Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (11 page)

My leg whined about the activity and I ignored it to stand within that last ring and gaze down at the majesty of this world.
It had stood here for how many thousands of years before I was born, it would stand all my life and go on standing long after I was gone. And most people had lived and would live all their lives without seeing it, or even knowing it existed. For Adriel to have brought me here was an honor, and showed him to be a better person than I. I didn’t want to share this place with anyone, not ever. This was a sanctuary.

One of the trees in this ring had a great hollow within it.
I went inside and looked around in the dimness. There was a protuberance just above my head that was the perfect size to seat a backpack upon, so I slung it off and heaved it up there. The red fabric could be seen by anyone coming into this ring.

When I stepped back out
side, I saw a boy standing below in a shaft of sunlight within another ring. He was looking away from me, his head of dark curls cocked to the side, and his olive arms were spread like he was embracing the wind rushing past us. I held my breath, knowing this could only be Cadmon. All he wore were dark blue sweatpants, not even shoes.

I said nothing, but somehow he heard me.
Turning around and bringing his arms close to his sides, he looked up to me through worried eyes and crouched a little like he was getting ready to run. I stayed still to keep from spooking him, not even putting out a hand to show I meant no harm. Adolescence had yet to make him gawky and pimply; he was an extremely beautiful preteen boy with arched eyebrows over light brown eyes and even features.

The wind gushed around us and I closed my eyes to let the lullaby pull me along.
It was almost like the music from after the fall . . . the memory had barely stirred before it faded from my mind. I stilled even more to hear the last of the chords. I had tumbled from the cliffs and heard this unearthly music . . .

When I opened
my eyes, Cadmon’s face had changed to joyous upon me like we shared this secret. He spread his arms once more, the wind tousling his curls, and he laughed like the chimes of a bell. It was a sound of unequaled elation. Whatever was wrong in his mind, it did not prevent him from experiencing the enchantment of this grove. I spread my arms to show him that I understood. I had wanted to hoard this place, to keep it all to myself forever, and now I couldn’t imagine it without this wild little boy there. It was all right to share it with someone like him.

The wind changed course and threw my
long hair back over my shoulders. Light warmed my skin, the canopy shifting above to let down the sun. The song riding by us changed in its dance between crook and mound and branch, taking us along for the ride as the rapid exchange of light and shadow blocked my vision for the length of a measure. Then the wind died and the canopy fell back, the music releasing me from its hold. I looked down to the boy, wondering if I should say something now, and he had wings.

Chapter Five: The Angel

In this place, it did not seem so strange. It did not even seem real. They arched over his narrow back, the tips of each dark gray feather shining with silver points of light. The wings began to beat, stirring new music from the shivering grass and foliage around the boy’s feet. He lifted into the air and drifted up the slope to me.

My thought was to back up, but my feet were rooted to the ground.
He passed through a shaft of light, which set his wings ablaze with silver. Coming into the ring, he touched one olive foot to the ground as his wings beat more slowly, and then the second foot.

A stronger wind wended
through the fairy rings, carrying music with it. I extended a hand hesitantly to his wing and waited for permission to touch it once inches away. He flicked it forward into my fingers. The softness was indescribable: softer than that feather in my room, the softest touch I had ever known upon my skin, or in my heart.

“You’re u
nguarded,” the boy breathed.

“What do you mean?” I asked, keeping my voice low and even.
The last thing I wanted to do was frighten him away.

His lips turned up a little in humor,
yet there was a melancholy quality to it. I knew that sadness from Adriel. “Unguarded soul.”

I ran my hand along his wing
in wonder, wishing to lose myself in this softness. “What . . . what are you?”

“I fell,” the boy
said in a sweet soprano, and his eyes filled with tears. He pressed his hand in curiosity against his cheek to feel the first tear dropping, like he wasn’t sure how it had gotten there. “For vengeance, I fell.”

“
Cadmon!
”

Adriel was stopped in horror in his descent of the hill, twigs and leaves rattling down from his feet.
The boy turned, his wing brushing against the length of my arm, and he called, “I fell, Adriel.”

“Cadmon, you can’t show humans this!”
Regaining himself, Adriel rushed down the hill to the bottom and then charged up the slope to us.

“We’ve fallen,” Cadmon whispered to me, his eyes drifting to
a distant point.

“Fallen from where?” I asked.

“From grace. For vengeance . . . for distraction . . . for love.”

“I won’t say anything,” I blurted
when Adriel came into the fairy ring.

