“I was aloft soon enough.”
“And a target even a half-blind Jansai could see! Had they turned their cannons your way while you floated above them in the air, could you have moved quickly enough to evade them? I think not! And one of those shots would have torn through your soft skin much more easily than through the wood and metal and rubber of this ship.”
“They would not have aimed at me,” she said confidently. “Kill an angel? Bael would never allow that. Never.”
“How would Bael have learned about it?” Reuben demanded. “If you were dead and every soul aboard The Wayward went down, who would be left to report atrocities to the Archangel? I was close enough to the Jansai ship to see where their guns were firing. I saw the muzzle slipped free of its support and aimed toward the heavens. You could have died in seconds, mikala, great angel wings or no, and not one of us could have done a damn thing to save you.”
It had not occurred to her—would never have crossed her mind—that she could have been in any mortal danger, deliberately and maliciously directed at her person. The ball would not even have had to hit her body; it could have torn through one of those delicate lace wings and sent her plunging into the icy water. But it had not happened. She would not think about it.
“I will not apologize,” she said, lifting her chin, though he could not see the mutinous gesture in the dark. “For, say what you will, I saved all our lives. And I would do it again. Though you locked me in my cabin and forbade me to help.”
“Well, and it was an act of courage and quick thinking such as I could not have come up with myself, even had I wings such as yours,” Reuben said in a softened voice. “If it were not for the great fear I had for your life, I would be blessing you and thanking you now. But my heart stopped in my body when I saw you swooping away from this ship, and when I thought that cannon would shred you to pieces overhead, I nearly died myself. I am not used to denying anybody the right to defend himself or his friend. I don’t know why it was so hard on me to see you take a chance I would cheer anyone else for taking. Maybe I am like every other Samarian, and I think any angel is a precious thing. But I would not like to live through another afternoon like this one.”
“No, and neither would I,” Lucinda said in as offhand a voice as she could manage after that extraordinary speech. “Let us hope none of us is ever at such risk again.”
Moments after that she left the bridge, murmuring some incoherent phrase about needing to clean the galley. Well, all Edori were flirts; she had heard that often enough from Gretchen, from her friends on Angel Rock. All Edori could charm the heart from a woman’s body with honeyed words poured into her ear; they were laughing lovers who left nothing but warm regret behind. And sailors—they were not to be trusted, they wooed girls in every port from Lisle to Port Clara to the Ysral harbors, and to not a single one were they true. So the words of an Edori sailor, sweet though they sounded, were as insubstantial as foam lashed up by a falling wave.
And yet he had sounded sincere, and the anger, she knew, had been genuine; so maybe, the least littlest bit, he cared if she lived or died. And the thought was so amazing, so huge but so intimate, that she could not get a hold of it. It made her shiver, made her sing, made her wrap her wings around herself for comfort and celebration. She stood for maybe half an hour in the tiny galley, cocooned in her own feathers, motionless, thoughtless, buffeted between doubt and fear, and wondered what it would be like to be drowned in an Edori’s love.
But her dreams that night were anything but romantic. Lately— since the morning of the Gloria—she had had odd nightmares, filled with fear and violence and desperation. Once or twice, waking at midnight, she would find herself still gripped by a wretched panic, a sensation so strong that she could not believe it was stirred up by nothing more alarming than a dream. It would sometimes be hours before the desolation faded and she could sleep again in relative peace.
But it had been a few days since she had had the nightmares, and she had been so tired this night upon seeking her bed that she had thought she would fall instantly asleep. And so she did—but a few hours later she woke herself by her own crying, soft and hopeless and unfathomable. Her face, her pillow, her hair were all wet with tears; she must have been weeping for some time before her sobs awakened her. She was surprised by the leaden weight on her chest, the sense of loss and helplessness. What could she have been dreaming of, what terrible images or fears had clenched upon her heart in the night? Dimly her mind showed her pictures of broken bodies, bloodied clothing, but she could not reconstruct a narrative. Maybe it was simply that the violent events of the day had gone reeling through her head in a drunken, brutal sprawl, and her mind could not process them rationally. It was not an easy thing to confront the possibility of one’s own death, or the deaths of those nearby. She was not used to such sober thoughts; they shocked through her body and transmogrified themselves to nightmares.
