by Sharon Shinn
“Can you tell me why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Can you at least kiss me farewell?”
She made a helpless gesture with her hands, but now he was beside her, and it was simpler to say silently. He took her into a gentle embrace, and she wrapped her arms around his back, resting her head on his shoulder. For a moment, he bore her full weight as she pressed herself against him, hugging him like a child fearful of the word goodbye, and then she freed herself and stepped back.
“I can’t stay,” she said. “You confuse me.”
He took her shoulders in a light grip and held her so that she faced him. She let him hold her but looked unhappy about it.
“I don’t mean to confuse you,” he said. “What I want is simple enough. I love you. I want to be with you. How does that distress you or complicate your life?”
“I’m the Archangel,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “It is my duty to find—and marry—the man Jovah has chosen for me. So far I have not had the time or inclination to look for my angelico too hard. But I must seek him out—soon, now, because he must sing beside me at the Gloria. And that is scarcely more than two months away. I have been terribly lax in my duty. But I cannot disregard it any longer.”
It was a blow; he knew very little of the conventions governing Archangels and their mates, but the word “marry” gave him a fair estimate. “How do you identify this angelico? What does he do? Is he a mortal man?”
She shook her head to signify she was not entirely sure of the answers. “Jovah selects him. I don’t know the god’s criteria. What the angelico does is—sing, and hear petitions that are not brought to the Archangel directly, and—and be spouse to the Archangel. Yes, he is a mortal man. Angels do not marry angels.”
“I am a mortal man,” Caleb said. “Why could I not be angelico?”
At that she wrenched herself away, and began pacing the room in some distress. “Jovah names him! Jovah chooses him! I cannot just petition the god for the man I would select on my own!”
“Why not?”
“Because—because Jovah has his reasons. Because that is not the way it is done. Because Jovah has already made his selection.”
Another blow; he was beginning to feel physically bruised. But he kept up his dogged questions. “Who is he, then? Why have you not gone to him?”
She tossed him a look over her shoulder and continued her fretful pacing. “Because Jovah is sometimes obscure. He told me to seek out the son of Jeremiah, which I have learned means one of the descendants of the Archangel Gabriel. That’s who I was looking for when I came to the Edori camp in Breven, because I thought the man might be an Edori… . But it turned out to be a false lead. I need to keep looking.” She sighed, stopped in her tracks, threw her hands into the air. “I need to do so many things.”
Caleb came closer. “What if I told you my father’s name was Jeremiah?”
She actually laughed. “You would be lying. And anyway, I am fairly certain that the Jeremiah referred to is a man dead these hundred and fifty years.”
“And if you cannot find this man?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know if Jovah would allow an imposter to sing at my side. According to the legends, an Archangel may only replace the angelico—or the angelica—if the one chosen by Jovah is dead. And Jovah seems certain this man is alive, though he is, for whatever reason, unable to name him.”
“And if you find him, then what?” Caleb finally asked, the only question with an answer he cared about. “You will love him? You will cleave to him? You will not willingly see me again?”
Alleya spoke to the floor. “He will be my husband,” she said. “There are angels who care little about the implications of such a bond, but they would be difficult for me to cast aside lightly. It is hard to imagine that I will love him.” She looked up at him now, her face both defiant and oddly pure. “It is hard to imagine that I will love anyone but you. But they say the god is wise and chooses well. I must believe him.”
“The god,” Caleb said deliberately, “cannot even hear you when you pray to him. How can you think he has your best interests at the core of his heart?”
She nodded. “Perhaps he does not. But as far as I am able, I must do his will. That is why I am Archangel, to carry out the laws and commandments of my god. I cannot choose which of those laws I am to obey and which I can with impunity break. It is everything or nothing.”
“Then nothing,” he said.
She shook her head. “And I am also Archangel because, of all the voices raised to him, mine is the only one Jovah heeds,” she said gently. “If I cannot reach Jovah, we are all lost. I cannot walk away now from the task I have been given. If we were all safe, if the storms had all abated, if someone else could make the god listen, I would go with you this morning. But you cannot ask me to abandon a whole world. There must be something I can do to save us.”
“Then abandon no one,” he said. “Do not abandon me.”
“I must,” she said, and turned away. “No other course is open.”
And she would not say another word to him, though he followed her from room to room, cajoling, pleading, trying to interfere with the knots she made on her packet of food, on her backpack of clothing. It was as if he were invisible, bodiless, a man she had dreamed, perhaps, not a mortal man with whom she must actually contend. Feeling less and less corporeal as the hour wore on, he trailed helplessly behind her as she finally left the house, carrying a kitchen chair in her hands.
“I’ve thought about what you said,” she remarked, as if they had been engaged all this while in easy conversation. “I think perhaps I can take off from the roof. If I can get up there. Could you hold the chair steady for me?”
So they found the point at which the roof made its lowest slope, and he grasped the chair firmly, giving her a hand while she clambered up the slanted grade. The green tile made a slippery climb, but there was a flat section in the middle near the back. Alleya picked her way there surefootedly, spreading her wings to help her balance. As soon as she found her footing, Caleb scrambled up after her, catching up with her just as she made it to the level place. A touch of his hands turned her to face him.
