Quatrain (12 page)

The dark one glanced in my direction, wholly uninterested. “How important to you is this friend?”

Demaris gave him a slow smile. “Well,” she purred, “she taught me some—skills—that I think might end up seeming very important to
you
. So I think
you’re
the one who owes her a favor.”

Both men laughed raucously at that, eager and delighted. “Doesn’t matter to me,” said the shorter one. “I’ll carry her up to the mountain if you want to fly with Matthew.”

Demaris picked up her flowered canvas bag and held out her other arm. “That sounds perfect.”

And just like that, I was in an angel’s arms, flying up to Windy Point.

I
wandered the corridors of Windy Point for an hour, trying to find Sheba.

For the most part, the hold was exactly as I remembered. The gray stone walls seemed to have been hewn directly out of the bones of the mountain; here and there you could imagine you still saw the original fault lines carved by axe or chisel. The corridors, which were gloomy and dark, snaked and twisted around in no easily comprehensible plan. Newcomers invariably got lost, and there were stories of people who had starved to death trying to find their way back to a familiar room, though I had always suspected those tales were apocryphal.

And the wind. Jovah defend me, the
wind
.

It moaned up from the floors, hissed down from the ceilings. Even the big interior rooms of the hold seemed linked to narrow passageways that rattled and whined and screeched with wind. The sounds were inescapable, night or day. Some people claimed that, after they had lived at the hold long enough, they grew used to the wind—or stopped noticing it—or began to like its mistuned music. I always assumed those people were lying.

Nonetheless, eighteen years ago, I had been familiar enough with these groaning passages to find my way easily from one part of the hold to another. I knew where the kitchens were located, where the laundry rooms could be found; I knew the hidden passageways that led to Raphael’s private chambers and the back stairwells that climbed to the small rooms where servants and angel-seekers slept. Every time I came to a key turning, I would pause, consider, and make a choice. So far, I had been right every time.

But I still hadn’t found Sheba.

I first tried the kitchen, where harassed cooks and sullen girls worked to clean away remnants of the evening meal. I snatched up some bread and cheese, which earned me a burning glance from the woman I took to be the head cook, and crammed it in my mouth while I looked around. But Sheba wasn’t there.

She wasn’t in the laundry area, the huge steaming vat of a room where workers were busy around the clock washing clothes and linens for the residents of the hold.

I made my way with some stealth to the common rooms, particularly the huge dining hall with its high chandeliers and endless array of tables. Dinner was long past, but at least twenty people remained, drinking wine, laughing immoderately, and nuzzling whatever partner they had picked out for the night. I stayed well back, clinging to the shadows along the walls, trying to determine if Sheba was one of the girls wrapped in the arms of a drunken angel. She wasn’t, and I was unutterably relieved.

I moved on.

Not until I reached the cramped upper corridors did I actually speak to anyone. I passed the open door of one of those tiny rooms and heard two women inside bitterly arguing about someone called Jacob.

“Excuse me,” I said, peering in at their startled faces. “I’m looking for a girl named Sheba. Dark haired, about my height. Is she here?”

“What do you want with her?” one of the girls asked.

“I have a message for her. It’s very important.”

The other girl shrugged. “She sleeps in the room down the hall. The door with the big bare spot in the paint.”

I felt my heart beat a little faster. “Is she there now?”

A hunch of the shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“Thank you.”

But she wasn’t in the room, which was so small it might originally have been designed for storage. A quick look through the possessions strewn around and I knew I was in the right place, for I recognized Sheba’s shoes and jewelry.

But if she was not here, and she was not in any of the common areas, she was no doubt in bed with some angel.

Even I did not have the courage to stalk through these hallways and burst into angels’ bedrooms at night, when most of them were probably engaged in some kind of sexual activity. With a sigh, I made room for my own suitcase on the floor next to Sheba’s, and I lay down on the bed. Not expecting to be able to close my eyes, I fell asleep within minutes. Even the wind could not keep me awake for long.

When I opened my eyes, Sheba was standing against the wall, staring at me. I made a little sound and scrambled to my feet, pushing my tangled hair back behind my ears. I wasn’t sure what time it was—there were no windows in this room—but by the heavy, exhausted way I felt, I guessed it to be an hour or two past midnight.

“Sheba,” I said.

I don’t know what I expected her to say when she first laid eyes on me. I had been so focused on getting here, on finding her, on wresting her out of Raphael’s cruel hands, that I had not bothered to wonder whether or not Sheba wanted to be rescued. Certainly if any of
my
fond relatives had come to Windy Point twenty years ago to try to convince me to leave, I would have laughed in their faces.

But Sheba was not laughing. Her face was so set that I could not read it, but she did not look horrified or contemptuous or angry or amused. She watched me a moment in utter silence, and then she said, “I knew you would come for me.”

“I know you think the life of an angel-seeker is glamorous and exciting,” I said, wishing I had given more thought to what I would say in this particular speech, “but it’s not. It’s degrading and ugly and powerless and short. I want you to come home with me.”

