by Sharon Shinn
“The funny thing is, I sometimes think my father loved her till he died. He didn’t talk about her, and if I asked, he would curse her, but he kept a portrait of her in his room. I saw it there once when I was a little girl, and it was still there the day after he died. I know, because I was the one who cleared his room out and bundled up his clothes. And sometimes I think—I wonder if maybe they weren’t true lovers—you know, intended by Jovah.”
“Why?”
“Well, something he said made me think that when he met her, his Kiss flared. You know”—and here Maga’s voice was edged with sarcasm—”the great sign from the god that lovers have met. Because he told me, a few days before he died, never to trust the Kiss, that it only led to sorrow. I had met Nathan by then, of course, but we were still young—friends—nothing had happened between us. The first time Nathan kissed my mouth— and the crystal on my arm came to life—I remembered what my father had said. And I realized he was right.”
Rachel frowned. They were half-sitting, half-lying on the floor amidst Rachel’s new pillows, on top of her new rug, and it reminded her very much of sitting around an Edori campfire talking late into the night. She stretched out on her stomach, still frowning.
“At my wedding,” she said slowly, “the oracle Josiah talked to me a little about this. The reason the Kiss lights in someone’s arm. He said that Yovah is not so much interested in true love as—bloodlines. The children that two people might bear if they are brought together.”
“Breeding,” Maga said with a slight smile. “I’ve heard this argument before.”
“So then if your parents were brought together by the Kiss— and Nathan’s parents were brought together by the Kiss—”
“Were they? I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yes. Hannah told me that the first day I was here. So that means Yovah united each of your parents specifically so you could be born. And if you and Nathan have been brought together by the Kiss—”
“I think, rather, the intensity of our love has caused the Kiss to light in each of our bodies,” Maga said. “Because angels are forbidden to intermarry, and Jovah was the one to lay down that prohibition.”
“Because of the monster children?”
“Right.”
“Hannah called them lucifers.”
Maga smiled a little. “That is the term for it among the Manadavvi—the term for anything dreadful and perverted. To them, even a rainstorm that goes on too long can be called a lucifer, because it is a good thing turned to evil purposes.”
“Hunh. Among the Edori, the word ‘lucifer’ means a false light. Certain insects at night give off a glow that looks like candlelight—they are called lucifers. Some swamp woods can burn, if you use them to build a fire, but only for a few minutes. They are called lucifers as well. And the Jansai—they have learned to build tent fires near Edori camping grounds, knowing the Edori will come seeking fellowship—and those fires are called lucifers, too.”
Maga smiled again. “The word really comes from the time of the founding of Samaria,” she said. “After Jovah brought us here and settled us into the three provinces, and divided everyone up into men, angels and oracles, he withdrew into heaven to watch over us. And there was peace for a generation. But as the sons and daughters of the first settlers grew to adulthood, they began clamoring to see the face of Jovah for themselves.
“At that time, the Archangel was a man named Lucifer—he had succeeded Uriel, who was now dead. To quiet the people, Lucifer said he would fly to the heavens and visit Jovah, asking him to return to earth. And he took off from the Plain of Sharon and he was gone three days, and no one saw him return. But on the third day, he reappeared on the Plain, and beside him was a great figure of a man, wrapped head to toe in glowing white cloth edged with gold. There were crowds of people gathered on the Plain, and they shouted out glorias when they saw Lucifer return with the god. And they crowded forward to touch the god, and beg for his blessing and ask to be healed by his hand.
“Now this went on for days and days, with people from all over Samaria making pilgrimages to the Plain of Sharon to personally touch the foot of the god. And Lucifer began to grow jealous, because no one was honoring him anymore—all the attention was going to Jovah. Finally, he grew so enraged that he ripped the white cloths from Jovah’s face—to reveal, not the god at all, but a poor giant half-wit that he himself had dressed up for the role. And so the word ‘lucifer’ has come, at least among angels, to mean anyone who betrays a sacred trust—who pretends to bring you love, for instance, and brings you dishonor instead.”
