Angel-Seeker

by Sharon Shinn

  She gazed up at him with those dark eyes, an expression so intense on her face that he felt sure he should be able to read it. They were so close; nothing would be more natural than that he bend down and kiss those generous lips. He wanted to. He thought she might want that kiss as well. But he had transgressed so many boundaries with her already. He did not want to put her Jansai soul in mortal danger.

  A moment longer they watched each other, and then she pulled free, stepping away from him and putting her veils back in place. “I have to go,” she said. “They’re expecting me right away.”

  “Thank you for coming by,” he said quietly.

  “I had to get the water.”

  She knelt by her pile of belongings, organizing things, wrapping the baby closely in some fine white cloth, pulling out a small packet and laying it aside. “That’s for you,” she said over her shoulder. “Some bread and meat. I thought you would be hungry.”

  “I am. Thank you.”

  In a minute she was on her feet, laden down with several bundles and one brother. She looked smaller than usual but just as efficient. “It was an honor, angelo,” she said.

  “I’ll see you in Breven,” he replied.

  She said nothing in response to that, just settled her burdens more securely over her shoulders and took the first few paces away from the oasis. Obadiah stood there, watching her walk away, waiting for the moment when she would turn back one last time and wave a final farewell. But he stood there till the shimmering heat hid the contours of her body, while the sun made its slow crawl up the bowl of the sky, and she never once turned back to look at him.

  In the morning, he took off for Cedar Hills. His initial ascent was a little shaky, as he had not been able to achieve a running start, and both his wings felt cumbersome and ill-trained. Yet, here he was, airborne, and feeling more confident with every downstroke, though he kept low to the ground in case trouble developed. His head was not entirely clear, and he felt a certain shivery weakness along his nerves and muscles—a consequence of too little food or too little exercise, he was not sure. But he could not lie helplessly in the desert one more day, especially when there would be no one arriving to offer him succor. He would rather die in the attempt to get home than die from lack of trying.

  The day was fine, although—as long as he flew over sand—hot enough to be uncomfortable, especially at this low altitude. But he thought it might take him only an hour or two to get clear of the desert, and he would be better off then, even if he had to land and make camp for the night. He would be in the soft, green hills of southern Jordana, and any man could survive in that terrain.

  The first hour passed slowly, almost tentatively, and Obadiah was conscious of every beat and lift of his wings. The sultry wind in his face made it hard to breathe, and rather soon he began to fear he might not have enough water in his canteen to slake his constant thirst. But the second hour was better. He felt strong enough to cut upward into a cooler layer of air, and his wings had resumed their usual steady, unconscious rhythm. And there, ahead of him, shades of green bordering the endless gold mantle of the sand. He was nearly to safety, nearly home.

  Crossing out of the desert made him so happy he felt a burst of energy surge through him, and he increased both his speed and his altitude. The farms and pastures of Jordana spread out below him, cool and inviting and veined with small, silver streams. He was more accustomed to flying over Bethel, but here in the southern territories, the landscape looked much the same. He felt so good that he decided against making a noontime stop, just digging out the last of Rebekah’s bread and munching on it as he flew.

  But somewhere he had miscalculated. About an hour later, he felt a wave of dizziness cause his wings to falter and his head to swim. He angled downward precipitously, hoping a denser oxygen mix would clear his brain, but the opposite happened; his vision grew more blurred and an intense pressure started building up between his ears. It was all he could do to concentrate enough to keep his wings beating, to guess how rapidly the earth was rising up to meet him, and to slow his descent.

  But he had miscalculated again. An errant breeze rushed by him, playfully as a child, and turned him in a half circle from his path. Normally he would have compensated for such a wind without a second thought, but at this moment he was so weak and so faint that he could not correct his course. He felt his wings flutter and his arms flail, and he tumbled the last few yards from the sky onto the ground.

  Chapter Nine

  It was not so easy as Elizabeth had hoped to make friends with an angel.

