Angel-Seeker (39 page)

And, in fact, he seemed both touched and greedy when he entered the room a couple of hours later, none too steady on his feet. “Aha! I thought I remembered!” he exclaimed when he saw her. “This was to be our night! I couldn't remember absolutely positively, but I hoped! Yes, I did, I hoped you'd be here. I even left my party early.”

She smiled at him and gave him a cursory kiss. “Well, since you've had to pass on a few rounds with your friends, maybe I can make it up to you,” she said. “I brought a bottle of wine for us to share. I hope it's a kind you like? It's from a Manadavvi vineyard.”

Tola, who knew most everything, had recommended both the brand and the seller, so Elizabeth was not entirely surprised when David let out an exclamation of satisfaction. “Give me anything from a Manadavvi field, and I'll drink it from now till sunrise,” he said, snatching up the bottle to examine it. “Well done, my surprising little laundress. Well done.”

He pried out the cork and she made sure he drank from the proper container. As she'd foreseen, he laughed at her choice of glassware, but he approved of the gesture so much that the mockery didn't last for long. If the manna root had any bitter aftertaste, it wasn't evident by the satisfaction with which David downed his second and third mugs of the wine. Elizabeth contented herself with one serving, impressed by the wine's smooth taste and heady effects. No wonder everyone raved about the Manadavvi vineyards.

Whether the secret powder had any instant impact on David she couldn't judge. He certainly turned quickly from imbibing to embracing, but the quality of the lovemaking was no different, as far as she could tell. But she thought the potion might be like disease or fever,
slow to take hold but impossible to shake, and so she wasn't too worried when the night did not end with any passionate declarations of love.

“Next week, then?” she asked as she was pulling her clothes back on. “Our usual schedule?”

“That sounds good,” David said drowsily, watching her body disappear beneath the folds of fabric. “It's always good to see my little laundress.”

She kissed him again and let herself out.

Faith had had significantly better luck with her portion, raving so much about Jason's tenderness and stamina that Elizabeth started to feel a little jealous. She didn't get to hear the story till the following day, because Faith spent the night in her angel's arms, listening to him tell her that he loved her.

“I am delirious with happiness,” Faith claimed, spinning around the room with her hands clasped beneath her chin and her eyes raised heavenward toward the god. “A gift from Jovah indeed! Thank you, great god, thank you!”

“When do you see him again?” Elizabeth said, throttling down her uncharitable emotions.

“Tonight! And tomorrow night! And maybe every night after that! Elizabeth, I think he may be truly in love with me!”

“I am happy for you,” Elizabeth forced herself to say. And it was true, except she would have been happier had she had a similar story to report.

“Maybe he will love me forever, even if I never bear his child. Maybe he will—maybe he will make me his wife. Angels marry, don't they? Some of them.”

“The leaders of the hosts at the three holds,” Elizabeth said. “I don't know about the other angels.”

“But there's no reason they
can't
marry.”

“None that I know of.”

Faith started spinning again. “I shall be an angel's wife, and live in the hold, and Rachel and Gabriel shall invite me to their dinners, and I shall stand beside the angels on the Plain of Sharon every year when it is time to sing the Gloria—”

Elizabeth smiled, because it was really hard to believe any of this would come true. “Unless you get so dizzy that you fall and hit your head and forget your own name, let alone your lover's,” she said.

Faith came to a shaky halt and stood there looking wobbly for a moment. “And I shall invite you to all my angel parties, and you shall meet someone who is much kinder and more attentive than David, and you shall bear twenty angel children, and we shall be happy the rest of our lives.”

“Twenty?” Elizabeth repeated. “I think I'd be happy with one.”

“Then you shall just bear one,” Faith said. “But we shall still be very happy. And always the best of friends.”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth, who had never had a friend before and was surprised to find out that she really did expect to know Faith the rest of her life. “We'll always be the best of friends.”

Elizabeth brought more of her ground-up powder to her next two trysts with David, and he happily drank down the spiked wine, but it still seemed to have no effect on him. Or no greater effect.

“Maybe I'm just not very lovable,” Elizabeth said to Mary a couple of weeks later, when the healer asked how the bewitching was proceeding. “David certainly shows me no more affection than he ever has.”

“Maybe even before you gave him the potion, he already loved you as much as he's capable of loving anyone,” Mary observed. “Did you consider that?”

Elizabeth thought that over for a moment. “That's a little sad.”

Mary smiled faintly. “Maybe you'd better look around for someone who's got a greater capacity for love.”

The angel Jason certainly seemed to have that capacity, for he had become simply enamored of Faith. He even came to Tola's house once or twice to fetch her, causing all the girls to sigh and coo over his long, silky blond hair and his boyish smile. Only Shiloh affected disinterest in him, smoothing her hands over her stomach when he was introduced to her, as if to communicate without words that Faith might have won a prize, but Shiloh had earned the ultimate trophy.

But even in Faith's sunny life, storm clouds were forming. “He has to go back to Gaza,” she told Elizabeth one night through
a frenzy of tears. “To Monteverde. And he's leaving in three days!”

“For how long?” Elizabeth asked.

“I don't know! Forever! Ariel is sending some other angel down here, and Jason is going back to Monteverde. I shall never see him again!”

“Yes you will, of course you will. He has said he loves you, and I'm sure he means it. He will send for you, or you can follow him—”

“I can't move to Monteverde uninvited!”

“No, but there is a city nearby. You could live there. You could find work there as easily as you have here, and you could be near him—”

“What if he doesn't want me to come?”

“What if he does?”

