The Alleluia Files (50 page)

Tamar seated herself at random on the edge of a plaid sofa. Jared at once pulled over a stool and settled beside her, shaking his wings out behind him. He immediately took her hand again. Conran straddled a straight-backed chair and laid his arms along its top.

“First, I’d like to hear the story of what happened to you,” he said, addressing Tamar. “I went to Ileah. I knew you had gone there. When there was no sign of you or the others—”

“I arrived a few days after the others, I suppose,” she said. She was trying to keep her voice even, but to her own ears it sounded dreary and strained. “The Jansai had arrived a day or
so before me. There were twelve dead and one gravely injured. I buried the dead and nursed the living.”

“Who?”

“Peter. He’s still alive, I believe.” She looked over at Jared, who had his eyes trained on the floor. “This angel took him to Stockton to seek medical attention.”

Conran, too, glanced at Jared but instantly returned his attention to Tamar. “And then?”

“I moved on to Semorrah. And from there to a wealthy farm outside of Shepherd’s Pass. Where I found Jared again.” Again she looked at the angel. This time he met her eyes, a faint smile on his lips. Well, at this exact moment she was not ready to go into all her dealings with him, all her fears and suspicions. “He told me that Jansai were looking for us—you, me, Duncan, a few others—they had portraits that someone had drawn of us.”

“Where did they get these portraits?” Conran asked sharply.

She shrugged. “From a Jacobite traitor, I suppose. I’ve been thinking about that. Zeke seems the most likely.”

“Zeke! What makes you think he’s fallen into the Jansai’s hands—or the angels’?”

“He went with me to Breven,” she said baldly. “I watched him try to board an Edori ship. I watched him get taken by Jansai. If he wasn’t killed outright, he probably found a way to buy his life. Zeke did not have much stomach for torture, you remember. And he was always a passable artist. He could have rendered our likenesses well enough.”

“So Zeke—or someone—gave our pictures to the Archangel,” Conran said evenly. “And we all suddenly became much more at risk than we believed.”

Tamar nodded tiredly. “Jared told me I was one of the ones they were particularly looking for. I could not imagine why.” She glanced at Lucinda. “Till I saw her. Bael must have realized who I was, although even I did not know.”

The angel leaned forward. She had not, since they seated themselves, once taken her eyes from Tamar’s face. “What did they tell you, then,” she asked, “about your mother and your birth?”

Tamar rubbed a hand across her forehead. “That she and my father had been Jacobites, devoted to the cause. That they had both died in the raid that killed Jacob Fairman. I never learned many details, but somehow I had come to believe that one of
them at least was a Manadavvi. I take it that wasn’t true. I take it none of the stories were true.”

“She was the daughter of an angel, and she lived in Cedar Hills,” Lucinda said. “She left the hold to join the Jacobites, but she was captured a few months before the raid that killed Fairman. My father—our father—was an angel at the hold, and he had always adored her. So I was told. While she was kept prisoner there they became lovers. And you and I were born.”

“Twins. Angel and mortal,” Jared said, speaking for the first time. “It had never happened before. And has not happened since.”

“They took me away from her instantly,” Lucinda continued. “One night, a few weeks after we were born, she managed to escape with you in her arms. But the night was bitterly cold, and she found no shelter. Two days later they found her dead at the side of the road, a dead baby in her arms.” Lucinda took a deep breath. “Apparently, however, the baby was not you.”

All eyes in the room turned expectantly toward Conran. He looked astonished. “What makes you think that
I
—”

“Tell us,” Tamar said shortly. “You have lied to me for twenty-eight years. I think I deserve to hear the true story of my life.”

“I told you what your mother wanted you to know,” Conran replied.

“My mother is dead. Now tell me what
I
want to know.”

