Astreus leaned over me and wiped away my tears with his fingers. As his fingers brushed my cheek, the modern world fell away, and we were dancing, he and I, amidst the May Day revel where we first met. Fairy lights glittered in the pine boughs overhead, and elvish music played from the open door in the hill. Farther away, slightly blurred, I could see the others—Erasmus, Father, Cornelius, Logistilla. A sane Mephistopheles danced with the Elf Queen, and Theophrastus, young and hale, partnered a lovely elf maid.
We danced together, gliding over the grass. His eyes mirrored the night sky, and his laughter rang about us like song. Leaning toward me, he brushed his lips against mine. His mouth tasted of wind and honeysuckle. I moaned softly, and he drew me tightly against him. Our kiss deepened, my arms snaked about his neck . . . and encountered empty air.
I stood back on the balcony. Astreus stood a little ways away, his expression unreadable. I blushed and turned away, uncertain whose dream I had just been dreaming.
“Ah, the glories of what might have been . . .” he murmured as we stared into the storm.
“I could not have become a Sibyl in any case,” I murmured sadly, as I watched the rain plunge into the depths of the ravine. “To do so, I would have had to free the Aerie Ones, and I could not. My father’s plan requires that they be bound a while longer . . . for mankind’s sake.”
Gone was my noble companion. Where he had been stood some fey and wild thing. The winds whipped about him until his sable opera cape billowed and his storm-dark hair rippled about his head. His eyes burned like black coals, blazing with barely controlled fury.
I drew back, frightened.
“Fool!” Astreus cried. “Had you but freed me from my oath, I could have curbed the Aerie Ones upon your behalf! They are my people! Commanding them not to harm your precious mortals would have been the least of prices to pay. Had you but freed them—I could have been free! Mephisto could have been saved, and you would have been a Sibyl. Everything you and I desire could have been ours!”
“I-I didn’t realize . . .” I whispered, heartsick.
“Slaver and daughter of a thief!” he spat, drawing splendor about him like a cloak. “You and your family have been the undoing of me. You have done me irreparable harm, while I have done nothing to warrant this terrible fate which befalls me. Every fond thought I have held of you has become a burning coal in my heart. The hope you represented was nothing. You are a lie!”
“That’s hardly fair. I never promised you anything!” I cried. “It was not even me you wanted, but a Sibyl. I have never been and never will be a Sibyl!”
“Obviously not! You are unworthy of the station!”
I recoiled, eyes stinging.
“Enough, I return to Hell. I would not allow one such as you to kill me! You are contemptible! Perhaps I can leave enough of myself in Seir to force him to seek death at Theophrastus’s hands.”
Astreus stormed away, yanking the circlet of silver and horn from his head. Darkness began gathering about him.
Frightened, I stuck my flute behind my back and grabbed my fan. I started to move forward, but he raised a hand to stop me. I halted.
“Stand over there,” he pointed to the balcony railing.
I could not tell if this was Astreus or Seir talking. Dubious, I backed up until I was pressed against the stone railing, facing him, my hand curled around the haft of my fan, which was hidden behind my back. For a moment, he stood regarding me; my dark hair and pale features framed by the violence of the storm.
“Why over here?” I asked hoarsely.
As Seir’s dark shape faded slowly away, Astreus’s voice hung in the air: “Because I would have my last memory be of the two things I most loved.”
I sank to my knees and knelt, cradling my head in my arms.
Oh, if only I had listened to Mab when he told me to leave well enough alone! Perhaps, if I had turned my back on the message in Father’s journals, my pleasant orderly life would never have come unraveled. Instead, I had lost my innocence. My Lady had abandoned me. The lovely mother I had always idolized had turned out to be a myth. The holy love between my father and his wife, which I had believed in since my childhood, might be a lie. I had learned my father, whom I had always adored, had secretly enslaved me so I would not take after my birth mother, an ugly twisted witch. My dreams had been dashed; my immortal brothers and sisters made mortal. The only glimmer of love I had found after an eternity of solitude was now lost forever. I had lost Astreus. I had lost Ferdinand. I had lost my Lady. I had lost everything.
