Archangel

by Sharon Shinn

  And indeed, when they were near each other, if you watched for it, you could see the faint flicker in the heart of each angel’s Kiss, the divine reply of one to another. Jovah in all his wisdom had not foreseen that.

  Gabriel tightened his grip on Nathan’s hand, and his brother turned his face upward to the god. Again, Gabriel was half-drowned in the glory of the music. His tenor note held firm against Magdalena’s descending alto line, and when Ariel’s soprano rose ecstatically above both, he felt himself tremble all the way to the tips of his wings. Then his own voice took the lead, while the rest fell back in choral harmony, and he sang the words of invitation and celebration with delight.

  And at that moment he felt the stabbing pain in his right arm again, and he suddenly knew what it was. A response to the music, a response to his voice, a response to him. The Kiss on his own arm was alive with muted sparks, and he felt that heat down to its anchor in his bone.

  Against all probability, Rachel was in Semorrah, perhaps even in the hall below them, near enough to hear him and attuned enough to react to the sound of his voice.

  * * *

  It became a matter of importance, therefore, to speak to every woman in the house. It was a very different Gabriel who attended to his social duties this day. At the luncheon, the following reception, the dinner, the second ball, he moved with great determination through the throngs and engaged each of the women in courteous conversation. He complimented them on their gowns, their hair, their jewels, asked them if they had enjoyed the wedding, and whether they lived in Semorrah or had just come for a visit. He was not conscious of flattering anyone until Nathan drew him aside at the reception and laughed at him.

  “So you’ve become a flirt, now and very abruptly,” his brother said. “Are you planning to leave a trail of broken hearts among the merchants’ wives since you cannot find your angelica anywhere?”

  “I’m just talking to them.”

  “And a fine job you’re making of it. I heard Lady Susan tell her daughter she was half in love with you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “But Gabriel, what has sparked this sudden amiability? I could have sworn you were bored out of your mind yesterday. And what’s more, so could everyone else.”

  “I think she’s here.”

  “Who’s here?”

  “Rachel. I think—but I’m not sure.”

  Nathan glanced quickly around him. “In this house?”

  “Maybe. I felt—while we were singing, my Kiss flared up. And this morning—I think she’s in the house, or very near.”

  “The Kiss has been wrong before,” Nathan said wryly.

  “No, I don’t think so in this case. Josiah told me— But I must talk to all the women of the house, you see that, and I feel very clumsy about it. Unfortunately, it’s not a task you can help me with.”

  “And you’ve had no response since the Te Deum this morning?”

  Gabriel was silent. Nathan exclaimed, “You have! Is the lady married? Is that the problem?”

  “It was very faint,” Gabriel said. “When I was speaking to the lady Mary—” Nathan laughed aloud, appalled. Gabriel grimaced. “I know. I complimented her on—her hair, I think it was— and she blushed, and I felt the slightest heat in my arm. But surely not enough—”

  “That would truly be the greatest irony Jovah ever enacted,” Nathan said, his voice solemn but his eyes alight. “To unite you with Lord Jethro’s newly acquired daughter-in-law moments after you sing at her wedding—”

  “But I think it can’t be her. Perhaps someone else she spoke to, someone who commented on her hair. Someone she was thinking of when I spoke to her. And it’s not as if I can ask her to list everyone she’s spoken to today—”

  “Stay calm. The case is not desperate. In fact, it’s better than it was yesterday, don’t you see? How long do you think we can stay in Jethro’s house, searching? Can you make an excuse to remain another few days?”

  “Raphael is leaving tonight, but Ariel and her sister will be here through morning. We can stay at least as long. After that— but it may do us no good to stay. She may be leaving with one of the other households. She may not belong here at all.”

  “A guest?” Nathan asked, watching his brother. “Or—a servant of one of the guests?”

  “Let us hope it is a guest, the adopted daughter of some minor merchant. I would hate to think my angelica had been serving as a lady’s maid any time these past eighteen years.”

  “If she has, she has,” Nathan said philosophically. “Let’s get on with the search while everyone is still here.”

  But Gabriel had no luck, though he managed to talk to virtually every female guest present—even those too young and those too old to be, by any stretch of diplomacy, twenty-five years old. The ball ended, the wedding was over, and everyone would be going home—and he was no closer to solving this most critical puzzle.

  Very well, then. Gabriel did not like it, but it seemed she was among the serving class, most probably a visitor to the mansion, come in the train of some merchant’s wife. He slept lightly for a few hours, then rose to prowl the lower corridors of the great house, stalking up and down the cramped hallways where the abigails and lady’s maids were quartered. But the Kiss remained cool and dark against his arm. She was not there.

