

  “Let me tell her—my friend—when she arrives,” Obadiah said. “It might alarm her to learn the news from you.”

  “As you wish, angelo. I will see that food is brought to you immediately.”

  So Obadiah was left to pace in his room for who knew how many hours, beset by a fresh set of worries. He had had his share of dealings with the Manadavvi over the years, and he had always found them tricky and impossible to read. The men were clever, ambitious, greedy, and worldly, but often so charming that you could not hold their vices against them. The women were invariably beautiful and mysterious—all of them, like Zoe’s mother, full of secrets. He knew an angel who swore he would never take any woman but a Manadavvi for a lover. “Because you can’t tell if she loves you or hates you, you can’t tell if you’ve bored her or roused her to rapture, but she’ll smile at you every minute that she’s with you, and you’ll sleep on silk sheets when you’re in her bed.” Those had not been good enough inducements for Obadiah—silk sheets and discretion—but he was willing to bargain for just one of those virtues now.