How long I wept, I cannot say, but the sky was growing dark when I finally wiped my eyes. So black was my despair that I could not go on or move without some kind of help or guidance. If my Lady would not answer me, I would have to go elsewhere. I thought of Gregor and, for the second time in my long life, I prayed to God.
“Please,” I prayed. “Help me. Give me hope.”
The setting sun coming through the leaves cast a deep golden light over the balcony, and the freshly washed air smelled of water lilies and of some heavenly scent I could not place. A calm seemed to settle over the ravine, soothing my ragged spirits. Only, I was facing south, so how could I be bathed in the light of the sunset?
Something hovered above me shining with a golden glow. My fan and the flute were both out of reach, scattered across the balcony where I had dropped them in my misery. Yet, even as I began to panic, a sense of peace came upon me that was so pervasive as to utterly banish fear.
An angel stood upon the air, shining with a golden light. Delicate silver slippers shod her feet. Pearls the color of a new moon glowed at the waist, sleeves, and neck of her gown of purest green. Five sets of wings—white with a touch of black, like the wings of sea gulls—spread out from her shoulders and back, and five halos, each a perfect circle, rose above her head: one of white light, one of ocean spray, one of water lilies sprinkled with perfect water drops, one of white river foam, and the last of golden light, like a shining wedding ring.
“Rejoice!”
The sound of her heavenly voice was so lovely as to bring tears of joy to my eyes, as if I heard the speech that divine thing of which a flute was merely a material approximation.
“Who are you?” I breathed.
“I am she who brings the wisdom that shatters illusions, the draught that is sweet upon the lips but bitter in the stomach. At the Will of the Most High, I once brought such a draught to a boy called Solomon. Do you not know me, my Child?”
“I know you,” I whispered.
Muriel Sophia! The angel who first visited me long ago, after the death—I knew now—of Ferdinand! When she had appeared to me, I had been wandering, ghostlike, down the red corridors of Castello Sforzesco, aimless and hopeless. I had been lost to grief, and her visit had saved me.
“You ask me to rejoice.” My voice cracked from sorrow and awe. “How can I, when everything worth rejoicing about has been taken from me?”
“Sorrow does not become thee, Child. Rejoice and fear not, for it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.”
“What Kingdom? Heaven?”
“Earth.”
“The Earth?” I rocked back and rose to my feet. “What do you mean?”
“Into the hands of Solomon, the Most High placed rulership of the Earth,” replied the Virtue. “Prospero and his children are Solomon’s heirs. Yours is the duty to guard the mortal world from the forces of Hell.”
“Will Solomon’s dream die with us?”
“Throughout the ages, I have watched over the ORBIS SULEIMANI, sheltering them beneath my wings; inspiring them to remain true to their purpose; shepherding them when they have strayed. This charge shall I continue until the end of the world.”
“The Orbis Suleimani!” I cried. “Of course!”
I had not considered their role in all this. As we grew old and feeble, we could place our staffs back into the hands of the organization Solomon set up as jailers for these very demons. With an angel guiding
them, perhaps they could hold out against the mechanizations of Baelor and his ilk. After all, they had held out for centuries before Father came along.
This was not just any angel, I realized abruptly. This was the guardian angel of mankind; the angel who was charged with the task of protecting the human race from the ravages of the supernatural; the angel for which the Orbis Suleimani—and therefore my family—worked! A feeling of awe and wonder flowed through me so all-consuming that for a time, I could not speak.
“Is there no hope for my family?” I asked finally. “Will we perish as the Angel of the Bottomless Pit predicted?”
“Hope is eternal, as certain of your poets have said.”
“How? What can we do?”
“Each member of your family carries a secret flaw, a private sin. You must overcome these vices and act together, if you wish to complete your task.”
“You mean the sin that carrying a demon-infested staff has engendered?” I asked.