  He returned to his room, to spend the last hours of the night brooding at his window. She was in Semorrah, she had to be. All right, she had heard him singing yesterday, but perhaps she had heard him from some vantage point other than this house. She had been in a passing cart, or listening at the window of one of the great houses a few blocks away. She was within the sound of his voice, that much at least he could cling to. Tomorrow—this morning—he could seek her again. He could take wing and hover over the city, singing the tender country ballads that women seemed to like so much. She would hear him, wherever she was. She would look up, and against her will, perhaps, stop whatever she was doing to listen to him, moved without knowing why by the timbre and cadence of his voice—

  His meditations were abruptly interrupted by the opening of the door. He glanced impatiently over his shoulder to see one of Jethro’s wretched slave girls entering with a coal scuttle and broom—no doubt the same one who had built the unwanted fire yesterday morning. He spared her only a glance before turning his attention once more to the empty cobblestoned streets just beginning to take shape in the dawn light.

  He would sing, and she would hear him, and he would know she was near because his arm would burn as it was burning now, as if the slave girl had indeed lit the fire and held a live coal to his arm—as perhaps she had done the morning before—

  He wheeled silently and stared at her. She was crouched over the hearth and did not look his way. Bare feet took him soundlessly to the doorway; not until she rose and made to leave did she realize he had moved. The Kiss on her own arm was alive with mutinous amber lights. She looked to be nothing but eyes and tatters and undomesticated golden hair.

  “Unbelievable,” he said, and then he spoke her name.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Rachel stared up at the angel’s face and felt a shiver of panic. Pride made her hide it behind a scowl. “Who are you?” she said, pretending ignorance.

  He had clearly never been asked the question in his life, and was instantly affronted. “I am the angel Gabriel,” he said stiffly. “I lead the host at the Eyrie.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “And you?” he asked. “You are Rachel, daughter of Seth and Elizabeth?”

  “I’m Rachel,” she said cautiously.

  “I’ve been looking for you for weeks.”

  She felt her panic grow, and her hostility with it. Both were unreasonable. “Why?” she asked in a most ungracious tone of voice.

  He took a deep breath, seemed to consider somewhat hopelessly what to say, and expelled the breath. “Did you know,” he said at last, speaking with great effort in a gentle voice, “that I am to become Archangel later t
his year?”

  “You are?” she said.

  He nodded. His blue eyes never stopped searching her face, as if he were seeking ways to slip behind the mask of her expression. She felt her scowl deepen in response. “Every twenty years, a new Archangel is chosen by Jovah, to lead all angels and all peoples of Samaria. This summer, I will lead the singing of the Gloria for the first time.” He hesitated. “You do know what the Gloria is, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said sharply. “I’m not stupid.”

  He was still watching her. The jeweled color of his eyes was beginning to reverberate in her head. “Then you also know that one of the people singing beside the Archangel is the woman chosen by Jovah to be his bride—his angelica—a mortal woman joined to the angels in harmony.”

  This was getting deeper into dogma and ritual than the Edori had ever taken Rachel, but she nodded. “Certainly.”

  He took another long breath. “And the woman Jovah has chosen as my bride,” he said, “is you.”

  She felt herself staring at him like a half-wit.

  “That is,” he murmured, “if you are Rachel, daughter of Seth and Elizabeth, born in a small Jordana farm town not far from the Caitana foothills.”

  “I was born near the Caitanas,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “But I have not been there … for years and years.”

  “I have been to that place,” he said abruptly. “It appeared to have been destroyed. What happened to it?”

  She shook her head. “I was very young. I have few memories of that time and place.”

  “Then what happened to you? How did you get from there— to here?”

  “I was adopted by the Manderra clan of the Edori people,” she said, her voice taking on a certain proud lilt; so the Edori always identified themselves to each other. “They found me when I was a child. I was with them until I was twenty.”

  “And then?”

  Her expression became ironic. “And then what do you think? How do Edori women usually become allali slave girls?”

  She deliberately used the contemptuous Edori word that once meant merely “city dweller” but had come to mean also money-grubber, cheat, slave trader, whoremonger and anyone engaged in unsavory commerce. She saw with satisfaction that he knew the word and did not like it.

  But he managed to reply in an even voice. “I imagine, through the intervention of a Jansai war band,” he said. “And that’s what happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Five years ago.”

  “Who was taken? Everyone from your clan? The other Edori I have spoken to said the Manderras were dispersed.”

  “Dispersed or dead,” she said in a hard voice. “There were maybe ten Manderras in the slave train that brought me into Semorrah. There were also Edori from other clans, some that I knew, some I did not. What happened to the rest of the Manderras I do not know.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. She did not reply. He spoke more briskly. “You can tell me more of your story once we are at the Eyrie.”

  She realized she was staring again. “At the Eyrie?”

  “Yes. We will leave today—now—as soon as you are ready and I have told Lord Jethro that I am taking”—he paused, and eyed her somewhat unfavorably—”one of the members of his household with me.”

  “But I don’t want to go with you,” she said.

  He stared at her as if she had spoken in tongues. “Don’t want to? Are you mad? Don’t want to come to the Eyrie with me—to be angelica? You’d rather—” His voice took on great sarcastic energy. “You’d rather stay here, in Semorrah, as a slave to Lord Jethro, when you could be a free woman in Bethel—a free woman, sweet Jovah, an angelica! What kind of choice is that? That isn’t a choice!”

  “I don’t want to go with you,” she repeated. “And I’m not a slave.”

