Angel-Seeker

by Sharon Shinn

  “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned that,” she said. “What is the Gathering?”

  His face lit up. “Only the most important event to occur on Samarian soil every year.”

  “That would be the Gloria,” she said primly.

  He laughed. “Or so the angels would have us believe! No, the Gathering is far more significant, to my way of thinking. It’s when all the clans come together for a few days to one great campsite, and renew old friendships and forge fresh ones, and sing their histories to each other, and celebrate the births and mourn the deaths. It is a time for connection and rejoicing. It is a time to remember what it truly means to be an Edori.”

  “And when is this held?”

  “Just as winter is grudgingly giving way to spring, about a month before the Gloria that the angels brag of so often.”

  She grinned. Samaria would not endure without the annual observance of the Gloria; it was something the god demanded of his people, to come together once a year to honor him and prove their harmony with each other. This Gathering might be a delightful event, but it could not eclipse the Gloria in true importance.

  “Where is it held? On the Plain of Sharon, like the Gloria?”

  “Certainly not,” he said, affecting horror. “To go to the same spot, year after year, like habitual creatures with no sense of adventure? The Edori would not do such a thing. They are wanderers with souls that cannot stay still. We choose a different place every year.”

  “So where is the event to be this year?” she asked patiently. She had heard Mary and Tola complain about the difficulty of getting a clear answer from an Edori, and she was just now beginning to realize what they might have meant.

  He waved a hand, apparently meant to indicate a northeasterly direction. “On the coastline just above the northern edge of the desert.”

  She was not good with geography. “Show me.”

  So he spilled salt on the table and used his finger to draw a map: the eastern coast, the ragged oval of the desert, the long spine of mountains stretching down from the Caitanas. He placed an olive on the right-hand side of his composition. “Breven,” he said. A fruit seed was laid an inch above it, indicating a distance of many miles. “The Gathering.”

  She studied it. “That’s a good five-day trip from here,” she guessed.

  He nodded. “And that’s assuming your horses are sound and the weather holds true.”

  “So are you going? It’s only a few weeks away.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You’re not going,” she said. “Why not?”

  He shrugged. His fingers swept lightly through the granules of salt, erasing the mountains and the cities. “I have a job, and I’ve grown fond of the money. To be gone two weeks when a man is counting on you—that’s not very responsible.”

  “Well, but if you told him you were leaving and that you’d like to return to him when you got back—”

  Rufus shrugged again. “He’d probably allow it. He’s a thoughtful man. All the workers like him.”

  “So?”

  “So?” he mocked.

  “So what are your other reasons for not going?”

  “Oh, it’s a long trip and I haven’t traveled so far on my own since I was—well, ever, really. I was young when I was taken from the people. I can make a fire and find water and catch game, of course, but I don’t want to travel so far alone.”

  “There are other Edori in Cedar Hills,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll bet some of them are going to the Gathering.”

  A small smile lit behind the dark eyes, warming them considerably. “Yes, you’re right about that as well.”

  “So? Other reasons?”

  “It’s been a long time since I was among my people,” he said softly. “All those from my own tribe are dead.”

  “You told me all Edori are clan.”

  He nodded. “Yes, but would there be any among the other tribes to recognize me? To call out my name and invite me to sleep in their tents? It would be a hard thing to travel so far looking for kin and then find none but strangers.”

  “So you’re afraid to go,” she said.

  He gave her another tiny smile. “It sounds harsh put in just that way.”

  “Afraid to be turned away. Afraid not to be welcomed by the people who should love you.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” he said. “Just the situation you described a little earlier this evening.”

  “Oh, not just the same,” she assured him. “If I had thought there was anyone in the three provinces who might—might possibly, had the barest chance of welcoming me—I would have run to that city so fast you would not have been able to see me for the cloud of dust I raised. But there was no one who wanted to take me in.”

  “Your cousin.”

  “Take me in and love me,” she amended.

  “I might go next year,” he said.

  “What will be different next year?”

  He laughed. “The Gathering will be longer than a few weeks away and I’ll have more time to think about it!”

  “I think you should go now,” she said.

  “And be gone from you for two whole weeks?” he said, his voice light. “It would seem too long.”

  “I don’t think you should include me in any of your future calculations,” she said sternly, but she could not keep the smile from playing around her mouth.

  “Oh, but I do,” he said, laughing at her. “And I don’t think there’s going to be much I can do about that.”

  When they were finally bored with sitting at the table, they paid their bill and headed back outside. The air was bitter now, a frigid wind blowing straight down from the Heldoras, and the night sky was frosty with stars. Two steps from the cafe door and suddenly Elizabeth felt all her weariness rush back and lodge itself in her feet, her lungs, her eyes.

  “I had so much fun tonight,” she told Rufus. “But I have to go home now. I’m so tired.”

  “And I’m the scoundrel for keeping you out so late when I knew you scarcely had the strength to stand,” he said remorsefully. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

  “Oh, don’t bother, I walk alone all the time in Cedar Hills.”

  “I’ll take you home,” he repeated, and put an arm around her shoulder. “It’s not that I worry about the danger to your person, it’s that I’d like the last five minutes of your conversation.”