“This cannot be the last time we see each other,” he said.
“Maybe so, maybe not,” she said, kindly enough. “It is hard to guess what will happen.”
“Promise,” he said.
She gave a soft laugh. “I can’t.”
“Promise,” he repeated. “Please.”
She lifted her fingers to his face, stroked the rough stubble of his morning beard as if it pleased her. “So often we don’t get any of the things we want,” she said. “Be content with what you’ve been given.”
“My desire is too great to feed on so little.”
“It is not a little thing,” she whispered. “My heart—and it is yours, although you cannot keep it.”
“Don’t leave,” he said. “Stay another day.”
Now she lifted her other hand, so that one of her palms lay against each side of his face. “Stay well, be happy,” she whispered. “I shall think of you every day of my life.”
“Alleya,” he said desperately, and she stopped his mouth with a brief, impassioned kiss. When she drew back, he saw tears standing in her eyes, but she smiled up at him nonetheless.
“Till we can see each other again,” she said. “If we can.”
“I love you,” he said.
She did not repeat it. Instead she moved her fingers from his cheeks, to his mouth, to his chest. He raised his hands to cover hers but she slipped away from him, took a step backward. Her wings spread, catching the white morning light, filling his sight, blocking the whole world. She was encased in brilliance; he could not go near enough to touch her. Then the great wings swept downward and up, and the air around him whirled with a speckled light. He fell backward a pace as she continued to ascend, and within three wingbeats, three heartbeats, she
was a small, bird-sized shape above him in the cloudless sky. He watched until she disappeared, and then he stood there another ten minutes, another thirty, looking toward the horizon where she had disappeared.
Finally, he shook himself free of his stupor and descended cautiously to the ground. Moving methodically around Hagar’s cabin, he went from room to room, erasing traces of their presence and making sure every window was tightly secured.
It was a little before noon when he began the long, wearisome hike down to the base of the mountain. The descent was easier than the climb had been, though on the way up he had had company; now his only companion was his brooding memory. But it kept him completely engrossed until he reached the foot of the mountain, and looked around for his horse.
She was there, quietly grazing, and she made no demur when he came over and instantly threw on the bridle. Caleb glanced up once at the westering sun, gauging how many hours of daylight travel he had left; not many. But he was not in a mood to wait for the morrow. He had a long ride ahead and wanted to reach his destination as soon as possible.
In minutes the mare was saddled and his gear was stowed on her back. Caleb swung himself up and lightly pulled on the reins, and the mare obligingly turned her head toward the northwest.
He expected to take three or four days to reach Velora. And even that would be too long.
Having declared her primary mission to be finding the son of Jeremiah, Alleya returned to the Eyrie with no clear idea of how to accomplish the task. And feeling so weighted down with depression that she wasn’t sure she had the strength to undertake it. It didn’t help much that she had spoken nothing but the absolute truth to Caleb Augustus; she couldn’t imagine spending the rest of her life without him. Knowing he was alive, eager, in love with her, and failing to go to him—this was a dreadful prospect to face for the rest of her days. Surely even stern Jovah could not ask so much of her.
Although he was asking a great deal in other ways. Alleya had not flown an hour from the Corinnis when she plunged headlong into a storm that could have passed for a standing pool of water, so thickly did the raindrops fall. She felt her wingbeats slow as her heartbeat speeded up; the first strong buffet of wind made her want to cry out in fear. But she could not give in, she could not succumb to terror. She gulped down deep breaths and forced her wings to gather power.
Once above the worst of the clouds, she made her ritual prayer for clear weather. She was surprised and more than a little pleased when, less than thirty minutes later, the clouds began to part and the rain thinned away to nothing. So he still loved her a little bit, Jovah did; she could take comfort from that.
Though love, she was beginning to think, was more often a heartache than a comfort.
But she would not think about love.
When she made it to the Eyrie later that day—damp, bedraggled and tired—she found she had almost certainly been away too long. Everyone in the confines of the hold had some specific, personal reason to see her in private; every single citizen of Velora had apparently walked up the grand stairway to approach her with his own petition; and half the angels of the other two provinces had dropped by to inquire about her health and well-being. She did not know where to begin or who to see.
She managed to avoid them all for that first evening and take a solitary dinner, but the next morning, all of her visitors and all of her problems still remained. She closeted herself with Samuel for the first hour of the day, reviewing the priorities as he saw them and delegating to him any tasks he was willing to take on.
“I don’t know where I’d be without you,” she said with a sigh as he rose to his feet and prepared to tackle his own assignments. “You’re so much more efficient than I am.”
“You’d be back in the archives, reading till midnight, like you used to be before you were chosen,” he said with a sad smile. “And I’d lay money that there’s not a day you wouldn’t still rather be back there than out here.”
“And you’d win your bet,” she said with a little laugh. “But Jovah’s cause, and not our laws. We do as the god directs us.”
