Angelica (18 page)

“But—why couldn't—why didn't anyone stop him?”

Miriam was combing her hair out and peering into a hand-held mirror to see if the chemicals had had any effect. They
didn't appear to have. “He was leader of the host here,” Miriam said. “Everyone respected him—”

“Everyone was afraid of him,” Chloe interjected.

“And everyone thought he was probably right,” Miriam finished up. She set down the mirror and looked over at Susannah with an impish grin. “I was a pretty awful child.”

“She was always in trouble,” Sela said.

“What did you do?”

Miriam shrugged. “Stole things. Ran away. Hid out in Velora for three days so they couldn't find me. Lied.”

Susannah thought of that big sober angel who had spirited her away from her clan and who seemed the embodiment of sound judgment. “And what did Gaaron say about all this?”

Chloe stood behind Miriam and began making tiny braids in the blond hair. “He was gone for a long time,” Chloe said. “Fostering with Adriel and Moshe at Windy Point. I think it was one of the reasons Michael was so cross with Miriam. He missed Gaaron so much.”

“Michael?”

“My father,” Miriam said. “Plus, he hated Adriel and he didn't like the fact that she had Gaaron and he didn't. It made him very unpleasant.”

“Why did he let Gaaron go to her, then?”

Zibiah rolled to her back and put her arms behind her head. Her wings spread out behind her, one of them drifting off the side of the bed and the other folding up against the side of the wall, the ragged wingtips making sharp serrated shadows against the stone. “It's a tradition,” she said. “The young, promising angels are always sent for a few years to live with the Archangel, to learn what it's like to rule the realm. That way, if Jovah chooses them to be the next Archangel, they will have some idea of what they're getting into. Michael was sure Gaaron would be named the next Archangel. But Gaaron wasn't the only angel fostered at Windy Point. There were four or five others over the next few years who also lived there. No one knew which one the god would choose.”

Susannah looked at Miriam. “Your father must have been very proud when Gaaron was chosen, then,” she said.

“My father was dead by then,” Miriam said in a voice of
great satisfaction. “I think the god waited on purpose to make the announcement.”

“Miriam,” Susannah said in a voice of reproach. “Yovah is not so spiteful.”

Miriam shrugged. “Not spiteful. Just.”

“But things were better anyway, once Gaaron got back,” Chloe said. She began plaiting the smaller braids together, looping a blue ribbon through the whole confection. “Michael was just a little afraid of Gaaron.”

“Afraid of his own son? Why, how old was Gaaron?”

“He came back from Windy Point when he was nineteen,” Sela said. “And he was big. Not quite as muscled as he is now, but just as tall. And his wings! Michael had always had the greatest wingspan of anyone at the Eyrie, and he was very proud of his appearance. But Gaaron had grown a foot in height and three feet in wingspan while he was gone, and when he stood beside his father, he made Michael look small.”

“I had never thought Michael would be intimidated by anyone,” Chloe said.

“What did Gaaron do?” Susannah asked. She was horrified and fascinated by the whole story.

Miriam laughed. “Oh, not much. Things were pretty quiet when Gaaron first came back. We were all getting used to each other again. And then, a few times my father would yell at me for some reason, and I think once or twice he hit me when Gaaron was in the other room, or maybe once when Gaaron could see him, but it was all very restrained. Not like it had been while Gaaron was gone.”

She held up the mirror again to check Chloe's work. “Oh, I like that. Use more of that dark blue ribbon.” She laid the mirror back down. “And then one day I'd done something—taken one of my mother's rings, I think, a gift that my father had given her—and my father started ranting at me. Slapped me once, went stalking around the room in a rage, slapped me again, stood in front of me screaming so loud that his face was red. And Gaaron walked into the room.”

She paused for a moment, as if reliving that scene, and everyone else in the room was silent. “He'd been in his bedroom but he'd been able to hear every word, I suppose, every
slap. And he stood there in the doorway for a long time, just looking at my father. And—I'll never forget this—my father's face had been so red, and now it turned completely white. He straightened up and stood there next to me, and he seemed to shrink and shrink, till he was almost my size. And Gaaron seemed so big, just standing there watching us.

“And then Gaaron walked across the room, really slowly, and he kind of fanned his wings out. I remember, because they seemed to fill the whole room, and they were so white and so bright that they made the entire room glow. And he knelt down beside me, and he put his arms around me, and then he folded his wings around me. And so then I couldn't see anything, of course, but I felt him turn his head so he could still look at our father. And he said, in the calmest voice you can imagine, ‘Don't you ever touch her again.' And he picked me up and took me back to his room and we played card games for the rest of the night.”

Miriam shrugged and picked up the mirror again. “Oh, that's good,” she said.

“I thought about putting in some silver thread,” Chloe said.

“No, I like it just like this.”

“But, Miriam,” Susannah cried. “What happened after that? With your father?”

Miriam laughed. “Well, he never did hit me again. And once in a while he'd yell at me, but Gaaron would just have to walk into the room and he'd stop. It was great—except that then Gaaron always felt like
he
had to point out my faults and tell me when I was doing something wrong. I never cared what Gaaron said, though. I went ahead and did exactly what I wanted to anyway.”

Susannah let out a deep breath; she didn't realize she'd been holding it. “What a tale,” she said softly. “But I like your brother better for it.”

“Everybody likes Gaaron,” Miriam said, looking in the mirror again.

From behind Miriam, Chloe put her two hands on the blond girl's face and turned Miriam in Susannah's direction. “So what do you think?” she asked. “A style you'd like for your own wedding?”

Miriam looked gorgeous, her hair a textured, colorful weave of elegance. “It's beautiful,” Susannah said.

“Well, come here and sit down,” Chloe said. “Let's see what I can do.”