  She yawned and then laughed. “I don’t think my conversation will repay you very well right now. I can hardly think.”

  “Your company, then.”

  So they walked in silence, briskly because of the cold, though Elizabeth was too tired to really hurry. She was both glad and sorry when the boardinghouse came into view.

  “This is me. That’s my window there. See it? With the blue curtains. I wonder if Faith is still awake.”

  “If she is, you’ll have a great deal to tell her about the details of your day.”

  She smiled up at him. Outside at night, his dark face was even harder to read. “It was good to see you again, Rufus.”

  “So, then, dinner tomorrow night?” he asked casually.

  She had to laugh. “Do you think I have every night free for dinner with you?”

  “I didn’t ask for every night. Tonight and tomorrow,” he protested. “It’s true that tomorrow I might ask for the night after that—but I might not. You never know.”

  “Tomorrow night will be fine.”

  Dark as it was, she could see the smile appear on his face and quickly vanish. “Till then,” he said, and bent to kiss her on her cheek. He waited until she stepped inside the door and shut it behind her.

  For a moment she stood there, back to the door, hand to her face, feeling astonishment tingle along her veins. She could not remember the last man who had given her a salute so tender, so undemanding. Her father, perhaps, when she was a very little girl. She could not even remember the last time she had kissed a man on the mouth when she was not planning on immediately going to
bed with him. She wasn’t sure she’d realized such a thing was possible—affection—or how greedily she might snatch up such a treasure once it was offered.

  She moved slowly through the hall and common rooms, absentmindedly greeting the few people she passed, and just as slowly climbed the stairs. She was not sure how much she would tell Faith. She might have to think over all the events of the evening, of the day, before she would be able to share them.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  There was never a moment’s privacy to tell Martha what had happened. On the trip back from gathering reskel roots, Martha’s mother insisted that the younger girls ride with her.

  “I never get a chance to talk to you, Rebekah, and soon you’ll be leaving us,” the older woman complained. “Sit here beside me and tell me about your wedding.”

  There was nothing Rebekah was less interested in discussing at this moment than her wedding. “I have not really been consulted on most of the details. You’d be better off to ask my mother,” Rebekah heard herself say. Her voice sounded a little thin, but that might be the effect of the desert air, so icy this morning that you could almost snap the willful little breezes between your fingers. Almost anyone would assume she was behaving quite normally.

  “Tell me about your dress, then. What color are you wearing? How will you style your hair? Do you plan to marry in the morning? I prefer afternoon ceremonies myself. Otherwise there’s so much time to sit around all day, worrying about what comes with the night.”

  “I don’t think Rebekah’s too worried about her wedding night, Mother,” Martha said, sneaking a sidelong look at her cousin.

  “No, I’m sure Jerusha has prepared you well enough for that,” the older woman said. “But it’s just that, after the meal is eaten and the toasts are drunk and everybody goes away, it’s just so awkward to sit around staring at your new husband and just wondering. Better to get it over with right away, that’s what I say. We’ll plan Martha’s wedding for very late in the afternoon, I promise you that.”

  “And is Martha getting married any time soon?” Rebekah asked politely.

  Ezra, sitting on the driver’s seat and only half-listening, gave a snort of laughter at that. “She’ll be married soon enough, don’t you be worried about her,” he said. “I have a couple of husbands in mind.”

  “I think I’m only allowed one,” Martha said.

  Her father laughed again. “I’m going to choose the best one of the lot. But I’m still looking them over.”

  So the whole interminable drive had gone, Martha’s mother asking prying questions in her whining voice, Ezra offering the occasional bluff counterpoint, and Rebekah and Martha supplying silly or serious responses as the occasion seemed to require. The entire time, Rebekah felt detached and unreal, numb with disbelief, but braced for the pounce of terror that was sure to come.

  She had to get home. She had to think. She had to consult calendars and count days. She simply had to be wrong.

  “I need to talk to you,” she whispered to Martha as the wagon halted in front of Hector’s house and Ezra alighted to pull down Rebekah’s traveling bag. She was speaking through her veil and she could not clearly see Martha’s face, but even with these baffles, Martha could catch the urgency in her tone.

  “I’ll see if I can come over tomorrow,” she said.

  Her mother caught this exchange. “Not tomorrow! Your father’s cousins are coming. How can you have forgotten? They’ll be here four or five days, and you’ll have to help me keep them entertained.”

  “As soon as you can, then,” Rebekah said, giving Martha’s hand a hard little squeeze.

  Martha nodded. “As soon as I can.”

  Once inside the welcome warmth of the house, Rebekah wanted nothing so much as a chance to run to her room and then stand there, shrieking out silent screams of panic and desperation. But Jordan spotted her at the door and darted over to see how the trip had gone, and then Jerusha stopped her in the hall to see how much reskel root she’d brought back for Hector’s kitchen. And then her mother thrust Jonah in her arms and said, “Jovah’s bones, he’s done nothing but scream for two days running. Take him, keep him, leave him in the garden for the birds to eat up, I don’t care. I have a headache, and I’m going to lie down.”