“What happened to the Archangel?”
“He was banished. I don’t know where. There is no mention of him anywhere else in the histories.”
“And what happened to the half-wit?”
“Stormed by the crowd and bludgeoned to death.”
“Maga!”
“Well, you asked.”
“I don’t think I’ll ask you for any more stories,” Rachel exclaimed. “Everything you tell me has a sorry end.”
Magdalena was laughing. “I apologize. How can I make everything right again?”
Rachel sighed. “Bring back the sunshine. I hate this awful cold and snow.”
Magdalena came to her feet. “All right. The snow will be gone by nightfall. Tomorrow we’ll go into Velora again.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to go aloft and pray for a weather intercession. We’ll have sun in the morning.”
“Pray for— Can you really do that?”
Maga laughed again. “Of course I can. Weather is the easiest thing for an angel to control. Want to come with me?”
“Flying? I don’t think so.”
“All right. I’ll only be gone an hour or so.”
And she left the chamber. Sure enough, late that evening, the snow stopped falling; the clouds drifted apart; the stars appeared fiercely white against the absolute blackness of the night sky. When Hannah remarked at dinner that the air seemed much warmer than it had that morning, both Rachel and Magdalena thought it prudent not to explain why.
And the next day they were back in Velora again.
It was too cold to shop for long at the outdoor bazaars, so Rachel and Magdalena had taken refuge at a pastry shop, where they drank hot spiced wine and nibbled on cheese rolls. Rachel had seated herself by the window.
“Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine,” she chanted. “I think I’ll just sit here all day.”
“Eating cake and getting fat and lazy,” Maga agreed. “Sounds good to me.”
“Sounds good to me, too,” said a man’s voice behind them. They both looked around quickly to see the slim, graceful form of the angel Obadiah thrown into high detail by the angle of the sun. He had entered the shop and come to their table without either of them noticing. “Can I sit with you and put on a few pounds?”
“Of course,” Maga said. Rachel merely looked surly. Obadiah pulled up one of the metal chairs—like the Eyrie chairs, carefully designed to accommodate angels—and gracefully disposed his wings over the back. He gave them both a seraphic smile.
“Lovely weather, for a change,” he said. “I compliment you on the efficacy of your prayers.”
Maga choked back a laugh. “What makes you think—”
“I can scent an intercession unerringly, lovely. I was on the point of going aloft myself, when I noticed a distinct improvement in the temperature last night. And if, as I believe, it was the angelica’s idea, I compliment her as well.”
“Not my idea,” Rachel said. “I didn’t even know it could be done.”
“Well, it’s not supposed to be,” Obadiah said thoughtfully. He raised a hand to signal to the shopkeeper for service. “Gabriel gets very testy when angels misuse power for personal comfort. But then, almost everything makes Gabriel testy. If we all conformed to his standards, we would sit mute and motionless inside the Eyrie, thinking only pure thoughts.”
Rachel could not stifle a giggle. Obadiah slanted
her a sideways look and then grinned at Magdalena. “So she does laugh,” he said to the other angel. “I confess, I have never even seen her smile in the weeks she has been at the Eyrie. I was beginning to wonder if she hated us all.”
“She likes me,” Maga said serenely.
“Everybody does.”
The shopkeeper brought wine and rolls to Obadiah, who flashed his bracelet in lieu of payment. The man nodded and left.
“You mustn’t be misled by our forbidding, disdainful appearances,” Obadiah continued, addressing Rachel this time. “You think angels live such fabulous lives, performing good deeds and communing with the god—lives to which poor, unworthy mortals could not even aspire—but I assure you it is not all rapture and glory.”
“I never thought it was,” Rachel said dryly.