  It wasn’t that they were hard to find. They were all over Cedar Hills, cluttering the skies with their great white wings and filling the shops and restaurants with their musical voices and their distinctive shapes. She was reminded of a visit she and her mother had made once to some obscure family connection, an old woman who had had a fondness for cats. The whole house was full of them, and you could not step into a room without your eyes automatically seeking them out: one on the bookshelf, two on the sofa, three in the corners of the room licking their paws or curled up in sleek elegance to sleep away the afternoon. It was like that at Cedar Hills. You could not turn a corner without seeing an angel.

  But the angels had even less interest in random humans than the cats had had. They did not step forward to be petted or fed; they did not even seem to notice that they shared their world with another species of life altogether. They just continued on their way, arrogant and beautiful, and filled Elizabeth’s whole being with longing and desire.

  She wanted to be just that gorgeous, just that careless, just that exquisite and divine. And if she could not be an angel, she wanted to touch one, put her thin arms around a man’s chest and feel the silken fabric of his wings as her hands met behind his back.

  So far, she had not succeeded in this plan, and she had been at Cedar Hills for nearly a month.

  She had fretted over just exactly what she would tell Bennie when she announced that she was not returning with him to James’s farm. But it turned out that Bennie was way ahead of her. They had not driven half a mile down the miraculous streets of Cedar Hills before he gestured at a little side street they were on the point of passing.

  “There’s a woman down there, owns a boardinghouse. She’ll take you in if you tell her I sent you,” he said.

  Elizabeth had looked at him with wide eyes. “She’ll—take me in? But I—how did you—”

  He had given her that rakish grin, and she reflected, not for the first time, that he was a nicer man than she had given him credit for, back when they both lived on the farm. “No girl runs off with a man she scarcely knows if she’s planning to run back home,” he said.

  “What will you tell Angeletta?”

  “Oh, I think she’ll have figured it out on her own by now.”

  She studied him. “I don’t want you to get in trouble over this,” she said at last. “I don’t want you to be fired.”

  He shrugged and grinned. “Not a job I love so much that I’ll mind it if they let me go,” he said. “Don’t you worry about me. It’s you that you should be thinking about. Tola will give you a place to stay for a day or two, but you’ll be needing money soon enough.”

  Elizabeth sat up proudly on her side of the bench. “I can work,” she said. “I can cook or clean.”

  “And you’re a beautiful girl who might find a different kind of work in pleasing men,” he said, much more seriously than she’d ever heard him speak. “But take my advice, if you’d value something so worthless from such a feckless man. Never be so bent on pleasing a man that you forget you need to please yourself as well.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  He sighed. “Well, you do, but I guess I can’t expect you to admit it. Good-bye and good luck, Elizabeth. I enjoyed the trip with you, and that’s the truth. I hope you find what you’re looking for in Cedar Hills.”

  “Good-bye,” she said, and then hesitated. He had pulle
d the wagon to the side of the road so she could hop out easily, and she already had one foot perched on the rim of the wagon. But she felt that she owed this man something more for all the kindnesses he had shown her on this weary journey. “I can’t repay you for all you’ve done,” she said.

  He grinned easily. “Ah, I don’t need coins. You’ll repay me by finding happiness.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. She felt the roughness of his whiskers and the firmness of his lips, and for just a moment, his hand lifted and brushed the hair on the back of her head. Then she pulled away and gave him a straight look. He was smiling again.

  “There. That’s all the payment a man could ask,” he said. “Now grab your bags and go. I’ve got chores of my own to get to today.”

  That had been more than three weeks ago, and she had not seen Bennie since. She hadn’t, truth to tell, thought about him more than once or twice in all that time, either. She was too busy figuring out the demands and duties of her new life.