The glorious woman placed her palm upon my head. I saw a vision of my family: Erasmus sitting with his head lowered in despair; Theo raising his fist, his face red with wrath; Mephisto lying in a bed with three barmaids; Cornelius placing pins sporting the symbol of the Orbis Suleimani on a map of the world, his calmness belying his ambition; Titus lazing on a couch, too slothful to rise; old stocky Gregor, his eyes dark with hatred; Logistilla gnawing on her fingers as she stared enviously; Ulysses greedily slipping someone else’s jewels into his vest pocket.
Muriel Sophia spoke in her heavenly voice. “Only Gregor comes close to mastering of his passions and conquering his sin, and only of late, since his seeming death.”
I nodded, but my thoughts were elsewhere. Erasmus, despair? Malice I would have understood, or pride, but when had cool casual Erasmus become a victim of despair? Was this a recent thing, since Osae’s attack? I thought of asking, but decided the angel might not take kindly to being doubted.
I had seen nothing of myself. For a moment, I congratulated myself on being the one perfect child among my father’s flawed offspring. Yet, I knew better.
“And what of my sin, Angel?”
“Pride, my child, the sin of Lucifer.” The angel lifted my chin with her shining hand. “You carry in your heart the Pride of Angels. It is your great glory and your great sorrow.”
It was not to my credit that her words pleased me. “Pride of Angels”—it sounded glorious. And yet, at the same time, I knew despair, for I recognized her pronouncement as true. My pride was like a great crown, stiff and unwieldy, keeping me from bending even when bending would serve me.
“What should I do?”
“Prospero is yet needed on the Earth. He must not be allowed to perish before his time. Recalling him with the Staff of Eternity will fail. Waste no time upon it. Go to him and bring him bodily from Hell. Between you and your siblings, you have all that is needed to succeed.”
I had expected more platitudes. This practical advice startled and cheered me. Could Father be saved? For the first time since Osae’s attack, hope rekindled in my heart.
“Is there anything we should know?”
“Only that no man is asked to give more than he is able,” the beautiful Virtue replied. “Yet oft’ men underestimate what it is within them to give. Give what is required, and your reward shall be greater than you can now imagine.”
Her words struck me as ominous, and yet, here in her presence, I could not recall exactly what fear felt like. I recalled that I often had a nervous feeling in my stomach and a tension in my shoulders, and that sometimes my heart beat rapidly . . . but I could not recall the exact sensation, or why it troubled me so much.
Once, I walked across a battlefield strewn with dead French soldiers in their handsome blue and white uniforms. I recalled stepping respectfully over their bodies, a handkerchief perfumed with lavender pressed against my nose to keep out the stink of rotting corpses. Everywhere was war and desolation, burnt cottages, ruined crops, the horrible, buglelike bellow of wounded horses.
Rounding around a broken supply cart, I came upon a stone church. The door hung open. I called out to the priest and entered. I do not remember what I was looking for—directions, perhaps, or clean water. I do not remember if I found it, or even if there was a priest present after all. What I do remember was the cloister.
After passing down the aisle through the dark pews, I stepped out the back door and into the walled garden that stood between the sanctuary and the rectory. A mosaic pebble path ran between two ponds upon which lotuses floated. Lily-of-the-valley grew around the ponds. A little wagtail wet its wings in a bird bath. The moss-covered walls rose to either side of me, blocking out all but the canapé of a tall birch.
I let my handkerchief fall to the pebbly path and breathed in the fresh earthy scent. Above, the sky was a pure and cloudless blue. I could hear no sound from outside the thick walls—no soldiers moaning; no weeping of wives, too recently widowed to have yet donned their black weeds; no beasts in pain—only the splashy flutter of a single blue-headed wagtail.
Standing there, amidst that island of serenity, I found I could no longer remember the war outside the wall. The beauty and tranquility here were so incongruous with the horror outside, that they could not both exist in the same universe. I could recall it, as if from a dream, but I could not really believe in it.