“I, for instance, was called away three days ago when a traveler to Velora said he’d seen a plague flag hoisted over a homestead fifty miles from here. You recall the weather, of course— Magdalena had not yet charmed the snow clouds from our gloomy skies—so there I was, darting past the flakes and even beginning to feel a bit chilled as I flew west for an hour. I spotted the flag, found the homestead—and entered the house to find one robust woman, a healthy man and half a dozen farm children gamboling around the fireplace. Not a cough to be heard, not a sore or lesion in sight.
“So I introduced myself politely, inquired in the kindest of voices about the presence of the plague flag, and received nothing but blank stares from the lord and lady of the household. Ah, but young Ezra, who looked to be about ten years old, came running in from the barn saying, ‘Is he here? Is the angel here?’ I admit to feeling, at that precise moment, a surge of misgiving.”
Maga was laughing openly. Even Rachel was amused by the light, sardonic tone of Obadiah’s voice. He was fair-haired, open-faced, slightly built. Though he told the tale as if it pained him, the laughter behind his eyes was easy to read.
“The lady of the house turned to young Ezra and exclaimed, ‘What have you done? Surely you didn’t call an angel down here to look for that fool animal,’ and the lord of the house expressed his intention of giving the boy a good sound whipping. He strode off somewhere, presumably to find a nice sturdy piece of leather. Ezra, meanwhile, evaded his mother’s hands and came running up to me, grabbed me by my belt and began sobbing into my chest. ‘He’s been gone for three days—I know he’s going to freeze to death in all this snow. I can’t find him and I’ve looked everywhere.’ “
“Let me guess—a dog,” said Maga.
“A goat, if you please, a white goat with white horns, who was no doubt destined to be slaughtered for dinner in a month’s time, anyway.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I went out looking for the goat. I brought Ezra with me so I could have an extra pair of eyes—at least that’s what I told him. Really I just wanted to postpone the whipping if I could. We were out for three hours.”
“Did you find the goat?” Rachel asked.
“Oh, yes. Holed up under a fallen tree, all snug and comfortable. And if you don’t think that was a pleasure,” he added, “flying back four miles with a ten-year-old boy under one arm and a squirming goat under the other, well, then, you have no imagination.”
Both women laughed aloud. Obadiah surveyed them benevolently. “So,” he said to Rachel, “the next time you are overawed by your angelic counterparts, remember me and the goat, and it will all whittle down to the proper perspective.”
“Thank you, I will.”
“Well, you’re very kind,” Magdalena said. “I don’t think Gabriel or Nathan would have gone searching for a pet.”
“No, somehow it’s always me who ends up with the bizarre or humiliating assignments,” Obadiah agreed. “I remember, my second or third time out, responding to a pilgrim’s petition—”
For the next hour, he entertained them with stories of his misadventures. Rachel could not remember ever laughing so hard. Magdalena contributed a few of her own stories, and even Rachel recounted a tale of an ill-fated Edori campsite which had not, at the time, been funny. It felt good to laugh, to remember, to share. It had been so long since she’d had friends.
It was Magdalena who brought the session to an end. “But we came down to buy thread and yarn for my weaving,” she said. “Let’s go look some more.”
Obadiah accompanied them back to the bazaar, where they wandered between the booths and were occasionally separated for a few moments at a time. Rachel was by herself in front of a booth of glassware when she was approached by a frail, dark-haired girl who looked about seven years old.
“Please, lady,” the girl said, tugging at Rachel’s sleeve. “My brother’s sick and he’s awful hungry. Could you give me something—”
The pale, paunchy man who owned the booth took a menacing step forward. “Get out of here, you. Go on—get!”
Rachel laid a hand on the filthy, tangled hair. “I don’t have any money with me,” she said gently. “Where is your brother?”
The girl pointed. In an alley off the main boulevard sat a huddled bundle of ragged cotton topped with a tousled dark head. “He’s been sick for two days and all he wants is some bread—”
“Let me go see him.”
“Lady, do you want the glass?” the shopowner demanded.
“No,” Rachel said over her shoulder, and followed the girl to her brother’s side. His eyes were closed and his hands folded across his stomach, and he moaned in a small voice as he rocked from side to side. He seemed even more emaciated than his sister.