“I want to come home,” she said, still in that careful, neutral voice. “But Raphael won’t let me.”

I felt a clutch of fear. “You asked him already? You told him you wanted to leave?”

She nodded. “After my very first night with him. He was—” She paused, shook her head, and went on. “I wasn’t a virgin, of course; I’m sure you knew that. But he—I found that I did not enjoy his company.” She shrugged, conveying a wealth of information, from a deep sense of revulsion to a lack of self-pity. “That did not seem to trouble him.”

“Raphael is a very depraved man.”

“So I told him I wanted to go home. And he laughed. And he said someday an angel might have time to carry me down from the hold, but it wouldn’t be any day soon.”

“We’ll leave tomorrow,” I promised.

She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “And I knew you would come for me, but I also knew it wouldn’t do any good. Raphael likes having people in his power. He will like having you in his power as well.”

“I can deal with Raphael,” I said. “Get some sleep now, and pack your things in the morning. We’ll leave as soon as I’ve had a chance to talk to him.”

Now some of her unnatural calm began to crack. I saw her eyes shine with tears, and her hands clench together, though she tried to hold on to her composed expression. “I wish that was true,” she said, her voice hardly above a whisper. “But—”

In a single step, I was close enough to gather her into an embrace. She rested her head against my shoulder and began sobbing in my arms, something she had not done since she was eleven or twelve years old. “Don’t worry, baby. Don’t worry,” I murmured into her ear. “Aunt Salome will save you from the angels.”

It was important to look good. To scrub off the grime of travel and wash my hair and put on the one clean dress that I had managed to save all during the trip from Laban. I didn’t want to be
attractive
for Raphael—that wasn’t it—but I did not want to seem strained and desperate. I needed the advantage of self-confidence, and I had always secured that by appearing my best.

I found I remembered precisely how to get to Raphael’s private quarters.

I waited until nearly noon to seek him out. He was a notoriously late sleeper and he snarled through the early hours of the day. But once he had had a shave and a meal, he regained his urbanity and his self-possession. I wanted him to listen to me, and for that I needed him awake, alert, and sane.

There was the main door to his suite, of course, accessed from the front hallway. Depending on his mood or his activities, he sometimes declined to open this door, no matter how long a visitor knocked or called. But there was a secondary entrance, reached through a warren of back corridors, that fed directly to his bedroom. That door had rarely been locked back when I lived at Windy Point, and it was not locked this morning.

I stepped in and looked quickly around. A tangle of blankets on the bed, a confusion of clothing on the floor. Raphael wasn’t immediately visible, but through the open door that connected to a small sitting room, I heard someone moving. I took a deep breath and strode through.

Raphael was standing in the middle of the room, scanning a piece of paper. He was half dressed and barefoot, but his well-muscled body glistened as if he had just stepped from a bath. His damp golden hair was just beginning to regain its curl; his wings were fluffed up behind him as if they had been newly washed and hung out in the sunshine to dry. It was hard for me to imagine a more beautiful man.

“Good morning, Raphael,” I said.

He spun around to see who had addressed him, but the instant he recognized me, his expression changed from astonishment to delight.

“Salome!” he exclaimed. “But I have been expecting you for days!”

“I apologize for arriving so late,” I said. “But I wasted time at the base of the mountain, waiting for angel transport.”

He made a dismissive gesture. “Really, there is so much activity going on within the hold that it’s hard to remember about the petitioners gathered below,” he said.

“And you have so little interest in them.”

He grinned. “Because other people are so much more interesting.”

I wouldn’t let him goad me. “Yes, indeed, Sheba is a fascinating girl,” I said in a calm voice, “but it’s time for her to leave Windy Point.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” he said. His face was filled with merriment. “I am very much enjoying her company.”

“How odd,” I said. “She has not enjoyed yours at all.”

He laughed. “Oh, but the longer she stays here, the more accustomed to me she will become,” he said. “It always takes a little time to understand someone else’s habits and preferences.”

“She’s leaving today,” I said. “And so am I. You or one of your angels will fly us off the mountaintop within the hour.”

“No, you see, you’re wrong about that,” he said, his voice quite genial. “I like Sheba. And I rather like you. I say you shall
both
stay—until I am tired of you—which I think will not be for quite some time.”

I watched him a moment in silence. My heart was beating very fast, but I still felt remarkably calm. I had known back in Laban that our conversation would go something like this. What kind of man holds a woman against her will? How could the Archangel be that kind of man? We must all hope Gabriel was nothing like Raphael or the whole of Samaria could fall to ruin in the next twenty years.

“The last time I was in Windy Point,” I said, “you were a few short months away from your wedding day.”

I had caught his attention. A sharp, arrested expression edged the laughter from his face. “Indeed I was.”

I strolled deeper into the room, still not close enough for him to touch me. “The god had selected a Jansai girl named Leah to be your bride. You had met her briefly, but you didn’t even know what she looked like, because of course her face was heavily veiled, as is the face of every Jansai woman.”

“Yet her father had assured me she was beautiful, and if you’ve met her, you know he spoke the truth.”