Angelica (28 page)

“I still can't believe it of Elias . . .”

They were still making their earnest denials and protests when one of the onlookers detached herself from a small group and made her way hesitantly over to the council. “Angelo?” she asked in a low voice. “Were you asking about the young woman who caused all the trouble?”

Magisterially, Gaaron turned to face her, the expression on his face grave but not particularly anxious. Susannah, who felt her veins jumping with alarm, wondered how he could seem so calm. “Yes, please,” he said. “Do you know anything about her? Any way we can identify her?”

She shook her head. “I saw her come by once or twice before, but I didn't think anything of it. She always had her hair covered and her face down. She was a blonde, I think. Fair-haired, anyway.”

“You don't know what she looked like? Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”

Regretfully, she shook her head. “I'm sorry, angelo, I just never paid that much attention. I thought maybe she worked with Myra and Elias. Or maybe she was a friend of his daughter's. She looked clean and respectable—you know, not the kind of woman who would arouse suspicious thoughts.”

Gaaron nodded. “I don't suppose you have any idea of her name?”

The woman had just shaken her head again when there was a sudden commotion inside the house. The door burst open and a young woman came running out, waving a soft piece of cotton in her hand. She was too old to be one of the daughters, Susannah thought, and too composed to be the wronged wife.

“Angelo!” the woman cried. Her voice was excited and
her expression was vengeful. “Stephen was just saying you wanted information about that slut who was here with Elias?”

Susannah's heart galloped around her rib cage and stampeded to her throat. She put her hand to her mouth to prevent any sound from escaping.

“Yes, do you know anything?” Gaaron asked, turning now to face her. Susannah came a pace nearer, wanting to see what the woman held in her hand, wanting to know what thoughtless, careless thing Miriam had done now to betray herself.

The woman was waving the cloth over her head as if it was a banner. It looked like an Edori scarf, Susannah thought, soft and multihued and designed to lend bright color to an otherwise drab wardrobe. “The girls say this isn't theirs and doesn't belong to any friend they know!” she exclaimed triumphantly. “I'll bet she dropped it, that ignorant tramp that Elias brought in, that girl who ruined this whole house with one little kiss—”

“May I see it?” Gaaron asked, and held out his hand. Reluctantly, for it was quite a prize, she laid it across his palm.

He studied it a moment, unfolding it and staring down at one of the four corners where, even by torchlight, Susannah could catch the heavy braid of embroidery. Her heart stopped bounding and now shuddered to a halt, then puffed itself up to twice its normal size so that she could not pull in breath around it. Edori women often embroidered their names on their scarves or the hems of their skirts. Miriam didn't know how to sew a stitch, but Susannah had been teaching her to embroider. She had been right when she had thought this looked like an Edori scarf . . .

Abruptly, Gaaron wheeled and passed the fabric to Susannah. She spread it out between her two hands and stared down at the embroidered pattern expertly set into the fiber. She found herself reading the letters of her own name.

Two days later, Miriam was packing for Luminaux.

They had managed to keep it a secret among the three of them—Gaaron, Susannah, and Miriam—just what kind of trouble Miriam was in this time. Nonetheless, everyone in
the hold knew that something had happened, and that Gaaron was beyond fury, beyond any kind of physical or emotional retribution. He had merely said to Miriam, as he found her in Susannah's room that night, “I am sending you away.” She had not protested. She hadn't even asked where she was going.

It was Susannah who had suggested, not just the city, but the venue. “There is an Edori woman who owns a bakery there, and I am friendly with her,” she had told Gaaron upon their return to the Eyrie that night. It was very late, but they were both too keyed up to attempt to sleep. “I think you would like her. She is very kind but not particularly sentimental. She has raised three daughters of her own, and I don't think Miriam would surprise her much.”

“Miriam surprises me every day,” he said. “But if she is willing, I would be in her debt.”

“I will go with her, of course, to make the introductions,” Susannah said. She spoke mostly to his back, and his hunched, unresponsive wings, for he was staring out the window at the wan face of the new dawn. “Will you come, too? Or—”

“No,” he interrupted. “No, I don't think I can.”

Susannah took a step nearer, wanting to comfort him, but having no clue how to do it. “Gaaron, she is very young,” she said softly.

“Not that young,” he replied. “Old enough, in some circles, to be a wife and mother. Old enough, most definitely, to know when what she is doing is wrong. Old enough to stop trying to prove to our dead father that she can do anything she wants.”

“You think this is still about him?” she asked.

He shrugged, and his wings rose and fell with an exhausted motion. “I know there are days in my own life when I am aware of my father's ghost watching over me. Gloating over my achievements or sneering at me for something I have missed. And I am older than Miriam and wiser by far.”

“He sounds like a dreadful man.”

Gaaron made an indecisive sound. “Dreadful? That doesn't say it precisely enough. He was an ambitious, driven, bitter man who was determined that his children would
become what he could not. Nothing he did from the day I was born, nothing he said to either of us, had a root in anything except his desire to see us succeed, to win the glories he could not.”

This was so alien to Edori philosophy that Susannah could not really assimilate it. “What successes? What glories?”

He finally turned away from the window, a most satirical expression on his face. “Why, the title of Archangel, of course. His own father had groomed him for that role. Had bestowed the proper name upon him. Had fostered him with the man who held the title before Adriel.”

“The proper name?” Susannah interrupted. “There is such a thing?”

“Oh, yes,” Gaaron said softly. “You didn't know? The Librera names the four great Archangels of the past, before the time of the founding of Samaria. Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, and Michael. Of the twelve Archangels who have watched over us since Jovah brought us here, eight of them have been christened with one of those names. My father's name, of course, was Michael. And mine, naturally, must be Gabriel.”

