Angel's Truth (Angelwar Book 1)

by A. J. Grimmelhaus

‘If you’ve finished playing nurse?’

  Tol glared at her. ‘Looks like open ground between here and Mosswood. I don’t fancy lugging you half the way because you’re too proud to accept help.’ He stood and offered his hand. Kalashadria peered up at him for a moment, slowly accepting the offered hand with a wry smile and letting Tol haul her upright. She barely weighed anything at all.

  ‘You don’t suffer fools, do you?’

  He laughed. ‘Seems like lately it’s me that’s been the fool. First I fall off a mountain, then I walk straight into a bunch of mercenaries and only get away because of some foreign woman who didn’t want their attentions. To make matters worse, I tell her part of what’s going on, only to find she’s a bloody Sudalrese spy. Oh, and then I get a convent full of nuns killed because I couldn’t convince them to leave.’ Tol shook his head. ‘And that’s not even mentioning the fast-freeze I blundered into, the ambush in Karnvost that I nearly ran into without a moment’s thought. Oh, and breaking into the Duke’s castle to save some bloody noblewoman from assassins when I should have been running east as fast I could.’ He sighed. ‘And now I’ve gone and got a bloody angel killed trying to save my own skin.’ He scowled at Kalashadria. ‘Any part of that which doesn’t sound stupid?’

  The angel cocked her head to one side. ‘No, that sounds like a fair assessment.’

  Tol grunted, and turned on his heel, stopping as an iron vice clamped around his bicep. ‘But you are still alive,’ she told him, ‘and from what you have told me, I think that many would have been caught or given up by now.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he muttered.

  ‘But let’s try not to do anything stupid today, okay?’

  Tol smiled despite himself. ‘I can’t make any promises.’

  41.

  Renewed after a fitful sleep, the angel set a faster pace in the last hours before dawn, her jaw clamped shut as she pushed herself across the wilds of central Norve. She did not speak, nor even look at Tol, her attention solely on keeping one foot in front of the other. For his part, Tol found himself again snatching glances at his travelling companion. Even in the dark, and mortally wounded, she was still a breathtaking sight to behold, a creature of legend not seen for two centuries. Tol had never imagined meeting an angel, not even in his most creative dreams, but he found the experience disappointingly underwhelming, and one that left him with more questions than answers – so many questions he didn’t know where to begin. He sighed softly, knowing she would tell him in her own time or not at all. And she doesn’t have much time left. Her skin was as grey as the pre-dawn light, and those long, loping strides had long ago slowed to unsteady steps. Soon, he knew. Tol hoped Kalashadria would last until the mountain pass, but her condition was worsening with each passing league. What do you say to a dying angel? What would he want to hear in her place? Should he tell her of the potential cure? It was a risk, he knew, with stakes higher than any game ever played.

  ‘I come from a small island to the east,’ he told her. ‘I was happy for a while, running through the woods and climbing trees. I even had friends – for a while.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘History.’ Tol adjusted his pack. ‘One day my friends stopped being friends and started being enemies. The woods were no longer a playground but a hiding place, a battleground. I was so young, I didn’t understand for the longest time. Eventually my father told me the tale of Galandor’s defence, of the seven knights who stood over him and slew a demon, and my ancestor – the man who killed the demon-slayer. And then I understood.’

  ‘A difficult lesson for a young boy.’

  ‘I had one friend. Her name was Vixen, and she stood by me, fighting by my side against boys twice our size. We were inseparable… and then, suddenly, we weren’t.’ He was quiet a moment. ‘I’ve been alone ever since.’ Tol laughed bitterly. ‘The worst of it was that on my ninth birthday my father sent me to Icepeak to learn the arts of war and perhaps one day become a knight. I – I thought it would be different.’

  ‘But it wasn’t?’ Kalashadria asked gently.

  ‘Oh, it was different all right; more boys, bigger boys, and no place to hide – a nightmare rather than the dream I imagined on the journey. The mercenaries that are after me, they’re just bigger boys.’

  ‘With swords.’

  ‘With swords,’ he agreed.

  The first rays of dawn were threatening to crest the mountains now, a faint orange hue caressing the lower peaks.

