Read Online Archangel by Sharon Shinn - Free Book Online Page B

last hours of the night brooding at his window. She was in Semorrah, she had to be. All right, she had heard him singing yesterday, but perhaps she had heard him from some vantage point other than this house. She had been in a passing cart, or listening at the window of one ofthe great houses a few blocks away. She was within the sound of his voice, that much at least he could cling to. Tomorrow—this morning—he could seek her again. He could take wing and hover over the city, singing the tender country ballads that women seemed to like so much. She would hear him, wherever she was. She would look up, and against her will, perhaps, stop whatever she was doing to listen to him, moved without knowing why by the timbre and cadence of his voice—
    His meditations were abruptly interrupted by the opening of the door. He glanced impatiently over his shoulder to see one of Jethro’s wretched slave girls entering with a coal scuttle and broom—no doubt the same one who had built the unwanted fire yesterday morning. He spared her only a glance before turning his attention once more to the empty cobblestoned streets just beginning to take shape in the dawn light.
    He would sing, and she would hear him, and he would know she was near because his arm would burn as it was burning now, as if the slave girl had indeed lit the fire and held a live coal to his arm—as perhaps she had done the morning before—
    He wheeled silently and stared at her. She was crouched over the hearth and did not look his way. Bare feet took him soundlessly to the doorway; not until she rose and made to leave did she realize he had moved. The Kiss on her own arm was alive with mutinous amber lights. She looked to be nothing but eyes and tatters and undomesticated golden hair.
    “Unbelievable,” he said, and then he spoke her name.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR
    R achel stared up at the angel’s face and felt a shiver of panic. Pride made her hide it behind a scowl. “Who are you?” she said, pretending ignorance.
    He had clearly never been asked the question in his life, and was instantly affronted. “I am the angel Gabriel,” he said stiffly. “I lead the host at the Eyrie.”
    “Oh,” she said.
    “And you?” he asked. “You are Rachel, daughter of Seth and Elizabeth?”
    “I’m Rachel,” she said cautiously.
    “I’ve been looking for you for weeks.”
    She felt her panic grow, and her hostility with it. Both were unreasonable. “Why?” she asked in a most ungracious tone of voice.
    He took a deep breath, seemed to consider somewhat hopelessly what to say, and expelled the breath. “Did you know,” he said at last, speaking with great effort in a gentle voice, “that I am to become Archangel later this year?”
    “You are?” she said.
    He nodded. His blue eyes never stopped searching her face, as if he were seeking ways to slip behind the mask of her expression. She felt her scowl deepen in response. “Every twenty years, a new Archangel is chosen by Jovah, to lead all angels and all peoples of Samaria. This summer, I will lead the singing of theGloria for the first time.” He hesitated. “You do know what the Gloria is, don’t you?”
    “Yes,” she said sharply. “I’m not stupid.”
    He was still watching her. The jeweled color of his eyes was beginning to reverberate in her head. “Then you also know that one of the people singing beside the Archangel is the woman chosen by Jovah to be his bride—his angelica—a mortal woman joined to the angels in harmony.”
    This was getting deeper into dogma and ritual than the Edori had ever taken Rachel, but she nodded. “Certainly.”
    He took another long breath. “And the woman Jovah has chosen as my bride,” he said, “is you.”
    She felt herself staring at him like a half-wit.
    “That is,” he murmured, “if you are Rachel, daughter of Seth and Elizabeth, born in a small Jordana farm town not far from the Caitana foothills.”
    “I was born near the Caitanas,” she said, her