“He caught you,” Cadmon breathed.
His eyes had come back to me, and he pressed the fingers damp from his tear to my cheek. “He was not supposed to catch you. She’s unguarded, Adriel.”

“What does he mean, you caught me?” I asked Adriel, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of my lungs.
“That was
real
? The flying . . . the music?”

Adriel blanched, looking back and forth around the fairy ring
for an answer that couldn’t be found there. Then he whispered, “Jessa, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Caught me?
You saved my life!” I said incredulously.

“Yours wasn’t a life that I’m allowed to save,” he said in agony, running his hands through his dark blond hair.
The gold threads shined in the sunlight. “We’re fallen, Jessa, we can’t save anyone any more. You were rightfully dead, and now you’re wrongfully alive.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’ve changed a thread of this tapestry again, and no one can find out. Cadmon, you shouldn’t have done this!”

“Angels,” I whispered
in realization.

“Fallen,” Cadmon
added sadly, closing his eyes to catch a measure of music from the wind.

“So . . . all of your f
-family . . .” I stammered.

“Thrown from grace for violating our principles,” Adriel
said in total agitation. “You mustn’t tell, Jessa! You aren’t an anchor thread of the tapestry, so they might never find out. They can’t know, not ever. The Thronos will mete out punishment . . . there could be a million ugly consequences.”

The wind blew more strongly.
Cadmon’s wings beat and he lifted high over our heads to spin. The gray of his wings blurred to the silver points of light at the tips, making the silver the predominate color.

Hating to see Adriel in such distress, I took his hand in mine.
“I won’t tell. I promise. You can trust me.”

Cadmon
floated with the wind to another fairy ring as Adriel said, “I know. It’s not you telling that I’m really worried about.”

“What is an anchor thread?”

“One person upon which many others depend. That’s why they are given to the charge of angels. Certain events must happen in their lives, so that what is woven matches what has been woven. But you’re human, and limited by linear time. These two things cannot exist to you.” His gaze followed his brother, who was sweeping farther and farther away with the wind. “I should not have caught you that night.”

I pushed my hair out of my face.
“Then why did you?”

“I don’t know.
I just couldn’t let you fall. But they might never know, since you don’t matter.” Something showed in my eyes at that and he shook his head to indicate it hadn’t been an insult. “You matter to your family, and to your friends, but not in a wider sense to the world. There aren’t many who matter to a great extent, but those few souls matter so much that the weaving of tomorrow hinges on what is woven today in their lives. So they are guarded souls.”

“Not eq
ual-opportunity angels?” I said, finding that unfair.

He had a hint of a smile
at my umbrage. “There aren’t enough to go around, and that’s not how it works. You aren’t an anchor in the turning of this world, so you have no angel. Most people don’t. Your thread was meant to come to a close last Friday night, but now it continues and changes the tapestry. Small changes can be overlooked. Yet one day your great great grandchild may affect an anchor soul in a way that is not meant to happen . . .”

“Well, why worry?
I won’t be around by then.”

“But all times exist at once, in some place.
It may be that the change to the tapestry is noticed tomorrow, and the thread of your great great grandchild will be traced back to you, back to that moment on the road when you plunged off the side. I am not allowed to interfere. Catching you was a crime.”

The next wind to come made me shiver.
Adriel looked up to the sky and said, “It’s getting late. We should get you back to your car.”

“Is that how you know so much about me?” I asked once we were out of the fairy rings.
“Like when I embellish to fit in at a new school?”

“Your soul . . . it doesn’t darken, but it feels shielded to an angel’s perspective,” Adriel said.
He slipped off his jacket and gave it to me. Blissfully warm, my chills dissipated at once. “Your soul is luminescent, so it’s very easy for me to see when a part of it shields.”

I looked around for Cadmon
, who was out of sight. “So he’ll be fine?”

“Yes.
This has just happened to him recently, the fall from grace. It’s a normal part of grieving. We all go through it. He’s trying to hear the music that an angel hears all the time. But we can only hear snatches of it now since we’ve fallen, most especially when we fly.”

“I heard it, too.”

“Some human souls do, the older ones.”

As the fairy rings fell farther and farther behind us, I longed
to return to them. Something incredible had just happened, and now I was headed back to my house, past the disco fish and on to a pile of homework, the mundane matters of eating and showering and sleeping. I wanted to return to the surreal. But even though it was gone, Adriel was still with me. I stepped down into the logging road and said, “Which was it for you? The reason you fell?”