“So from the time you were born, he thought you—”

“From the time
he
was born, he thought
he
would be named Archangel. He thought, everyone thought, he was destined to take up the reins of power. The office rotates between the three holds, you know—or perhaps you didn't know—but not on any exact schedule. You might have one Archangel from the Eyrie, one from Monteverde, another from the Eyrie, then two from Windy Point, another from Monteverde—it is an informal schedule, yet there is a sense that no one of the angel holds can be given power too many generations in succession. And there had been three Archangels between the last one from the Eyrie and the next one to be named. And my grandfather was convinced that my father would be the next one to be called.”

“But he wasn't,” Susannah said.

Gaaron shook his head. “But he was not,” he said very deliberately. “He was passed over, and the title went to Adriel instead. I was a boy then—nine or ten—but I will never forget my father's rage. It was as if she had stolen something from him—a birthright—something more precious than
money or love. He had not been a calm man before then, but from that day on, he was possessed. He focused all his thoughts, all his energies, on turning me into the angel who would be prized above all other angels.”

“Who chooses the Archangel?” Susannah wanted to know.

For the first time in this long, impossibly wretched evening, Gaaron looked at her with something of a smile. “How can it be you live in this land and do not know the answer to that question?” he asked.

She smiled tentatively back. “I have not been around angels much, and never around Archangels, so you must excuse my ignorance.”

He sighed heavily and settled himself into one of those uncomfortable-looking cutaway chairs. His wings flopped on the floor behind him, listless and crumpled. Susannah sat in a rather more respectable chair and waited for his answer.

“The god chooses,” he said. “He communicates his choice to the oracles, who communicate it to the rest of the world. There is no gainsaying the god. There is no lobbying to change his mind. I have always thought the system worked very well, because had it been up to men to decide—had a council of angels or mortals convened to vote on their candidates—I do believe my father would have gone on a rampage and murdered every last one of them. As it was, there was nothing he could do but rage. And make life a living hell for his children, of course.”

“Did you want to be Archangel?” Susannah asked. There was stale bread and some half-filled glasses of water on the small table between their chairs. She picked up a crust and nibbled on it. She was not even hungry, but her hands were restless. She was too tense to merely sit still and talk.

Gaaron seemed to think for a long moment, and then he sighed. “I don't even know,” he said. “It was as if there was no choice. Did you want to be born an Edori? The contours of your life were determined for you before you even came crying out of the womb. That is how I felt about being Archangel. About being groomed to become Archangel,” he corrected himself. “There was, of course, no guarantee.”

Now she sipped on the water, wondering who had last
drunk from this glass and not particularly caring. “And had you not been named Archangel?” she asked. “If someone else—Neri—had been chosen instead? Would you have been disappointed? Furious? Would you have wondered then what to do with your life?”

He considered again. “I don't know. I was by then so used to the responsibilities my life held that being named Archangel was just part of the same litany. I had been chosen leader of the host by the time I was twenty-one. I was—you understand, I was a serious young man, people had gotten in the habit of relying on me. I was used to taking things on. I cannot say I wanted the glory and the glamour of being Archangel, as my father always did. What I can say is that it seems to be a hard job, given to someone who is used to doing hard jobs, and that I have done so many hard things in my life, it seemed inevitable that it would fall to me. Would I have been disappointed had the title gone elsewhere? I don't think so. I think I would have believed that some other difficult task had been reserved for me, that the god would make known in his own time.”

Susannah was silent, but she felt strange. She had never heard anyone so simply and straightforwardly offer himself up for duty and rough labor. She looked at him surreptitiously, a tired man sitting lax after a devastating day, but that was not what she saw. She saw a capable man sitting in a pool of his own power, phosphorescent with will and latent force. The hard muscles of his arms were relaxed, the purposeful face was loose and weary—but a little shiver went through her. Sound an alarm, call out a warning, and those slack muscles would bunch, the fine mind would hone down to a ruthless clarity. He would not rail at a god who sent him one more crisis; he would shoulder the burden, and he would move on.

Her silence caught his attention, and he looked over at her with a little smile. “And you are thinking that one of my difficult assignments is Miriam,” he said. “And you are thinking that Jovah gave me a rare task there.”

“That's not what I was thinking,” she said quietly.

He stretched, and those fatigued muscles rippled and lay quiet again. “I disappointed my father in every way, and I
had a chance of carrying out his dream,” he said. “You can imagine how he felt about Miriam, who could offer him nothing. She has lived her whole life trying to prove to him that she could be worse than he even imagined.”

“I don't think he's the one she's proving it to anymore.”

He thought that over and nodded. “So I have become my father in her eyes? I have tried very hard not to. But Miriam was set long ago on a path of self-destruction. And loving her does not seem to have done much to turn her feet another way.”

“I think you have done as much for her as you can,” she said softly, coming to her feet. “Now it is up to Miriam to decide what road to take.”

He looked up at her in surprise. “You're leaving?”

“Gaaron, you look exhausted. I'm going to let you sleep for a few hours. Don't answer the door. Don't worry about anything. I'll handle Miriam and any questions that come our way.”

“You're tired, too,” he protested, but he did not stand. He did not look capable of standing.

She stepped around the table between them and laid her hands on his tousled hair. He had changed into reasonable clothes before they rushed off to Velora, but he had not thought to comb out his hair, tangled from sleep. For a moment he looked young and vulnerable; his resemblance to Miriam was suddenly pronounced.