Angelica

  Mahalah smiled. “She sounds thoughtful and wise, your Susannah. I am even more eager to meet her.”

  “Soon, oracle,” he promised, bending over to kiss her on the cheek. “Very soon.”

  He was out of Mount Sinai a little before noon, loaded up with provisions that Mahalah insisted he take even though he only had a short flight ahead of him. The air was chilly in the mountains, cooler still as he climbed to a comfortable flying altitude, but the sun was a bright, happy yellow, and the flight was enjoyable. He made good time, and landed on the Eyrie’s plateau without having paused once to rest.

  He stood there a moment, taking stock. The paired voices of Chloe and Sela drifted down in high sweet harmony; children ran across the open area, calling out cheerful insults. Enoch stood off to one side, deep in conversation with a couple of farmers who appeared to have come to the hold to offer a petition. But nothing bespoke trouble or even urgency. It was as if his six-day absence had been unremarked.

  But then Enoch broke off his conference with the petitioners and crossed the plateau to Gaaron’s side. “Good, you’re back,” he said.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  Enoch jerked his head in the direction of the farmers. “A little flooding south of the Corinnis. I’ve sent Lydia off to take care of it.”

  “Any more reports of burned campsites?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “Any other trouble?”

  Enoch spread his hands. “Zack causing problems again. He always seems to behave worse when you’re not in the hold.”

  “What’s he done?”

  “He and that other one—Jude. Took a couple of the mortal boys high up—then dropped them.”

  “Dropped them? To the ground? Sweet Jovah singing, is anyone—”

  “Not to the ground,” Enoch interrupted. “One of the angels dropped a kid, the other caught him. A game, maybe, except the mortal boys were screaming for help and they didn’t seem to think it was a game. Nicholas and Ahio helped me stop them, and we’ve put Zack and Jude in the storerooms, away from their friends. No one knows what to do with them next, though.”

  Gaaron nodded and ran a hand through his hair. Knotted from flight; he needed a haircut. “If Nicholas and Ahio are back, that must mean Susannah has returned as well,” he said. He was a little surprised to hear the words come out of his mouth.

  Enoch looked surprised, too, at the change of subject. “Yes, they got here the day before yesterday.”

  “Any word on Miriam?”

  Enoch shook his head. “I haven’t really talked to the angelica.”

  Gaaron nodded. “Well, I’ll deal with Zack and Jude once I find a few free minutes. Thanks for the report.”

  He turned toward the tunnels, eager to find Susannah. Eager to hear of the trip, and how Miriam had settled in, and eager to tell her of all that had transpired on his end since she had left. Excited, almost, at the thought of seeing her again, of hearing everything she would have to say.

  Esther caught him before he’d taken ten steps down the corridor, to repeat, though in much more lurid detail, the story of Zack’s latest escapade. He kept an expression of courteous interest on his face, though he had to admit he was feeling neither courteous nor interested, and waited also through a recitation of other small woes.

  “How’s Kaski?” he asked, when the Jansai girl’s name did not come up.

  Esther sniffed. “Better now, though weak as a newborn. We could scarcely get her to eat at all while Susannah was gone, but the minute the angelica returned, the little girl seemed to come back to life. She even attended her classes again. Didn’t say anything, though. I expect she never will.”

  “I’ll need to get Susannah’s assessment of that,” Gaaron said, his voice grave. “Do you know where she is? The angelica?”

  Esther gave a little sniff. “I suppose they’re all in her room,” she said. “Susannah and those girls.”

  Since Miriam was gone, and Chloe and Sela were singing, Gaaron could only suppose “those girls” indicated Kaski and Zibiah. He was a little disappointed. He had hoped to have a long solitary conversation with Susannah—but an informal one, something he didn’t have to engineer. Well, perhaps Zibiah would offer to take Kaski off to her classroom, and he would have a free, unstructured moment with his bride-to-be.

  Perhaps you should have a wedding, Mahalah had said.