  Jerusha disappeared down the hall in a swirl of robes. Rebekah stood unmoving for a moment, staring down into Jonah’s moody face. It would be only a moment, she knew, before he started squirming and kicking and demanding to be set free, wailing at the top of his lungs to reinforce his demands.

  “You are the very last creature I want to deal with right now,” she said in a voice so low even he might not have heard it. “I am not feeling so fond of babies at the moment. If I could, I swear by Jovah’s ears, I would find a way to make you disappear.”

  She held him to her as she ascended the stair, clasping him more tightly as he began to writhe and whimper. But after all, she loved Jonah. He was not the baby she truly wished to make disappear.

  Once they were safely in her room, she set him down and let him scamper on hands and knees through the furnishings. She kept a pile of toys in one corner, collected expressly for him, and he headed straight there, yodeling out his incomprehensible language. Rebekah sat on her mattress, her legs folded under her, her arms crossed over her chest and her hands wrapped around her throat, and tried to think.

  Not last month. No. Not the month before that. Jovah’s bones, she was at least two months pregnant. Possibly almost three. This explained everything: the lingering nausea, the emotional outbursts, even the changing contours of her body, which she and Martha had noticed the last time they were trying on clothes.

  She glanced down at the Kiss in her arm, sparkling with a visible fervor. Could this, too, be attributed to the presence of the child in her womb? When had she first noticed it? When had she realized that it, like the baby inside her, was growing stronger day by day? It was said that the god caused the Kiss to flame when lovers came together for the first time. Maybe its incendiary joy now was a reflection of the god’s delight at the creation of a new life, a silent, exquisite promise to Rebekah about how much she would love the child she was carrying inside.

  But she would not love it. She would not even have it. There were ways, there were drugs, Jansai women knew all sorts of methods to keep an unwanted child from coming. She searched her mind, trying to recall every whispered, half-overheard conversation among the married women who were tired of producing a baby every year, ruining their bodies and sapping their strength. Certain herbs were abortificants; certain readily available ingredients could be combined to produce the desired effect.

  “Beb-be-be-be,” Jonah cooed, crawling over. He gripped the fabric over her folded knees and pulled himself shakily to a standing position. “Po-po.”

  She swung him into her arms and carried him across the room to the chaos of his playthings in the corner. “I don’t want to play with you. I want to sit and think,” she said, but she dropped to the floor and crossed her legs, and set him down beside her.

  “Heh,” he said, picking up a carved wooden horse that Hector had brought back from some journey. It had wheeled feet and a rather nasty expression on its long face.

  “Horse,” she said, and pushed it back and forth on the floor for him. Then she did much the same thing with a handful of brightly painted wooden balls. Then back to pushing the horse. Tedious beyond description.

  Martha would know the secret recipe for getting rid of a child. Martha had been wrong about the chances of a mortal girl becoming pregnant with an angel’s child, but a practical piece of information like this would be part of Martha’s basic store of knowledge. Hepzibah probably knew the formula as well, and might help Rebekah obtain the ingredients, but Rebekah shied away from that source of aid. Only if she was desperate. Only if there was no other course.

  “Bah!” Jonah shouted, so she rolled the balls in his direction again.

  The question was, had she waited too long? How mu
ch poison would it require to discourage this parasite, unhook its tiny fingers from their tenuous hold, wash it out of her body? She had heard awful tales, adolescent gossip, about this woman or that who had tried to force a miscarriage and badly miscalculated, bled to death on some unwatched bed as she made her try in secret. Rebekah could hardly go down the hall to the water room and expect to find a day of privacy. Someone would notice if she lay there for three or four straight hours, bleeding away an inner life. That would be just as bad as trying to carry the child to term; that would mark her for just as much guilt.

  Martha would know. Or Hepzibah. One of them would help her.

  “Bah!” Jonah cried again. Her hands had been too slow on the small painted spheres. She pushed them his way again.

  She didn’t know how she would tell Obadiah. They had never discussed the concept of children. Jonah’s name came up from time to time but was never followed with, “So do you see children in your future? How many would you like to raise?” She didn’t even know how angels organized themselves into family units or whether or not angels as a race were particularly fond of children. And who knew how Obadiah the individual felt about the idea of babies of his own? Would he be sad to think she might destroy a life that he had had some part in creating? Would he be horrified to learn of her carelessness, relieved that she had acted quickly enough to take all responsibility from him? And what if Martha had been in some way right? What if mortals really could not bear angel children? Was the child inside her anathema to her own life?

  There was a frightening thought.

  Jonah babbled at her again, and when she did not respond correctly, began crying in mingled fury and despair. Even when Rebekah picked him up to rock him, he could not be comforted. It never ceased to amaze her how quickly his moods could change, from sunny to stormy and back again in the space of minutes. “Are you hungry?” she asked, because usually food would satisfy him, no matter what else had sparked his misery. “Would you like some cheese? Some bread?”

  He didn’t answer intelligibly, of course, but his cries did abate. So she carried him downstairs and rummaged up snacks for both of them. They had eaten twice on the road, but these days she was always hungry. Well, one more mystery explained.