“How’s your foot?” he asked abruptly. “I notice you’ve been favoring it.”
“Oh, it’s much better! And my face hardly shows any bruises at all. I’m quite healed, I think.”
“Do you know what you plan to do next?” he asked, lingering at the door. She had already given him the outlines of her search at Hagar’s Tooth—the discovery of the listening device, the proof that it was working. He had interpreted it just as she had.
“No,” she said, which was a lie. “Do you have any suggestions?”
“No, but Mary might.”
She felt an instant tickle of alarm. “Mary! Is she here, too?”
He nodded. “Arrived last night after you’d gone to your bed.” His face lit with a grim smile of satisfaction. “Asher would not let her come to your room, though she insisted she just wanted to make a short visit. I’ve never liked the boy so well.”
“I wonder if she’s learned anything,” Alleya said, half to herself. “Well! Certainly she should be the person I meet with next.”
But Mary, when she was ushered into Alleya’s formal receiving room, had nothing but questions. “I cannot believe I forgot to ask you this when we met in Semorrah! Did you find the Edori man you were looking for? Is he the one we wanted?”
That seemed so long ago; so much else had happened since then. Alleya repressed a sigh. “He died when he was still a child,” the angel answered. “No help there.”
The oracle looked stern. “Then you must turn your attention back to the search for your angelico. Alleluia, the Gloria is only two months away. How can you expect to find and groom this man with such a limited amount of time? What if he is an untrained singer? What if he does not know a single mass? He must lead the Gloria, you know. There is so much he has to learn.”
“I know—I know. I’m sorry,” Alleya murmured.
“I blame myself. I should have paid more attention, made sure you were devoting your time to the search. But there have been so many problems needing our attention—”
“And we still do not know,” Alleya interrupted, “if—whether or not the angelico is at my side—the god will hear any of us sing the Gloria.”
Anxiety briefly etched deep lines in Mary’s face; she looked almost hunted. “I know,” the oracle said. “I think of that night and day. What if the god does not hear us, no matter who sings?”
“What, indeed?” Alleya responded. “I too think of it, day and night, night and day. When I am not worrying about the storms, and the floods, and the Jansai, and the Manadavvi, and my angelico—”
“Whom you must find.”
“I will leave in a few days to seek him.”
“Seek him where?” the oracle asked sharply.
“I have an idea where I might find him. I prefer to look first and tell you about it afterward. In case I am wrong.”
“But Alleya—”
“And you,” the Archangel added, almost playfully, “bend your mind to the answer of this riddle: What happens if we do not find him? Who sings beside me on the Plain of Sharon?”
“I don’t know…” Mary said very slowly, staring at her with painful intensity. “It has never happened before, that the Archangel has failed to find the one selected for him—or her—by Jovah.”
“One more question, and then you can go,” Alleya said, pleased with herself for that felicitous way of asking the oracle to leave. “When Delilah came to you asking Jovah to identify her angelico, did the god speak plainly? Or did he speak in cryptic words, as he did when we asked for my sake?”
“Delilah did not come to me for that information,” Mary answered. “Job was the one who questioned the god on her behalf.”
Alleya nodded wisely. “Ah. Well, then, I’ll ask him next time I see him.”
“Why? Is that important?”
“I’m not sure,” Alleya said mysteriously. “Perhaps not.”
; Mary left the room reluctantly enough, and Alleya waited a moment before she summoned the next petitioner through the door. She would have to confirm it, of course, but she remembered Job once telling her that he thought Mary had misread the god; surely Jovah was too wise to choose Levi to be Delilah’s angelico. In any case, Alleya had always thought Delilah had asked Mary to petition the god for her husband’s name, but Mary had just denied it.
Certainly it would not be beyond Delilah’s ability to pretend to each oracle that she had consulted the other on this most delicate, most momentous of matters. Delilah had been in love with Levi all her life; she had been determined to have him. No one had been surprised when the god granted her this dearest wish, because the god had always loved Delilah.
But Alleya suspected that Delilah had not even asked the god.
And that was a precedent that, once set, could be followed.
Unless the god had already named the angelico. And could he then be ignored or countermanded?
And if he was?
The day was filled with similar conferences: Samuel and the other angels could generally handle the problems of most of the petitioners, but Alleya tried to make it a point to personally meet with the river merchants, the wealthy landowners—and the ordinary farmers and shopkeepers who absolutely insisted on seeing the Archangel and no one else. Timothy, who had been monitoring for her the trade routes along the upper Galilee River, reported harmony for the moment between the Edori and the burghers who wanted to use that road.
“But there could be trouble,” he added as he finished his story. “There were a couple of dry weeks, and then the rains started again. Jerusha said the Manadavvi came to her humbly enough, asking that she invite you to pray the showers away. She said you would, of course, and there was no hint—this time—that they blamed you for the rain. But we did not know when you would be available.”
Alleya sighed. And how could she search for her angelico if she was constantly flying off to control urgent problems? “I can leave tomorrow—or, more likely, the day after,” she said. “If you would like to send that message—”