  Gaaron pushed the thought away, and strode purposefully down the hall. The door to Susannah’s room was partway open, and even before he got close enough to see around it, he could hear laughter coming from inside. It was infectious; he couldn’t help smiling. There was a soft thud and more laughter, as if someone had been the target of a thrown pillow. “My hair!” someone shrieked. “You’ve messed it all up!”

  Feeling momentarily as he had while dining with all the acolytes at Mount Sinai, Gaaron sounded the door chime. More gales of laughter inside and some scrambling sounds as the women presumably assumed more decorous poses.

  “Is that you, Nick?” Susannah called. “Just come on in.”

  Gaaron pushed the door wider and took a few steps inside. “No,” he said, suddenly feeling a little ridiculous. “It’s just me.”

  For a moment he was the target of four sets of eyes and had the distinct impression that he was completely unwelcome. He was confused himself, because there were two Edori in the room, and Susannah was the only Edori who was supposed to be at the Eyrie. Meanwhile, Kaski shrieked and dived for cover, barricading herself behind pillows and blankets so that he could not see her face. The others fluttered over her—Susannah, Zibiah, the other Edori woman—and Zibiah’s lacy white wings fanned out to provide additional protection from Gaaron’s eyes.

  “I think perhaps I shouldn’t come in,” Gaaron said stiffly.

  Susannah was on her feet and hurrying across the room, her hands outstretched. “No, don’t be silly, she’s just a little theatrical. Gaaron! I didn’t know you were back.”

  He took the proffered hands and peered down at her, thinking she did not seem very happy to see him. At any rate, there was a look of constraint across her features, and her eyes were tired. “I just arrived. Met by Enoch and Esther with tales of disaster in the hold. But I wanted to see if you had returned safely.”

  “Indeed, yes, a couple of days ago.”

  He nodded across the room where the Edori woman was slipping behind Zibiah’s wing to comfort the Jansai girl. “I see you have a friend.”

  Susannah looked over her shoulder toward the bed. “You remember Keren, don’t you? We ran into her in Luminaux, and she was very eager to come for a visit.” She turned back toward Gaaron. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  He shook his head. “Not at all. Someone to keep you company.”

  She smiled. “You have no idea how impressed she’s been by everything at the hold. The water room alone is enough to keep her happy for weeks. She washes her hair twice a day. I’ve told her it will all fall out if she keeps that up.”

  He was beginning to remember Keren now, the vain, pretty girl who had sat before the Edori fire and asked him about opulence at the Eyrie. She had been one of the dozens who shared Susannah’s tent, along with . . .

  Along with Dathan. Along with Susannah’s former lover. If they had encountered Keren in the blue streets of Luminaux, no doubt they had caught up with the rest of the Lohoras as well.

  He dropped her hands. “I’m glad you had a chance to see some of your Edori friends again,” he said, his voice sounding stiff and formal even to his own ears. “She is welcome to stay as long as she likes. I hope she makes friends here.”

  It was not his imagination; Susannah looked as if she felt just as awkward as he did. “Yes, already Chloe and Zib and Sela have sort of adopted her, and Nicholas keeps promising to take her to Velora for a day. I’m sure I’d better go with them, though, because I’m afraid she’ll persuade him to buy everything in the market for her. She could beggar the hold in one day.”

&
nbsp; He offered a perfunctory smile at that. “And how is Kaski? I heard she suffered during your absence but that she has revived upon your return.”

  She glanced behind her again, where whispers and giggles were beginning to emerge from behind Zibiah’s spread wings. “Yes—I was very distressed to learn how poorly she did while I was gone. I’ll have to work on that—making her a little more self-sufficient. But I don’t know, Gaaron. She is a problem I am not certain how to solve. She doesn’t belong here and she’s not happy here. Although clearly she cannot return to her own home.”

  “We will come to a solution,” he said gravely, though at the moment he had little interest in Kaski, or Keren, or anyone else in the entire hold. “Not today, perhaps.”