  He swept her with one comprehensive glance. She felt her face flush. “I’m not,” she said defiantly. “Or I won’t be. Lady Mary has requested that I be given to her as a bride gift, and she has already promised to free me.”

  He was still incredulous. “To do what? Serve her the rest of your days? Braid her hair and fetch her drinks and listen to her inane chatter about her husband and her children and her pets?”

  Rachel lifted her chin. “She’s going to pay me.”

  “Trust me,” he said grimly, “no salary would be high enough.”

  “I’d rather go work for her than be your angelica,” she said.

  “You don’t even know what an angelica does,” he said with some heat.

  “No? I know what allali wives do, and a lot of it’s worse than listening to inane chatter about husbands and dogs.”

  He was utterly furious, and he looked like a man who did not always successfully throttle his rage. She edged back just a little. “The angelica,” he said, through tight lips, “holds the position of highest honor on Samaria. She sings beside the Archangel at the Gloria. She hears petitions that men and women fear to put before the Archangel himself. She can, if she chooses, be a great force for good among mortals, among angels. Many angelicas have had special relationships with Jovah, asking from him boons and favors which have been divinely granted. The angelica is one step from the god.”

  “The angelica, you said,” she responded, “is wife to the Archangel.”

  She had not thought he could become angrier, but it seemed she was wrong. “If it is the thought of the physical relationship which repels you, you need not be concerned,” he ground out. “They marry, but Archangels and their angelicas have often made their own arrangements.”

  She arched her eyebrows just a little. Stubborn unto death; Simon had told her that once. Stubborn just for the sake of stubbornness, and stubborn out of fear. Stubborn when there was no good reason for it except that she had never, not even in five years as a slave, learned to back down. “Edori,” she said, “do not believe in marriage.”

  “You,” he said, “are not an Edori.”

  “Nonetheless—”

  “And you,” he added, “have no choice. Don’t you understand? The god has chosen you. Not I. Were I free to take a bride of my own choosing, believe me, I would not have gone to the Caitanas or the Edori or the kitchens of the great houses of Semorrah, looking for the woman of my dreams. You have been thrust upon me as this role has been thrust upon you. I suggest you accept it with as good a grace as possible.”

  She shook her head. “No. I will admit it is an honor, but I decline it. I will not go with you to the Eyrie.”

  He gave a small, bitter laugh and tossed his hands apart. For a second, she thought she’d won. But no. “You may say you are not going,” he said. “You may resist. You may hate me, you may hate Jovah. But you are going. You cannot escape your fate. You cannot escape the dictates of your god.”

  “I have a right to choose my own life!” she cried suddenly, filled with an uprush of despair. “I have a right to refuse you!”

  “Did the Jansai give you a choice? Did they allow you to refuse?” he said with an exasperated malice. “Understand this. Your life has been given over into other hands, and your will is insufficient. We leave in two hours’ time,” he added, turning away from her. “Tell who you will that you are leaving. I will see Lord Jethro myself.”

  And he opened the door and stalked out, leaving her staring after him in mingled rage, hatred, astonishment, shock and fear. Perhaps he had not meant it as cruelly as it sounded, but she felt very much as she had when the Jansai rode shrieking into her campground and forever altered her existence. It had been an unforgivable thing for the angel to say, and she vowed right then that she would never forgive him—not for saying it, and not for doing it. Once again someone was taking her life out of her hands, just when it seemed worth living.

  It was hard to tell, Gabriel thought cynically, who was more embarrassed at the discovery that his angelica had been laboring as a slave girl in Lord Jethro’s household for five years, but the Archangel-elect felt t
hat he concealed his discomfiture better than his host. Jethro could not have been more apologetic or accommodating; in fact, his incoherent expressions of mortification palled quickly.

  “All I ask is that you have her bonds removed as soon as possible,” Gabriel said, interrupting. “Within the hour. And that you find her some decent clothing to wear so that I am not ashamed to bring her to the Eyrie.”

  “Certainly—oh, most willingly—but, angelo, let me assure you—in my house she met with nothing but kindness. There was no mistreatment, no importuning—”

  “I’m sure of that.”

  “One thing more you can be sure of,” Jethro continued earnestly, “I will tell no one—absolutely no one.”

  Gabriel shrugged, his expression wry. “This is not a secret it will be possible to keep,” he said. “But I would appreciate it greatly if you did not facilitate the gossip.”

  He had made only one stop before heading straight to Lord Jethro’s bedroom suite to demand instant admittance. The stop had been at his brother’s room, to waken Nathan and tell him the mixed news. Even half-asleep, Nathan had been properly appalled and amused.

  “Jovah guard us,” Nathan had said, struggling to sit up and grind the sleep from his face. “Could it be worse?”

  “It’s worse,” Gabriel replied. “She dislikes me.”

  Nathan choked back a yawn. “Already?”

  “She does not want to go with us. She declined the honor awaiting her. I informed her she was not allowed to decline. I would not put it past her to make a run for it. I want you to get dressed and find her. Follow her. Keep her in your sight till I rejoin you.”