She turned to her side and pillowed her head on her hands, but she was a little afraid to go back to sleep. She still felt weary, drained, and sorrowful, for no cause that she could identify (no one had died, after all). Even Maurice had seemed stable enough when she last checked on Gretchen before seeking her own bed. Everything would be fine. Reuben or Michael had apparently decided that the engines were whole enough to do their work, for they were still moving through the ocean at top speed and they would be at Angel Rock sometime before morning. They would all be safe there; everything would return to normal. A few more hours and all would be well.
CHAPTER NINE
The tiny harbor at Angel Rock was crowded: in addition to the various small working craft owned by island residents, there were three visitor ships lined up at the dock. Two were Edori and one bore the blue colors of Luminaux, so Lucinda, who had been fearing Jansai, relaxed. No danger lurking here.
Always a sleepy port, Angel Rock at dawn was completely deserted. Lucinda flew in low over the wharf, just in case anyone was astir, but she spotted no one. So she flew on to the Manor, the eight-bedroom inn that she and her aunt Gretchen operated, and landed on the flagstoned walk leading to the front door.
Emmie was standing on the porch, shaking out a rug, which she dropped to the ground when Lucinda touched down. “You’re back! We weren’t sure when to expect you! Your aunt wrote from someplace a week or so ago and said it might be another fortnight—”
“Is Jackson here?” Lucinda interrupted. “We’ve got a hurt man on our ship, and we’ll need a stretcher to carry him back here.”
“He’s sleeping, I’m sure.” Emmie sniffed. “I’ll wake him if you like.”
“Yes. Tell him to go to the dock and await The Wayward. Then get a good breakfast ready for five or six. I’ll go see if I can find Hammet. How many rooms are empty?”
“Four of them.”
Lucinda nodded. “We’ll put Maurice in one and the others can share. Or—I don’t know, they might want to sleep on the ship. At any rate, they should be here within the hour, so please hurry.”
Emmie disappeared back inside, leaving the rug in the dirt. Lucinda hurried on foot down the short road to the Gablefront Inn, run by Hammet and Celia Zephyr. They were a charming, erudite couple who had retired to Angel Rock from Luminaux five years ago; Hammet had been a surgeon of some renown and Celia had been a metalworker. Although Hammet never failed to point out that his specialty had been bone repair, he was the closest thing to a doctor living on the island, and so they all brought him their illnesses, injuries, and aches for healing.
Celia herself answered the door, dressed in an embroidered nightshirt that looked expensive enough to pay for remodeling her hotel. Her salt-and-pepper hair was coiled on top of her head, and her complexion was rosy from sleep. “Why, Lucinda! I had no idea you were back! Is there trouble? Where’s your aunt?”
“She’s still on the ship that brought us from Samaria,” Lucinda said. “There’s a hurt man on board. I’ve sent Jackson to the harbor with a stretcher. Do you think Hammet can m
eet us at the Manor in an hour or so? I don’t know how soon they’ll arrive.”
“But of course he can!” Celia exclaimed. “What’s the nature of this man’s injury? Hammet will want to know.”
“Concussion and some pretty big chest wounds,” Lucinda said. “Our ship was fired on by Jansai cannon, and the ball hit where Maurice was sitting.”
“Fired on! Jansai!” Celia repeated. “I can’t believe—”
“I couldn’t either. But I was there. No one else was hurt.”
“Sweet god singing,” the older woman murmured. “Don’t you worry. I’ll have Hammet over at your place in half an hour.”
Lucinda checked in at the Manor again briefly to make sure both Emmie and Jackson were doing as they were told, and then she glided back to the wharf to waken the harbormaster. Not that there was much he could do, but Foster liked to be apprised of all the events going on in his domain.