  ‘I had a home once,’ Kalashadria told him as they walked towards the distant glow, ‘though I barely remember it, it was so long ago.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Once it was a beautiful world, though I remember so little of it as it was then – the sky gardens of Kia Vanetria, the waterfall at Skyfe, and the Glass Palace with the corchuca vines that grew up its delicious curved stairwells, reaching skywards and brushing the seven-pointed minarets that caught the sunlight and sent it darting through the halls like a snake.’ She sighed. ‘Vague, watercolour memories. Mostly I remember my home as it was during the last days of war, burned and blackened and befouled.’ She looked at Tol, and he shrank back at the bitterness behind her eyes, eyes that suddenly looked so very old. ‘The war lasted for decades, and both sides lost.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘We destroyed our world.’ Tol thought Kalashadria finished, but after a moment she continued, ‘Yet even that was not enough. Only a few thousand survived on each side, but still no peace could be reached – nor can it ever – and so we fled our world and carried our war to the stars.’

  ‘You can fly among the stars? Truly?’

  ‘Not unaided, no. The space between worlds has no air, and even my kind cannot survive long without breathing – a short time at most, and only then with our ears, eyes and noses closed.’

  Tol laughed. ‘You can’t close your ears, you’re teasing me.’

  Kalashadria grabbed him. ‘Look.’ She pulled a strand of hair over her ear and thrust the side of her head close to his face. Tol gasped as he saw a tiny membrane within her ear slide across, the inner ear safely ensconced behind it.

  The angel stepped away, peering down scornfully at Tol, a silent reprimand for his disbelief. ‘That’s pretty neat,’ he admitted. He thought for a moment then said, ‘I can hit an apple from thirty paces. With a dagger,’ he added.

  ‘How wonderful for you. It is not quite the same thing, though.’

  ‘Okay,’ Tol sighed, ‘you win.’

  ‘I was not aware there was a contest,’ Kalashadria replied shortly, turning away and resuming her slow march towards Mosswood.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Tol murmured, setting off after her.

  ‘I can still hear you,’ the angel called over her shoulder.

  Tol cursed – but quieter. Good to know, he decided, although how knowing the range of an angel’s hearing could be any use utterly eluded him. Still, as the abbot often said, knowledge is a weapon, and sometimes one piece of knowledge could mean the difference between life death. And it was the little things, the abbot had told the boys, that often made the difference: what hour the guards changed, when the men broke their fast, which way the wind was blowing. For once, Tol hadn’t been the only one to doubt the abbot, and the old man had proceeded to recite a litany of battles turned by titbits of information so small and so unremarkable that most men would simply ignore them: the Serrian attack on Viralla, where the Meracian sheep were herded into their path, slowing their advance enough that the defenders slew half their force with arrows; the Olgarisi reavers who drove deep into eastern Meracia, undone by a dawn assault that would have succeeded if not for occurring on the morning of a village feast, the people reacting quickly enough to muster a defence until relief arrived and shattered the Olgarisi force. And, of course, the battle at the gates of Galantrium where seven knights and an angel had turned the course of the battle, the war, and history itself.

  Tol caught up with her in a few long strides. So beautiful, but so cold and
distant. And so utterly alien. Kalashadria spoke of other worlds, of destruction so vast and terrible as to be incomprehensible, and spoke of it in such a way as though it was the kind of casual conversation that two strangers might share in a tavern – mundane, and ordinary, unremarkable. But it is anything but that.

  ‘We have something in common.’

  Tol heard the angel sigh softly, a flicker of annoyance crossing her pale face. She saved me, he reminded himself, but not out of charity or because of my quest. Only because it served her own ends.

  ‘We are not alike.’ She glanced over at him then, something akin to pity briefly flaring in her eyes as Tol’s face fell. ‘Very well,’ she sighed, ‘what is it we have in common?’

  Tol didn’t know how the angel managed it, but even that question was delivered with such casual disregard that it was plain the answer was of little or less interest. She looked down on him as if she saw his words as a feeble ploy to engage her in conversation, to find some kind of common ground, or perhaps just to hear her voice. And the worst part, he thought, is she’s right.