He nodded and spent a moment looking down at the floor, as if he was organizing his thoughts or remembering an old tragedy he had long since managed to forget. “It was the coldest winter anyone could remember,” he began, in the low, emphatic voice of the born storyteller. Everyone fell silent to listen. “Even in southern Jordana, where the seasons are usually not so harsh, it was colder than a man could stand to be outside for longer than an hour. The Jacobites were still stricken from the loss of Jacob Fairman, and no one was sure what to do next. Most of us had scattered to the homes of friends and family members who were tolerant of our incendiary politics. Elinor and I were staying in Luminaux in the house of her brother’s son.

“News came about Galena, one of the Jacobites, who was spending the winter at her sister’s house near Cedar Hills. Her sister was some sort of domestic who was employed by the angels, and she had only begrudgingly taken Galena in because
Galena was about to have a baby. Galena had written to Elinor asking if she could come when the baby was due, and now, during the worst winter of the century, it was her time.

“So Elinor and I traveled to Cedar Hills. But by the time we arrived on Galena’s doorstep, tragedy had already come to visit. The baby had been born amid much bleeding, strangling on its own cord, and unable to draw more than a single breath. And this baby had nearly killed Galena in the process. When we walked in the door, the sister began screaming, blaming us and our heresies for the baby’s death and her sister’s desperate condition. She ran from the sickroom and locked herself in her own bedchamber, and would not emerge to watch her sister die.

“Elinor and I turned to tending Galena, but we knew we had come too late. Within an hour Galena died in Elinor’s arms. I was still ripping the mortuary cloths to use for wrapping the body when there was a furious clamor outside. Someone pounding at the door, someone crying to be let in. I ran to the door and threw it open, and on a frigid blast of air, in tumbled Rinalda.”

He paused a moment, rubbing his hands together; he seemed, even in this close, warm house, to be suffering again from that freezing air and a chilling discovery. “Elinor and I dragged her to the fire and began stripping her body of wet clothes. She did not have the strength to weep or speak, though we pelted her with questions. We were stupefied to find, as we pulled back the sweater nearest her skin, an infant girl swaddled in rags and strapped to Rinalda’s chest.

“The baby was rosy and warm, kept safe from the bitter air by the heat of the mother’s body. We had heard, through Galena and her sister, that Rinalda had given birth to twin girls, one angel, one mortal. Elinor held the child in her arms and exclaimed, ‘Rinalda, is this your baby girl?’ And Rinalda gathered up every last bit of strength she had and whispered back, ‘Keep her safe. Guard her from all the angels. Never tell her who her father was or who I was. Never let her seek out those who have betrayed me—and will betray her. Never! Promise me this!’ Elinor protested, but I promised for both of us. Only a few hours after this Rinalda died.”

Again, Conran paused; again he seemed to shiver from a remembered cold. “We had other friends in Cedar Hills,” he said slowly. “While Elinor watched that baby, I ran out into the
awful night to the house of a friend who had use of a horse and cart. He and I took Rinalda and Galena’s baby and threw their bodies into the back of that cart, and we drove as far from the lights of Cedar Hills as we could stand. And then we dumped those corpses on the side of the road, brutally unprotected from the malice of winter, and left them there for anyone to discover. And may I say that I have not, since I was a boy, believed in the existence of the god, but that night for the whole drive back to Cedar Hills, I prayed for those two wretched, abandoned souls.

“When I returned to Galena’s sister’s house, Elinor was gone. She had taken the baby to another friend and left Galena for me to prepare for burial. This I did. It was while I was sorting through Rinalda’s clothes one last time that I found a roll of fifty gold coins sewn into a pocket. I put them aside to give to her baby girl at a time that would seem appropriate.

“The next morning, when Galena’s weeping sister finally emerged from her room, I told her that we had wrapped the dead baby in the dead woman’s arms. I remember that she nodded and seemed pleased. ‘Good. Galena will keep her warm,’ she said to me. I thought of that frozen body out on the Jordana highways, and said nothing.