“Jansai, yes, they’re a terrible nuisance on the high seas,” he told her as they strolled down to the dock to await The Wayward’s arrival. “More than one Edori ship has come dragging into harbor here having run afoul of a Jansai warship.”
“I didn’t know anything about this,” she said.
Foster shrugged. “I suspect they war on none but the Edori. Who are not the type to complain to the Archangel. He may not even know of the piracy.”
“Or he may,” Lucinda said, thinking back to her conversation with Reuben.
Foster shrugged again. “Or he may. The ways of the angels are mysterious and sometimes prejudicial to mortals. Which is why I left Samaria twenty years ago.”
“Someday you’ll have to tell me the whole story,” Lucinda said, but absently. She had spotted The Wayward‘s masts shaping out of the early morning mist. “When we have more time.”
There was an excruciating wait (it seemed pointless to fly back to the ship just to get in everyone’s way), and then an hour’s worth of bustle as the ship docked and Maurice was carried off. The sailors commandeered Jackson’s stretcher and bore their captain down the short street to the Manor, following Gretchen’s brisk lead. Lucinda trailed behind them, feeling useless and stupid.
Another pair of hours passed in purposeful activity as Hammet examined Maurice, Lucinda fed the sailors, and Gretchen consulted Emmie and Jackson about the status of the hotel while she’d been gone. Everything looked fine to Lucinda: The roof was still on and none of the windows had been bashed in, so she couldn’t imagine that anything dreadful had gone wrong. But Gretchen liked to be in control of her environment, and she could not relax for half an hour until she had identified potential problems that had boiled up in her absence.
Reuben slipped away before Lucinda had a chance to talk to him; she guessed he had swallowed his breakfast, then tracked down the doctor in Maurice’s room. There was good news, though: Reuben had told Gretchen that he would much appreciate a room at the hotel, though he expected the three others would sleep on the ship. Which meant, for another day or so, she would have the exquisitely wonderful, exquisitely torturous gift of his company.
She busied herself cleaning the kitchen, though Emmie could do it well enough. Gretchen swept through, saying, “Well, nothing’s irretrievably broken, and that’s a blessing, though a small one,” before marching toward the stairway to check on the condition of the upstairs rooms. Lucinda smiled, men she sighed.
It was another half hour before she had any news of Maurice, and that was brought by Reuben himself. Lucinda had drifted into the large parlor and begun automatically to open curtains and neaten the furniture, though Emmie had kept everything in reasonably good shape. She cast a longing glance at her harpsichord, for she found nothing so soothing as music, but she did not want to disturb the hurt man. So she merely dusted the top of it with the cuff of her sleeve, and closed the lid over the keyboard.
“When you’ve time, you’ll have to play a song or two for me,” said a voice from the doorway, and she was so startled she almost crushed her fingers under the lid. “At least, I assume you play?”
“I do, and so does my aunt. She taught me. How is Maurice?”
“Your kind doctor says he’s well enough and just needs two or three days of quiet rest, undisturbed by gunfire or violence.”
“You told him what happened?”
“He did ask.”
“Was he shocked?”
Reuben came farther into the room and shook his head. “He didn’t seem like a man easily shocked, your doctor. My guess is he’s got sharp old eyes that have seen a great deal in this lifetime.”
“Luminauzi,” Lucinda said with a shrug.
“Well, they are the wisest.”
There was a moment’s silence while Reuben stared out through the lace curtains and Lucinda tried to think of something to demonstrate her own wisdom. All she could come up with was, “So what will you do now?”
“Wait a few days till the captain’s better, then sail on to Ysral,” he said, still looking out the window.
“I meant—this minute. Is there anything I can do for you? For Maurice?”
“Where are Michael and the others?”
“They went back to the ship. They said they needed to sleep for a week.”
Reuben smiled. “As do I. Perhaps we’ll be here longer than a few days.”
“There’s a room ready for you,” Lucinda said tentatively. “If you’d like to go there now.”