  ‘Seems like life dealt us both a bad hand,’ Tol said, staring straight ahead. He grunted, amused at what he realised was a pathetic attempt to gain her trust or friendship. We are so different that always she will lead and I will follow; the master and the slave. ‘Of course, I reckon you win in the who’s-had-it-worse stakes, can’t really get worse than losing your world.’

  Kalashadria chuckled quietly, though it held little mirth. She exhaled slowly, a snatched glance showing her face return to its usual unreadable mask. ‘You talk of winning, yet there are no winners in life. Some just lose more than others.’

  And you lost everything. He didn’t say it, but knew Kalashadria was thinking it too, the silence as uncomfortable as any he had known. ‘How do you cope with it? Maybe it doesn’t seem much to you, but I’m hated by near everyone I meet. When I was younger it was just beatings, but now it seems everyone I meet wants me dead. All because an ancestor did a terrible thing…’ Tol shook his head. ‘Sometimes the anger’s unbearable,’ he said quietly. ‘Surely it must feel the same for you?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Kalashadria admitted, her voice almost drowned by the chill pre-dawn breeze. ‘But it does no good to hold onto such feelings. Let it consume you and you will end up no different to the foul creature that hunts you.’ The angel stopped, turning to face Tol as he halted. Her eyes were mesmerising, windows into a pain the depth of which he could scarcely imagine. ‘There are many things beyond our control, many events we cannot change,’ she told him, ‘but there are many which we can affect; decisions large and small that can bring happiness or sorrow, save a life or end one. It is those decisions that define us, Tol Kraven, and it is in those which we may find joy or peace if we but take the time to look.’

  Tol grunted, a wry half-smile plastered across his face. ‘You sound like Katarina. The spy,’ he explained. ‘She saved my life.’

  ‘A smart woman.’

  Kalashadria turned away, but Tol placed a hand on her shoulder, surprised it brought forth no anger, merely a raised eyebrow at his imposition. ‘How do you do it? Let go of the anger, I mean.’

  She smiled sadly. ‘I am still learning.’ She gently prised Tol’s hand from her shoulder. ‘We should get moving,’ Kalashadria said. ‘Dawn is almost upon us.’

  They had gone no more than a dozen paces when Kalashadria muttered something under her breath in a strange tongue.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘People coming this way, two of them.’

  Tol peered ahead into the gloom, but couldn’t see anything, remembering just as he opened his mouth that the angel reacted poorly to any doubting of her claims. Kalashadria shivered as a sudden gust of wind struck them from the east, her hair fanning out behind her like a peacock’s plumage.

  ‘We will cross paths before we reach the forest.’

  Tol removed his furs, standing on tiptoe and wrapping them round the angel’s shoulders.

  ‘I am not cold,’ she said as Tol tried to hide the curve of her wings beneath the fur. Three times he tried, but still a small snatch of feathers poked up over Kalashadria’s shoulders.

  ‘Thought it might help disguise you,’ Tol said. He looked away when her head twisted towards him, adjusting his sword belt and checking the scabbard while carefully avoiding eye contact. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘they’ll slow me down if it comes to a fight.’

  ‘An adult and a child pose little threat,’ Kalashadria said, her tone dry. ‘At least to me.’

  ‘Could be assassins.’

  ‘I hardly think so.’

  The abbot would be turning in his grave to hear such disdain, Tol thought. The old man had harboured quite firm views on assassins, and had shared them with his students on many occasions. ‘The best assassins are the ones you don’t suspect till it’s too late,’ Tol said, remembering the old man’s words.

  ‘The best assassins are the dead ones.’

  He used to say that, too.

  *

  They crossed paths as Kalashadria had predicted, a farmer and his son heading north-west, loaded with goods for market, and Tol and Kalashadria stumbling north-east, the edge of Mosswood less than a thousand yards away. The farmer had one hand clamped on his son’s shoulder, perhaps fearing bandits, but it fell away as he got a clear look at Kalashadria, his weather-beaten face twisting to confusion then fear before slipping into slack-jawed wonder. The hemp sack of goods fell to the ground, the farmer following it a second later, prostrating himself in front of Tol and the angel and pulling his son down to the earth beside him.