“We fall for many reasons.
Mine was pity.”

I wanted to know more, but he didn’t offer it.
“Cadmon said that he fell for vengeance.”

Adriel looked back to me in surprise.
“He’s never told us, not in ten years.”

“He came to you as a fallen
angel toddler?”

“No, he came to us as he is.
We stay this way forever, or near enough. For vengeance . . . that’s terrible. Drina did something like that.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Do you really wish to know?”

There wasn’t much else I could
think of wanting to know more and he said, “You don’t have to answer. I can see it. An anchor isn’t necessarily a good soul, Jessa. Some are, but not all. In her charge was one of the bad ones. But the evil he inflicted, as a tribal leader upon his community, was not for Drina to judge. It played a bigger part outside of him, outside of those he brutalized. Other events hinged on these events. Her opinion . . . the opinion of the guardian angel is irrelevant. One does as bidden. There came a night where she was to warn her guarded soul of an attempt on his life, whisper a premonition of it in his ear, so he felt a need to conceal himself. She didn’t, disgusted at what he was doing to the innocent, and he died.”

I
n disbelief, I said, “He was cruel. How can you be expected to watch? And
protect
?”

“This is our role, and she spurned hers to stand by while a soul entrusted to her care was murdered.
So she fell, cast out by the Thronos, for the crime of passivity. She’s the oldest of us.”

“The Thronos is
your . . . authority?”

“Yes.
They watch the weaving of the tapestry, give us our charges, and pass down judgment. Drina is to walk this world until the last human soul leaves it, and then she will die. She is not allowed to interfere in human affairs, nor can any of us.”

We wended our way
down the logging road, the slope back out of the redwoods visible ahead. “Don’t you change things just by existing? You bought a house and that affects the seller. Investments affect the economy . . . Kishi takes classes at the junior college that someone else could take . . .” You go to school and break my heart to look at you, I thought.

“We can live the lives of mortals who aren’t important threads to the tapestry,” Adriel said.
“And less than that, in truth. We must move every few years, to prevent people from taking interest in how we never age; we can have no relationships but with each other nor have children.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“I was timeless until I fell. That was in the 1800s. I can’t be sure of when; I was like Cadmon, raging to return to our angelic music. Drina found me living in the woods after she read a newspaper article about a feral boy. She hunted me down. Sometimes those wild people turn out to be fallen angels. All of my memories are in a tumble of those years, but I do remember the first automobiles.”

I longed to return to that music myself, and to have the memory of it reawakened
even slightly created a physical ache in my body. We climbed the slope to the oak trees. When among them, I said, “You were outside my window. I found one of your feathers.”

He stiffened.
“I wanted to see that you were all right. Forgive me. That was rude.”

He
shouldn’t be asking for forgiveness when I was the one who should be
dead
. “And you just happened to be there when I fell off the cliff? Are you some supernatural stalker?”

Adriel laughed quietly and opened the gate.
“You’re too clever for your own good, Jessa Bright. I was flying in that area. We can darken our wings temporarily to keep from being seen. The commotion at the party caught my eye, and then yes, I followed you out. I was worried. It was so windy to be on a scooter.”

“People think you wer
e in San Francisco that weekend.”

“
We wanted to not be bothered. I saved one destined to die, and thus violated the law. There is little I could have done that would be more terrible. We had to decide what to do, all of us move, just me-”

Horrified that he might be leaving, I blurted, “And what did you decide?”

“Pray that news of this lapse never travels beyond our circle, that the new fabric woven on this tapestry is overshadowed by the greater light of the anchors passing through this world. This may be so small a change that nothing ever comes of it.”

Within the beautiful house, music was playing.
That must have been why he was in the orchestra room, listening for some piece of harp music. There was no re-creation of what I’d heard while flying, no equivalent substitution, but in nature or instruments, they could hear hints of it. Adriel walked me to the mail truck and closed the door once I was inside. Struck with shyness, I said goodbye awkwardly. The gates opened as the vehicle approached, and I pulled down to the road an utterly different person than the one who drove up it hours ago.

The sky was growing purple by the time I arrived home.
Grandpa Jack was just setting dinner on the table, his version of vegetables being a handful of vegetable-flavored chips on each plate. We ate with the news playing, and I laughed to see Grandpa Jack eating the potato and tomato flavored chips but avoiding the spinach. He put the green ones back in the bag with a shrug, muted the television for commercials, and said, “Everyone asked about you today, from one end of town down to the Gap.”