At last he turned to look at her, smiling faintly, and she felt all her blood rush to her cheeks at the sheer beauty of his face. “What I need more than a bed right now,” he said, “is a hot bath. Is such a thing to be found here on Angel Rock?”
“Yes, we have baths in a chamber out back,” she said, though it was a struggle to speak normally. Which was ridiculous; she could not imagine why she was behaving so oddly. “I’ll have Emmie heat the water. It will be ready in ten minutes.”
“And then I’ll sleep for a week,” he said. “When I come down, I’ll be so civil and cheerful that you won’t know me.”
“You may be changed,” she managed to retort, “but I don’t think a little water and a little dreaming will improve you so much as all that.”
“Wait and see,” he promised. “Wait and see.”
After that, the rest of the day was nothing but dull anticlimax. Reuben and Maurice slept; Gretchen sailed through the house, noting inefficiencies and errors; Emmie trailed behind her, explaining things away and rolling her eyes at Lucinda; Jackson kept to himself in his basement quarters until he was summoned to a chore or an accounting. Most of the neighbors dropped by to welcome them back, but of course Gretchen had no time to visit with any of them. Lucinda listened with far less interest than usual to the recitations of events that had occurred while she was gone (learning from three separate sources that Timothy and Gia had decided to marry, though no one was supposed to know it, and Parker was considering returning to the mainland, though he had not decided if he would live with his son in Breven or his daughter on her farm in Bethel). These were the comforting, familiar threads of her daily life; she was shocked to learn that other faces, other names, could take up so much of her attention that she had little to spare for her oldest friends.
But she was tired and out of sorts. In a day or two, when the Edori sailed away, she would revert to her ordinary self. The Manor would not look so strange, as if the rooms had shrunk down or the furniture had been wrongly arranged; the accents of her neighbors would not sound so provincial and unmelodic. Everything would be the way it should be, as she remembered it, as it had been before she’d left.
And the next day she did feel much better. She had gone to bed early and slept late, and not stirred once the entire night. She woke to the smell of Emmie’s pancakes and bacon, and the aroma was so delicious and so familiar that she instantly felt like she was home. And was swept with a great nostalgia for this place that she had known most of her life, and missed more now, at this instant, than she had for the whole time she was away on her
journey.
She bounded into the kitchen and had breakfast, chattering with Emmie the whole time. Yes, it was true, Timothy and Gia were marrying but the real secret was that Gia was already with child and if Gia’s parents ever found out, she would be banned forever from Angel Rock. As for Parker, he had been saying for five years that he would leave the island, but Emmie herself would believe that when she saw his ugly face grinning at them from the railing of an outbound ship.
“But who cares about any of those people?” the housemaid said impatiently, clearing off a place at the table and sitting beside Lucinda. The two were nearly the same age and had both been raised on Angel Rock; neither could remember a day they had not known each other. “Who is that gorgeous man? And how long is he going to stay here?”
“You couldn’t possibly be referring to poor sick Maurice, now could you?” Lucinda teased.
“No, I couldn’t be. I meant that other one—Reuben, I think your aunt called him. He‘s enough to make you want to go sailing off to Ysral.”
“Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind.” Lucinda sighed. “Although—Edori sailors. You’re the one who told me never to trust them.”
“Well, and I had good reason to tell you that,” Emmie said firmly. “That Yacov! Well, and I didn’t have much luck with Amos, either, although he was a beautiful man to look at and said sweeter things than I have ever heard coming from a man’s mouth. But this Reuben looks like an intelligent, thinking man. So tell me about him. Did you get to know him on this journey? And how is it you come to be traveling on an Edori ship, anyway? I thought your aunt wouldn’t consider it.”
But the trip home was the very last part of a very long story, and Lucinda was just as glad to turn the talk away from Reuben’s manifest charms. There were many other tales to tell Emmie, of the Gloria itself, of Bael and Jared and the other angels, of Cedar Hills and Luminaux. And Emmie listened intently to it all, easily remembering names and events and interjecting the occasional shrewd comment on Gretchen’s probable reaction to events.