“Elinor and I stayed for the funeral and left for Luminaux as soon as we could, the purloined baby in our arms. It was two days before we thought to give the child a name. I wanted to choose something rebellious and wild, for Rinalda would never have given her daughter a traditional name culled from the Librera. But Elinor was adamant. ‘We will call her Tamar,’ she said. ‘For the Tamar of legend was also a seditious mortal born to angels. It is a name that will serve her well.’ And Tamar she thereafter became.”

He fell silent again, now reviewing a more recent history, and then he sighed. “We did what we could for that baby,” he said. He still had not raised his eyes to look at Tamar, or any of them. “We gave her whatever love we had. We taught her the things we knew. We raised her on what we still believe is the truth. But it has been a hard life for her, as it has been for us, and I have wondered more than once what would have happened to her had Rinalda not stolen her away from her prison in Cedar Hills.”

He sighed deeply and finally looked at his audience, glancing
from face to face as if gauging how deeply each listener had been struck by the story. Tamar herself was numb. Her head was pounding, her eyes felt oiled in acid; she could not move, she could scarcely think. She did not want to hear one more word of this terrible story.

“And I wonder,” Conran said with a little more passion, “why she picked that night of all nights to flee from Cedar Hills. Surely there had been other opportunities to run—or would be again. Why the night so cold that no one could survive it?”

A small voice spoke from the other side of the room. Or at least the voice seemed small. Perhaps Tamar’s ears had merely shrunk down. “Because that was the night Bael chose to help her.”

“
What?
” That word was much closer, much louder, leaping from Jared’s lips. “Who told you that?”

“My aunt Gretchen. She says she saw Bael sneak into my mother’s chamber that night and usher her from the hold. She says Bael wanted her to die in the winter night. She says that’s why she took me away from Cedar Hills.”

Conran nodded soberly. “It is about what I would expect of him, to murder a helpless girl in a cruel and clever way. And it makes me glad to think that we have fooled him all these years by keeping Tamar alive and whole. Would that we could have saved a hundred more just like her.”

Tamar shut her eyes. She could not keep the room in focus; Conran spoke awhile longer but none of his words registered. She heard various voices call out her name but she did not have the strength to respond. Her head expanded and contracted with a slow, painful rhythm, and all she wanted to do was sleep.

“There’s a room upstairs,” Conran said, and suddenly she was swept up in someone’s arms—Jared’s, she knew, for she had become quite familiar with the feel of his arms around her. He climbed a short stairway and within minutes had laid her on a narrow bed. She had a confused impression of shapes and shadows around her, and she caught fragments of whispered consultations. “Let me stay with her,” a woman said, and a man protested. Tamar did not care if all of them camped out on the floor or abandoned this room, this house, this village utterly. She turned to her side, and she slept.

Dreaming again. Or perhaps not. It was hard to tell sleep from reality, nightmare from memory. Light and dark fenced and feinted, gleaming thrust and parry; figures bulged into menace, then melted into sweet brilliance. More than once, someone held fiery liquid to her mouth, and she drank, spilling droplets down her cheek and into her collar. When she cried out in her sleep, someone was instantly at her side, cool hand on her forehead, low voice chasing away terror. She never saw this person’s face, but she was not sure; it could have been a parade of people, dozens of hands, or it could have been the disembodied spirits of her imagination.

Once in a while she was sure she woke, fevered but lucid, and then she opened her eyes. Somewhere in the room there was a low, electric light that threw all the shapes into unwavering relief: the tall dresser, the cracked cheval mirror, the straight-backed chair placed a few feet from her bed. Every time she woke, she felt a moment’s surge of panic, a desperate sense of desolation, till she looked over at that chair and saw the familiar sight: angel wings draped across a sleeping body, white feathers drifting across the floor. Only then did the fear subside, only then could she sleep again.

And has it come to this?
she thought crossly during one of those brief clearheaded periods.
That I cannot sleep without an angel by my side
? But these past few days she had grown so dependent on Jared’s strength that now she could not sleep unless he was there to guard her. She woke; she craned her neck till she could catch a glimpse of those sleek wings; and then she slept again.