  Tola had proved to be a friend indeed, not only taking Elizabeth in and providing her a place to stay, but helping her find a job within three days of her arrival at Cedar Hills. Tola was a stout, no-nonsense, gray-haired woman in her late fifties, and she ran a boardinghouse that at the moment was home to a dozen other young women, all come to Cedar Hills to make their fortunes. Elizabeth was a little shocked, at first, to hear how openly the other girls talked about their goals and desires—which were, almost universally, to find an angel lover and bear his angel child. They discussed the venues where they were most likely to encounter an angel, the clothing that might be counted upon to catch an angel’s eyes, and where a girl and her angel lover might find the necessary privacy.

  Because angels were not permitted in Tola’s place. “For I don’t run a whorehouse, no matter what anyone might say,” she commented once. “I provide a place for young girls to live, because someone’s got to offer them a safe bed at night, and it’s not up to me to tell them how to run their lives. If they want to chase after anyone with wings, who am I to stop them? But they won’t be carrying on inside my house. Angels or no angels.”

  In fact, Elizabeth learned to her astonishment, Tola had a low opinion of angels in general, and of certain Cedar Hills angels in particular. If she heard one of the girls in her boardinghouse waxing enthusiastic over David’s wings or Stephen’s eyes, Tola would make a hrummphing sound, and everyone would know that David or Stephen had found a way to earn Tola’s contempt. This didn’t stop the girls from pursuing David or Stephen, or even from talking about them in Tola’s hearing. Nothing, Elizabeth soon realized, could keep these girls from talking madly about the angels.

  “He spoke to me!” Faith breathed one day as they all sat down to dinner. Faith, who was tall and thin and wore her light brown hair fashionably short, was a lively and well-liked girl who could not have been more than eighteen. “I was in the shop, and Nathan came in and spoke to me!”

  “Huh. Nathan. He’s kind enough to everyone, but he won’t look at a girl like you,” said Ruth, a plump, dark-haired girl with a wicked tongue. “He won’t look at anyone except Magdalena.”

  “Everyone looks away from his wife from time to time,” purred Shiloh. She was statuesque, blonde, and poisonous, and they all hated her. “Even the saintly Nathan.”

  “No, he won’t!” Faith said hotly. She had a grand passion for the leader of the host at Cedar Hills, but it was a pure sort of love. She desperately wanted to believe that he would be true forever to his angelic wife, because that meant, someday, when she found him, a loving angel might be true to her. “He loves Magdalena! He was allowed to marry her by a special dispensation of the god! He would not betray Jovah by betraying his wife.”

  “Not even Jovah would consider it a betrayal if a little indiscretion on Nathan’s part brought another angel child into the world,” Shiloh said cynically.

  “Yes, but Magdalena would!”

  “Then why doesn’t she bear him an angel child herself?”

  The argument was quickly under way, but Elizabeth ignored it. She had heard it, or variations of it, ever since she had first moved into Tola’s house. Faith was in love with Nathan but actively pursuing an angel called Abraham; Ruth spoke rapturously of an angel named Matthew; Shiloh had managed to “enjoy liaisons,” as she put it, with two angels, but nothing had come of these trysts. Well, to put it bluntly, she had not gotten pregnant. Which was what all of these girls wanted—to become pregnant with an angel child.

  It was what Elizabeth herself wanted, even more fervently now that she was actually here in Cedar Hills. But somehow, now that she was here, the goal seemed both more desirable and less romantic. More like a job—one she could actually get, since she was qualified for it—and less like the misty dreams of her sleepless nights at her cousin’s farm.

  To bear an angel child! It was an event that would not only reshape her world, but cause the whole of Cedar Hills to dance with celebration. This Elizabeth had learned in her first three days here. Since the founding of the hold, only two angels had been born to the citizens there—only two, and so many angels were so desperately wanted. One of them had been born to a boarder at Tola’s house, and Elizabeth had heard that tale over and over in the weeks since she had arrived. Magdalena had been informed of the pregnancy, of course; that, it appeared, was standard procedure any time there was the possibility of an angel birth. When the girl had gone into a harsh and difficult labor, Magdalena had come by the house in a swirl of scented silks and fluttering feathers, to check on her progress.