  ‘My lady,’ he croaked, head tilted down, hands clasped in front of him in supplication. ‘Has the Maker sent you for Helen? Is she bound for Heaven?’

  Tol saw the confusion etched on the angel’s features, and felt relieved the farmer and his son kept their eyes downturned. Enough dreams have been shattered the last few days, he thought.

  Kalashadria found her voice, and even buried under his furs she still looked regal, majestic. ‘Rise,’ she told the farmer. ‘Who is Helen?’

  ‘My lady?’ The farmer remained on his knees, though he did at least look up. ‘Helen is my wife. Is it not her time? The Maker will grant her entry, will he not? Surely—’ He broke off, cheeks colouring as he just managed to stop himself short of questioning one of the Maker’s angels.

  ‘That is not why we are here,’ Tol said gently. ‘Is your wife ill?’

  The man nodded, relieved his near-mistake was to be forgotten. ‘She sickened a week ago,’ the farmer explained. ‘The boy and I are going to Wood’s Farrow… Can’t afford a healer, even if I sell this lot at the market, but maybe he’ll accept food for his services.’

  Not likely, Tol thought. Judging by the farmer’s tone, he knew it, too.

  The farmer finally looked at Kalashadria. ‘If you’re not here to collect her, m’lady… can you help her, cure her?

  ‘No.’

  The farmer nodded and his head down again. ‘Had to ask, m’lady.’

  ‘I am not an adept healer,’ Kalashadria said, shifting slightly.

  ‘We are on dire business,’ Tol added, coming to her rescue. Though I’m sure she won’t thank me for it. ‘We are pursued by a demon.’ The icy morning wind suddenly gusted, Kalashadria’s furs flapping open to reveal her bandaged torso. ‘Were we to visit your wife, I fear we would only bring death to your family,’ Tol said as the farmer’s eyes widened, his mouth falling open as he saw the extent of Kalashadria’s injuries.

  ‘My lady, I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I did not know you were injured yourself. Please forgive me.’

  ‘We must be on our way,’ Tol said, stepping forward and pulling the man to his feet. He withdrew his purse and extracted two silver ducals. I guess I won’t need it for much longer. Tol kept the two coins and handed over the purse to the farmer. ‘That should pay for a healer,’ he said, squirming as the farmer thanked him profusely. ‘If the man says leeches are th
e cure, pay him not a penny; such men are charlatans.’

  The farmer nodded, tears in his eyes as he helped his son to his feet. ‘Thank you, sir knight. May I know your name?’

  ‘Tol Kraven.’

  The farmer looked from Tol to Kalashadria and back again. ‘Then you must be blessed indeed,’ he muttered, picking up his wares and preparing to leave the pair. ‘And you, my lady? Might I know the name of the angel who has brought hope to my family?’

  ‘Kalashadria,’ she replied, frowning as she peered down at the man.

  ‘Kalashadria,’ the farmer murmured reverently. ‘Oh, how blessed we are.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Last child of the angels… You remember, Karl?’

  The boy swallowed, his voice sounding frail in the mounting wind. ‘Unaligned, Kalashadria holds the key to Heaven, the Maker’s own daughter, her countenance as yet unchosen.’

  The farmer patted his son on the shoulder. ‘Fare well, noble Kalashadria, you will be in our prayers every night.’ The farmer began backing away, drawing his son with him and bowing as he went.

  ‘Wait,’ Tol called. There’s no way they won’t tell the first person they see that they saw an angel. And I can’t say I blame them. ‘When you tell people of what happened here today, say that we were heading south.’

  ‘Yes, Sir Tol.’

  I like the sound of that. ‘And if any man with cold eyes asks again, tell him we are striking east for Kron Vulder.’

  The farmer nodded once, then resumed his sedate retreat.

  Kalashadria stared after him, her cheeks ruddy, face angry as an infected wound. ‘Those words,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘They had the feel of something learned by rote. Explain.’

  Tol stared after the departing pair, distant memories of his unenthusiastic tutelage returning. How could I have forgotten? Kalashadria was not just an angel – though that was wondrous enough – but the daughter of the Maker himself. She thumped his shoulder as a none-too-gentle reminder, and Tol reluctantly turned his attention back to his companion.