  “No,” she agreed. She looked over her shoulder once more, then moved toward the door, and Gaaron followed her out into the hall. “How was your own journey?” she asked in a low voice. “I hear you went to visit the Archangel.”

  “I and about fifteen others,” he said. “To discuss the influx of murderous strangers into our midst.” He shrugged; suddenly he felt tired. “We discussed it for hours and resolved nothing. Oh, except some of the Manadavvi think we should begin developing weapons so we can protect ourselves from harm.”

  “Weapons! What kind of weapons? Oh, Gaaron, I’m not in favor of that at all.”

  He smiled a little bitterly. “Neither am I, though I seemed to be the only one in the room who remembered why technology was prohibited in the first place. I do not think we are in any immediate danger of producing war toys, but I would not be surprised if Constantine Lesh returns to his estates and begins reading up on tools of destruction.”

  “We must find a way to stop that,” she said quietly.

  “There are a lot of things we must figure out how to fix,” he said.

  She nodded and leaned against the wall. Her hands were behind her back, as if she braced herself. Against the rosy beige stone of the corridor, her dark skin looked exotic and mysterious.

  “You look tired,” he said abruptly.

  She attempted a smile. “Do I? I am, a little.”

  “Maybe you have taken on too much, bringing Keren back here and trying to mother Kaski as well. I’m sure they all sleep in the same room with you every night. That can’t be restful.”

  “They do, but I like to have them there. I miss sleeping with all my Edori family around me at night.” She paused, as if wondering how he might interpret that, and hurried on. “It’s not—Keren and Kaski are not what is keeping me awake. I have—dreams—sometimes. Or rather, the same dream, all the time. I used to have it now and then, when I lived with the Edori. It’s not—it’s never been a frightening dream. But lately it comes almost every night, and I wake up when it ends. I find it hard to fall back asleep sometimes.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Esther,” he said. “She acts as our apothecary here. She might have some drugs that would ease you back into sleeping.”

  “I know a few of those drugs myself, and I could buy them in the Velora market,” Susannah said. “It’s just . . .” She paused, and shrugged. “Perhaps I will,” she said finally.

  Her voice had been perfectly pleasant, but he felt like he had been rebuffed. As if his suggestions had no merit but she was too polite to say so. This reunion was not going at all the way he had visualized. Instead of feeling more at ease with her as the minutes passed, he felt more clumsy, more stupid. “I meant to ask much sooner,” he said. “How was Miriam when you left her?”

  She gave a little laugh, as if embarrassed that she, too, had forgotten the reason she had left the Eyrie in the first place. “She seemed fine. Frida was happy to take her in and treat her as one of her own daughters. Miriam behaved very well—she was quite polite—though that is no guarantee that she did not turn into a wild child the minute I left the bakery. She has promised to keep in touch, but I don’t expect her to keep the promise. I expect . . .” She laughed again, a little more hopelessly. “I don’t know what I expect.”

  “We will have to wait and see,” he said. “I, at least, appreciate what you have done for my sister.”

  “I would do anything for her,” she said. “I love Miriam.”

  “Yes,” he said, and then his voice caught, and he had nothing more to add.

  After a little pause, she said, “I’m glad you’re back, Gaaron.”

  “Yes,” he said a second time. “It is good to see you again.” And then he gave her a sober smile, nodded again in a formal manner, and turned to pace down the hall. He thought he could feel her watching him, but she made no move to follow, and did not call out his name as he walked away.

  C hapter S ixteen

  Miriam watched Susannah stroll away, her head bent over Keren’s, her laugh floating back along the cobalt cobblestones. In Luminaux, even the noises were blue; the laugh sounded azure, the color of a spring sky. It did not make Miriam feel at all mirthful.

  Frida came to stand beside her. She was a generously sized woman, with the creamy brown skin and radiant black hair of all Edori, and there was a certain calm purposefulness about her. “You might find it hard to settle in, at first,” Frida said. “Would you like to have this afternoon free, to look around Luminaux, or would you like to come in and learn what we do in the bakery?”