Faith paced around the room. It was late at night, and she had been crying since about noon, when she received the news. She looked awful. Her dark, curly hair was tangled and knotted; her face was blotched with red, and her nose looked sore and puffy. The wild expression on her face didn't help, either.

“I think the potion is wearing off,” Faith admitted. “I think—these last few days—he still seems fond of me, but he doesn't seem so infatuated. He didn't seem at all upset by the thought of leaving me behind! I think he's tired of me.”

“We'll grind up more of the grains,” Elizabeth said. “He'll be sure to take you to Monteverde then.”

Faith shook her head. “No, I—if he doesn't want me—well, I'll do just fine. I will. I just—I was hoping—
this
time I would have an angel baby,
this
time it would be all right.”

A few more incoherent exchanges like this, and Elizabeth had heard enough. “That's it. You're going to bed.”

“I can't. I won't sleep. I'll just lie there—”

Elizabeth was already rummaging through a little satchel she'd bought, much like Mary's, only not nearly so full of interesting concoctions. “You'll take one of these tablets, and you'll sleep well enough,” Elizabeth said firmly. “You'll feel better in the morning.”

Indeed, Faith slept through the night and seemed much calmer the next day, though pale and apathetic. “You come home early tonight and you go straight to bed,” Elizabeth told her.

“I can't,” Faith said with a sigh. “I'm meeting Jason for dinner.”

“Well, then, you come home and take a good long nap. And when you get up, you put on your best dress and braid your hair back in a fancy style. Make yourself so beautiful that he won't be able to leave you behind.”

“Three more days,” Faith said in a whisper. “He's leaving in three more days.”

“Three days left to love him, then,” Elizabeth said.

As for herself, she had no interesting appointments to keep that night, so she agreed to go out with a group of the other women from the house. They went to a new restaurant, one that had just opened on the west edge of town and was designed to accommodate large parties that didn't have a lot of money. Elizabeth looked around the big, open room, all whitewashed walls and dark supporting timbers, and thought she might have seen this place when it was still a pile of lumber and nails. She and Mary had been in this very neighborhood on the first morning that Elizabeth had worked for the healer, when they had been summoned to sew shut a man's bleeding head.

The day she had met Rufus. Elizabeth had never seen him since, though she and Mary had been called down to more than one construction site in the past ten weeks. She wondered if he had moved on, back to Semorrah, or gone off to seek his lost Edori relatives. She wondered if he'd found another pretty girl to spend his salary on. She didn't think about him often, of course, just now and then, when she was in this area or she passed a man who looked Edori. She really scarcely knew him at all.

“I'm
famished,
” declared Ruth, who could be counted on to say those exact words at every single meal. “And it smells wonderful here!”

“I'm going to have the fish,” Marah decided.

“The beef for me.”

“Anything with sauce. The richer the better.”

Shiloh put a hand down on her stomach. “I have to be careful what I eat,” she said. “Angel babies are very delicate, you know.”

“Oh really?” Ruth said brightly. “I never knew an angel yet who didn't eat everything he wanted, down to the bones and gizzard.”

“A full-grown angel, perhaps,” Shiloh snapped right back. “But when they're this small—in the womb—”

“Yes, I'm sure you're doing everything you can to protect your little one,” Marah said soothingly. She was always the peacemaker of the group. “So what can you eat? Do you see anything you'd like?”

Soon enough they had all ordered, and they sat around the table chattering with easy enthusiasm about clothes, men, upcoming social events, and the prospect of a new angel flying in from Gaza. “He's older than Nathan, but not really
old,
” Ruth said. “And not as handsome as Jason, but fair, like Jason.”

“Have you ever met him?”

“Not to talk to. He was in Castelana a lot one summer when I was working there. They were having trouble with too much rain, and he was the one who always came to town to pray. He stayed at our inn a few times. I thought he seemed very nice.”

Shiloh refused all wine, because of the baby. She couldn't choke down any of her meat, because of the baby. She couldn't have dessert, because too much sugar would alarm the baby.

Elizabeth thought she might have to kill her.

Still, it was clear that Shiloh was annoying everyone else as much as she was annoying Elizabeth, and that made the theatrics a little easier to bear. Ruth ordered a huge piece of creamy white cake, decorated with frosting in swirls and loops, and crammed the first bite in her mouth.

“Thank you, Jovah, for making sure I wasn't pregnant tonight,” Ruth said, piously turning her eyes toward the heavens. “Because this certainly is the best cake I ever had in my life.”

Shiloh turned her head aside and had to brush away a tear of hurt or anger.

Elizabeth caught Ruth's eye, grinned, and had to turn her own head away to try to hide her laughter. The motion brought a few nearby tables into her view, and she idly looked over the occupants. Most of the other diners were mortal, since this was a place that featured hearty food without a lot of fancy touches, but there were two angels that she hadn't noticed when she first came in. One was Lael, who lived at the dorm where Elizabeth used to work.

One was David. And he was with a mortal girl.

Elizabeth felt herself turn motionless and cold as she watched the two of them across the room. The woman was small-boned and dainty, with finely cut features and dark ringlets of silken hair. She was dressed in some kind of floating, diaphanous material of dark red, and she gestured as often as possible to cause the fabric to fold and glitter around her arms. Her face was animated, and she seemed fascinated by whatever it was that David was saying.

Elizabeth transferred her gaze to the angel. He was talking rapidly and with great exuberance, now and then throwing his head back to laugh. But then he would quickly focus his eyes back on the woman's face, as if unwilling to miss out on a smile or overlook a single expression. He looked attentive; no, that was not strong enough.
Captivated,
Elizabeth thought. As if this slip of a girl had captured his heart.