“Does he have a fever? When’s the last time he ate anything?” Rachel asked. She dropped to her knees to get a closer look.
It was a tactical mistake. Someone shoved her hard from behind; as she toppled forward, the sick boy leapt to his feet, miraculously recovered. Hands yanked on the gold chain she had hung around her neck that morning; nimble fingers untied the silk scarf from her hair. Before she could regain her balance, they had stripped her few valuable items from her and gone skipping down the street. She heard cries of anger and outrage follow them as the brother and sister wove through the throng and disappeared.
She had not even tried to resist. The instant she’d recognized the scam, she had frozen, allowed them to take what they would. Now, as running footsteps hurried up from behind, she steadied herself against the alley wall and pushed herself slowly to her feet.
“Rachel! Are you all right? What happened? Those children—!” Magdalena was the first to reach her, with Obadiah right behind. Strangers formed a crowd behind the angels as she turned to face them.
“I didn’t even see them. What did they look like?” Obadiah demanded. “I might be able to catch them.”
Rachel shook her head. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. They just took a couple of things.”
Maga had already noticed the thefts. “Oh, your pretty gold necklace! And your silk scarf. And—your belt with the gold disks—oh, Rachel, it took us three days to buy that belt!”
Rachel laughed shakily. It was no very pleasant thing to be attacked, even by children, and even though they left you quite unharmed. Seeing her whole and relatively calm, the gathered onlookers began to disperse. “The belt and the necklace hardly matter,” she said. “I hope they can find some nice little shop to pawn them for a few gold pieces. They looked hungry.”
“And you looked like easy prey, lovely,” Obadiah said. “One of us should have been with you. I’m sorry.”
“It’s disgraceful,” Maga said. “That an angelica can’t walk safely through the streets of Velora—”
“It is disgraceful,” Rachel interrupted. Her trembling had stopped; she was feeling, instead, the steadying power of righteous rage. “Disgraceful, that in a town less than a vertical mile from an angel hold there should be starving children on the street, reduced to begging and robbery to survive.”
The angels both stared at her. Obadiah, predictably, began to laugh.
“But Rachel—aren’t you angry?” Maga asked, puzzled.
“Of course I’m angry! How can such things be allowed to happen? Why aren’t these children provided for? Why doesn’t someone care for them? You yourself told me that at least some of them have been sired by angels, though they aren’t fortunate enough to bear wings when they’re born. Is that their fault? Among the Edori, you are responsible for your child no matter how he looks when he is born—no matter if he has hair of a color you dislike or a foot deformed in the womb or a mind that will never cease to function like a child’s—”
Maga glanced around to see who might be listening. “Rachel, hush. This is not the time or place—”
“Angels who think it’s so important to sire more angel children and then not caring what happens to the mortal babies that are brought into the world. Leaving them to starve or die or turn into street urchins who know no way but violence to survive—”
Unlike Gabriel, these two had not had an opportunity to see Rachel in full spate before. Maga was distraught, but Obadiah remained cool. He blocked Rachel’s way as she began to pace, spreading his wings wide and backing her toward the building. When she lifted her hands as if to strike him, he caught her wrists and pushed her gently against the brick of the wall.
“You can’t solve anything when you’re crazy like this,” he said, his light voice taking on hypnotic, soothing rhythms. “Calm down, discuss it—we can work it out.”
“Solve it! Discuss it! What can be done? It’s disgraceful—”
“It is, I agree, calm down. There are things to be done, things you can do, but you have to stop a minute, think, calm down—”
Quickly enough, the beautiful voice had its effect. She stopped resisting his grip, took several long breaths and stared fixedly down at the cobblestones until her vision returned to normal. When she looked up at her companions again, she was still angry but in control.
“I’m not sorry,” she said defiantly. “You think I behaved badly, but such a thing should make you angry, too.”
Obadiah released her. Maga rushed in to give her a quick hug. “But Rachel, you should not get so upset about things. You frightened me—”