  She had not been there when, screaming and bloody, the girl had delivered herself of an angel child, a boy, half-smothered in his own wings and furious at his violent passage into the world. He had survived; his mother had not. Magdalena had reappeared minutes after the child was born and swept him away with her to be raised by angels, and none of them had ever seen him or had word of him again.

  But the death of one of their own—that had shocked the inhabitants of the boardinghouse down to their brightly painted toenails. To come so close to the dream that you died attaining it! It had not occurred to any of them that their own roads could lead to such destruction. It had not occurred to them how high the price might be to finance their dearest desires.

  They knew about the other potential costs and factored these into their calculations. They knew that they were five or ten times as likely to bear a human child as to bear an angel child, even if they took no lover but an angel. They knew that there was not much market for such children in Cedar Hills or elsewhere. There were already two orphanages in Cedar Hills, overflowing with children barely a year old, born to the residents of the new hold but missing a crucial feature. Other babies mysteriously vanished, taken home to farm families who were willing to feed an extra mouth, or a sister in one of the river cities whose own child had died just the year before.

  Or so the stories went. Sometimes a woman disappeared with her infant one week and reappeared without it the next, and no one could say with certainty where she had deposited the child. No one inquired too closely. No one knew what her own fate might hold, what her own decision might be if such a disastrous event unfolded.

  Two such situations had developed at Tola’s boardinghouse in just the last year. One of the young women had left the house with her newborn daughter in her arms, never to return to Cedar Hills. The other one, a quiet, intense girl, had gone to visit relatives and reappeared three days later unburdened by a child. Neither Tola nor anyone else had asked about the details.

  Elizabeth could not imagine what she would do if such a calamity befell her. But she was sure it would not. She had come to Cedar Hills to make her fortune, and she had to believe she would succeed. She would meet an angel, and he would love her, and he would love her even more when she bore him angelic daughter after angelic son. Her heart was set on it.

  Still, she had not made much progress since her arrival.

&nbs
p; Tola had found her an empty bed, and Tola had arranged a job for her doing laundry at one of the angel dorms. It was hot, wet, heavy work, and Elizabeth did not care for it much, despite the proximity of angels. She did not appear to her best advantage with her face flushed from heat and the front of her gown smeared with soap. Besides, not all the angels made a point of delivering their dirty clothes personally to the laundry room. Some just left their sheets and shirts piled up in cascades of linen outside the doors to their rooms, and it was one of Elizabeth’s duties to walk down the hallways every day and see what kinds of messes had been left behind.

  She would much rather have a job like Faith’s and work in a bakery, selling bread and waiting on all kinds of customers. But Faith shook her head when Elizabeth said so in a grumbling voice. Faith was her roommate, and the only person in the dorm that Elizabeth truly liked.

  “Oh, no! The bakery’s a dreary sort of place to work,” Faith said. “Well, first, of course, I have to be there so early in the morning so we can get the bread started. And then I’m stuck back by the ovens most of the day. It’s so hot, you wouldn’t believe it. I only get to wait on customers out front if somebody else is gone on an errand, and even then you can imagine how I look, my face red and flour all in my hair. Not very attractive.”

  Elizabeth laughed. “But then, who does have the best job? And how can we get it?”

  “Yours isn’t so bad, you know. You have a chance to—” Faith paused delicately. “To see angels in their most intimate surroundings. You could casually step into someone’s room someday, while he was still sleeping, or at least lying in bed. . . .”

  Elizabeth laughed again. This had never occurred to her. “And say what to him? ‘Oh, I accidentally unlocked your door’?”

  “Oh, you say you thought he was gone and it was the day to strip his sheets. Make sure you find out ahead of time, of course, who exactly lives in that room! You wouldn’t want to walk in on Calah or Lael or one of the other women.”