Once I stepped outside again and inhaled the smoke of burning flesh, it all came rushing back. So much so that the cloister was now the dream. And yet, it was a dream that would not fade, a dream that reminded me that even in the midst of devastation, peace still bloomed.
Speaking to the angel was like stepping again into that cloister and breathing once more the fragrant air within the shelter of its tall mossy walls.
“I will,” I vowed. “Whatever is required, I will accomplish.”
“One last thing, Child. Obedience is a virtue, and yet so is discernment. Angels have no free will for they partake of the Divine Word directly, but the children of men must learn to listen to the whisper of Divine Will within their hearts, that which men call wisdom. You were not meant to lean on your Father, or even Eurynome, forever.”
The fifth halo grew brighter, its golden glow warming me like sunlight. The more I basked in it—letting it spill into and illuminate the dark spaces in my mind—the more real it became to me, until the gold light seemed substantial, and the world around me faded like a dream. The stone of the balcony, the orchid-covered wall, and my room beyond all grew misty and indistinct, insubstantial. Glancing down, I experienced an instant of panicked vertigo, for the rock beneath my feet was fading, and I could see the sheer drop of the ravine beneath me. The instant passed, however, for I could not truly fear while I abided in the secret place of the angel’s radiance.
“I have stayed too long and must depart,” the angel said. “Your material world is too fragile to long sustain one of my high estate. It will fade like a dream should I stay longer. I must away before it vanishes altogether, as I wish no harm to those dwelling here within.”
The golden light of the fifth halo grew so bright I could hardly see anything else, and yet no matter how bright it became, it did not hurt my eyes. As the lovely form of the Virtue faded into pure gold, I heard her beautiful voice ring out one last time.
“Fear not, Child, for I am with thee always.”
Even after the heavenly glow was gone, I remained where I was, silently basking in the peace that remained in the wake of the angel’s visit. My heart felt so calm and filled with hope. The sorrow that had gripped me only minutes before seemed something of a forgotten age.
I knew it would return, that the peace brought by the angel would fade, and the agony would come again—the terrible loss of my Lady’s presence, the sorrow over Astreus’s fate, and the pain caused by our less-than-amicable parting. At the moment, however, all was peaceful, and the causes of my distress seemed as far away as the moon.
Returning inside, I glanced at the chessboard beside the h
earth to see that the black knight now threatened the white king. Peering closer revealed the check to be mate. My chuckle died in my throat, however, as, upon glancing up, I discovered the gift that had been granted my family.
Next to my fireplace, against the wall, rested a length of black wood marked with blood red runes. Whether by accident or design, Seir of the Shadows had left me Gregor’s staff.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Abandon All Hope, Ye . . .
“This has got to be the most cockamamie thing I’ve ever let you talk me into, Ma’am,” grumbled Mab.
“You didn’t have to come,” I reminded him.
“What, and let you all stomp off to face demons without a cautious voice among you?” Mab scoffed. “Might as well kill you myself, Ma’am. Besides, someone has to keep an eye on that accursed flute and make sure it doesn’t fall into the hands of the enemy after you Prosperos all perish horribly.”
We were, all of us, crawling on our hands and knees down a lightless, dusty passage. The tunnel began in the crate Mab, Mephisto, and I had found in the Maryland warehouse—the crate containing the gate through which Father had originally fallen into Hell. Mephisto and Mab had fetched it using Ulysses’s staff, and Theo had warded it in such a way as to keep ghouls and barghests from pouring out of it onto Father’s Island.
We had started out with flashlights and headlamps, but they failed after only a hundred feet or so. Gregor managed to suck up the palpable darkness into his staff, but we were still stuck crawling through darkness of the regular sort.
But none of this mattered to me. Finally, we were underway, all together. Nothing could stop us now.
“Please, Miranda,” came Ulysses’s voice from somewhere behind me. “It’s bad enough we are willfully crawling into Hell on your say-so. Can’t you keep your man from talking about our imminent demise?”
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