So for the next half hour, Susannah sat in the middle of the room while Chloe fussed with her hair and Sela tried cosmetics on her face. “Your skin is so dark, but it has these bronze tones,” Sela murmured. “I don't know that I have the right colors here, but let me try this—”

“Do you have any gold ribbon?” Chloe asked. “Or maybe red. I need something really bright against all this black.”

“Oh, I like that, I do,” Miriam murmured, stepping back to get a look at the whole effect. But they wouldn't let Susannah even peek into the mirror until both makeup and coiffure were complete.

And then they let her stand and walked her over to the big mirror in the corner of the room, the one that was as tall as Susannah herself and could contain her whole body if she paused before it. But now all she looked at was her head and her hair. And she gasped.

“It doesn't even look like me,” she said, turning from side to side to try to view every angle. Sela had brushed smoky rouge onto her cheeks and applied dark red lipstick to her mouth; she had rimmed Susannah's eyes with a faint black line, which made her dark eyes appear huge. Chloe had woven gold and crimson ribbons into the sleek black hair, turning it into a vivid tapestry of unrelated images.

“Bells,” Chloe said, as Susannah twisted this way and that. “For her wedding day, little bells in her hair. Don't you think?”

Opinion was divided on that, but Susannah liked sound just as much as she liked color, and she thought she would like to try the bells sometime. “I look so
beautiful
,” she said at last. “Thank you all so much! You make me feel so welcome.”

An outcry at that—“Of course you're welcome among us!”—but they didn't really know what she meant. None of them knew what it was like to be so far from friends and family that you could not even imagine how to get back, and how lonely the company of strangers could be, even the
company of well-meaning strangers. But these little acts of friendship mattered immeasurably to Susannah, slight and trivial though they were. Being alone was so much worse to one who had always been surrounded. And now she felt, just a little bit, covered up again by love.

They talked late into the night, drowsing on their bedrolls. Susannah drifted off to sleep more than once, convinced that the conversation was finally done, and then she would wake to catch a few more scattered words. Now and then, someone rose to use the water room, invariably tripping over some supine body on the floor, and then there would be smothered giggles and an exchange of insults. The little Jansai girl cried out once in the night, and Susannah stirred, but before she could even sit up, she could hear Zibiah's voice comforting the mikala in the dark.

It was as much like sleeping in an Edori tent as not sleeping in an Edori tent could ever be. In the morning, despite not having slept very many hours, Susannah felt as rested and as happy as she had felt since the last night she had slept in Dathan's arms, still convinced he loved her.

The next day they spent down in Velora, all except Zibiah, who had work to do in the hold, and the Jansai girl, who stayed with Zibiah. They spent a great deal of time in the open-air markets, fingering the merchandise and bargaining with the vendors, who seemed just a little wary of this explosion of girls into their midst. Although only Miriam, at nineteen, was really a girl, Susannah thought. Chloe and Sela were a couple of years older than she was, Susannah guessed, and Zibiah was somewhere in between. But they acted young, young as Keren, and Miriam's high spirits infected all of them. So perhaps the merchants were right to be wary.

In fact, Susannah kept her eye on Miriam, and watched her as she fondled gold bracelets or let the piles of semiprecious stones sift through her fingers. The look on Miriam's face was speculative, and Susannah remembered how, the night before, the blond girl had admitted that she had stolen things in the past. Miriam had a silver necklace in her hands and had been looking at it for the longest time, when she glanced up to find Susannah's eyes on her. Susannah shook
her head, and Miriam smiled and put the necklace back.

After that, Susannah watched her even more closely.

They bought bolts of fabric, yards of lace and trim, handfuls of beads and sequins and bells. No one ever seemed to pay for anything, for Susannah saw no money changing hands, but all the women flashed their bracelets at the merchants as a sort of identification. Miriam, when asked, confirmed this; the Eyrie had an unlimited spending budget across Samaria, and all a resident had to do was show the coded bracelet to be able to make a purchase.

“You'll get one, too, when you and Gaaron are married,” Miriam said, displaying hers to Susannah. It was a slim spiral of gold set at random intervals with three sapphires arranged in triangles. “It has to include sapphires in this pattern, but you can have them set in gold or silver, in a wide band or a narrow one—whatever you like.”

“It looks very expensive,” Susannah said.

Miriam laughed. “The Eyrie is rich.”

Late in the day, the four of them were joined by Nicholas and Ahio, and, after much discussion, they settled on a small, dark, and clearly fashionable establishment in which to have dinner. The group including angels was escorted instantly to a table while other patient would-be diners had to wait a little longer. Susannah smiled an apology at the mere mortals as they passed, but saw no looks of recrimination on their faces. Apparently, being an angel was a pretty good excuse for any kind of behavior, rude or not. Or maybe it was youth that excused it.

They ate well, drank more wine than Susannah was comfortable with, and laughed even more than they had the night before. A man at a neighboring table had another bottle of wine sent over to them, so Miriam went to thank him and his friends and stayed a long time at his table. Chloe, Sela, and the men seemed to think nothing of this, but Susannah watched her, a little troubled. Miriam's open friendliness was one of her most endearing traits, the Edori thought—but maybe one of her more dangerous ones. Susannah was not so sure the young woman should be laughing so flirtatiously with men whom no one from the angel hold seemed to know.

“Excuse me,” Susannah said to the others, and went to join Miriam and her newfound friends.

Miriam seemed delighted at Susannah's appearance. “Sit with us for a while! This is—wait, I can remember—this is Leet and Kasho and—and—Morvai! They've only been in Velora a few days, but they've already eaten at every restaurant and tavern in town.”

“And we like this one the best by far,” Morvai said smoothly.