  It was kind of her to offer options, Miriam thought. She turned toward the door. “I’ve been to Luminaux,” she said, her voice indifferent but polite. “Why don’t you let me see the bakery?”

  So Frida took her to the kitchen and showed her where the flour was kept, the cool cistern where the butter and milk were stored, the pantry full of spices, the books full of recipes. There was also the sink full of dirty pans, and a pipe system as good as the Eyrie’s for carrying water into the building and away.

  “Looks like a lot of work,” Miriam commented.

  “It is,” Frida said. “But I like it.”

  “Do you want me to start on the dishes?” Miriam offered. “I don’t know how to mix recipes, but I do know how to clean a pot.”

  Frida smiled. “That would be a great help, thank you. We generally close the front of the shop in early evening, just after everyone’s gone home for dinner, because we open so early in the morning. We come back here and clean up, then have our own dinners.”

  “You live nearby?”

  “Upstairs. My oldest daughter moved away last spring, you can have her room to yourself.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Miriam said politely.

  “We’re happy to have you here,” Frida said.

  Miriam said little more than commonplaces as she drew the hot water and filled the sink with soap. She could hear Frida moving around the kitchen behind her, wrapping up softened cakes of butter and scraping burned spills of dough from the stove. Even farther away, she could hear the voices of Frida’s daughters from the front room, talking to customers and laughing with each other. It was a still and quiet place, redolent with aromas so rich they acted on her almost like wine; her mind felt relaxed and unfocused.

  “What about this pan? I think it might need to soak overnight.”

  “It always does. Just run some water in it when you’re done with the rest of the pots.”

  “Anything else before I dry off my hands?”

  “Just this one little dish, if you don’t mind.”

  The girls came laughing in, taking off their aprons and telling some tale of a man who, apparently, dropped by every single day for a cherry-filled pastry. “We pretended we had sold the last one, and he was so sad! He said, ‘Really? But you didn’t save one for me? Here, let me pay you now for the whole next week so that you will always save one for me.’ Then I felt a little bad, but he looked so happy when we brought out the one that we had hidden that I stopped feeling bad.”

  “Why don’t you girls help Miriam carry her things up to your sister’s room? I’m sure she’s tired, and we’ll let her go straight to bed as soon as we’ve had our dinner.”

  Miria
m followed the sisters up a rather narrow staircase to a pretty set of rooms on the second story of the building. None of the rooms was very big, but they were all furnished with colorful Edori scarves and rugs as well as the pottery and glassware so readily available in Luminaux. The windows overlooked the busy streets still crowded with people hurrying home to their own dinners. The sunlight was beginning to fade and the gaslights were starting to come up, and even the flames in the glass globes burned blue.

  Miriam’s room was tiny, barely big enough to accommodate a small bed and a somewhat dilapidated dresser, but the scarlet bedspread and flowered curtains gave it a happy air. “Oh, I like this,” Miriam exclaimed. “It’s so cheerful.”

  “My mother said that at the Eyrie, every bedroom has its own water room, but here there is only one for all of us,” the oldest girl apologized.

  “That should be fine,” Miriam said.

  “Are you hungry? We usually eat right away.”

  “Yes, I’m starved. Can I do anything to help get the meal ready?”

  About half an hour later, the four of them ate a simple dinner around a small table wedged into one corner of the main room. The girls were still laughing and talking, though now they were talking about boys who worked at the studio down the street and not about customers with a yen for sweets. Frida appeared absorbed in daily sales reports, though she looked up once in a while to make a comment that showed she had not missed a word of the conversation.

  And then, from time to time, her thoughtful gaze rested on Miriam and she considered the young hold-born girl as if none of this meekness and good nature fooled her for a minute. During those inspections, Miriam found it harder to maintain her expression of amiability and spent most of her energy finishing up the meal on her plate.

  “Well, let’s clear the table and then the two of you can be off, if you want,” Frida remarked eventually, coming to her feet. “Miriam, feel free to go with them—they’re just going down the street to meet some of their friends. They’ll be happy to take you with them.”