Sharon Shinn - Fallen Angel

VIP免费
2024-12-20 0 0 321.75KB 35 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Fallen Angel
SHARON SHINN
THE first time an angel kissed me, I was too young to remember. The Archangel Raphael had come to visit my
parents, for he was a great friend of my grandfather Karsh, and he kissed me as I lay sleeping in my cradle.
The second time an angel kissed me, I was fourteen, and the Archangel Gabriel was complimenting me for a solo I
had just sung at the Gloria. I was one of a handful of Manadawi girls who had been chosen to sing that year, and
Gabriel had given each of us a chaste kiss on the cheek after we performed.
The third time an angel kissed me, he was not an Archangel at all. He was a fatherless wanderer, the wildest of wild
young men, and he kissed me as he suffered in exile for having killed a mortal man.
What made it worse was that the man he had killed was my father.
Actually, if I were telling the truth, I would have to admit that that was not the first time Jesse had kissed me, when
I was eighteen and he was twenty-one, and I had come to find him shackled to a mountaintop. He had kissed me twice
before, on a single autumn day, when it was clear he was only flirting and it was equally clear I had no business flirting
back. I was a Manadawi woman and he was a wayward, reckless, sullen boy completely without prospects. Manadawi
women were not permitted to love men like that—and we were certainly not allowed to marry them.
My grandfather Karsh was one of the richest men in Samaria. He owned so much property in the fertile northern
plains of Gaza that, the story went, he could not walk from one end of it to the other in a single day. His house was so
huge that it could accommodate a hundred overnight guests. He had more servants than family members, more money
than love, and he hated the Archangel Gabriel. His entire life was spent scheming—how to make more money, how to
acquire more property, how to outmaneuver his neighbor and best friend Ebenezer Harth. The Harths and the Karshes
and the Leshes and the Garones and a smattering of other families made up the people collectively known as the
Manadawi, the wealthy elite in the country we called Samaria. For me, until I sang at my first Gloria at the age of
fourteen, they made up the entire world.
"A Manadawi woman owes a debt to the family and to the property," my mother told me more often than I cared to
count. "You will marry a man your father or your grandfather chooses. He will be a Harth, perhaps, or a Lesh, or
possibly a merchant's son. But only a merchant from Semorrah or Castelana. He must be respectable."
"Could I marry an angel?" I asked her one time when I was thirteen.
My mother frowned, as if considering. "Possibly," she said. "Not just any angel, of course. If he was to be the next
Archangel, then, yes, you could marry him. Or if he had been chosen to lead the host at one of the holds. He would
have to be an angel of some distinction."
This particular conversation was taking place a few days before we were to hold a very large dinner party. We had
just gone through every single item of clothing in my wardrobe to determine which pieces might be appropriate for me
to wear at the afternoon tea and the morning breakfast that would bracket the main event. To wear at the dinner itself,
of course, new gowns had been commissioned for both of us. Now we were looking through my jewelry case to see if I
had the right necklaces, earrings, bracelets and rings to complement the outfits we had already chosen.
"But how will I know?" I asked, pulling off a short opal necklace and trying on a strand of pearls instead.
"How will you know what?"
"If the angel will be Archangel? No one has been chosen yet to succeed Gabriel."
"Gabriel has served a little over half his term, silly girl. The god will not need to choose another Archangel for
seven or eight years."
"But then how will I know if the angel I fall in love with is good enough?" I asked.
She laughed a little, the merest sound of exhaled breath. "Silly," she said again, her voice soft and affectionate.
"You won't be in love with this man you marry. He will be chosen for you because he is a proper husband."
"But I want to fall in love," I argued.
"Love comes after marriage for a Manadawi woman," she said firmly. She began picking through my jewelry box to
search for a suitable ring.
I looked in the mirror to try to read the expression on her face. She was looking downward and all I could see were
her slanted cheekbones and the perfect fall of her loose, fine, honey-colored hair. "So you didn't love my father the
day you married him?" I asked.
"Oh, I was quite pleased at the idea of marrying him," she said, her face still tilted downward. "Quite a handsome
man was Joseph Karsh when he was only twenty-five! He still has that dark hair and those dark eyes, and his face was
even more handsome when he was young." She glanced up, meeting my eyes in the mirror, and smiled. "You have the
shape of his mouth and the color of his eyes, but you have my cheeks and my hair," she said. "Your grandfather said
you took the best of us both when you were born."
I was frowning at her in the mirror. "But when did you fall in love with him?" I insisted.
She laughed. "I've had life with him," she said. "Three children and fourteen years of running his house. That's
what a marriage is, Eden. It's not this sweet romance you seem to have concocted in your head."
"I want romance," I said. "I want to fall in love. I don't want to marry a Manadawi or some other man just because
he's rich."
She put her hands on either side of my head and turned me back to face the mirror. "Let me give you a little piece
of advice," she said. "Never say that to your father."
IN fact, I rarely said anything to my father at all. He was as my mother had described—a handsome, dark-haired
man, with intent brown eyes and a restless energy. As my grandfather was always scheming, my father was always
striding— off to look over the fields of whatever crop was due to ripen, off to inspect some new shipment from
Luminaux merchants, off to argue with the angels at the nearby hold of Monteverde. He was impatient, intelligent and
frequently ill-tempered. The only time he seemed truly happy was when he had just completed some business deal that
was extravagantly advantageous to the Karshes. He was impossible to like and—I finally realized after this
conversation with my mother—impossible to love.
It had never occurred to me that others might hate my father as much as I did. Not that there was anyone else to
ask. My brother Evan, five years younger than I was, looked like a smaller, angrier version of my father. He was only
happy when my father allowed him to trail behind him through the fields or to the negotiating table, absorbing every
word, every gesture that my father used. The rest of the time he was throwing tantrums and engaging in displays of
temper. I avoided him whenever I could—easier now that I was almost a young lady. I spent less time in the
schoolroom with my brothers, more time with my mother being groomed for my entrance into society.
My youngest brother, Paul, was only two, and so had no opinion on anything other than the food he wanted to
eat and the times he did not want to go to sleep. He looked more like my mother than Evan did and had a much sunnier
disposition. I admit I spent more time with him than I did with Evan, but I did not make much effort to interact with
either of my brothers. We were not a close family. The five of us did not sit down to intimate meals; the children did
not visit with the parents at the close of day to recount our adventures and lessons. The very patterns of our lives
separated us—and once I turned thirteen, I had even less time to spend with my brothers.
From that time on, I was required to take part in the social events that regularly occurred at my grandfather's
house. We often had other Manadawi over to dine, for instance, and many river merchants were considered
respectable enough to be included in the Karsh hospitality. Ariel—the leader of the host at Monteverde—was a
frequent guest, and despite the fact that my father and grandfather would just as soon do away with all angels and
their interference in Manadawi schemes, she was always treated with the greatest respect. I met her for the first time at
a small dinner held at our house shortly after I turned fourteen.
"So you're Joseph Karsh's little girl," Ariel said when my mother introduced me to her. Ariel was tall, energetic and
full of laughter, and I liked her at once. "You're very pretty."
"Thank you, angela," I said politely.
She tilted her head as if to inspect me, taking in the shape of my face, perhaps, and whatever stamp of personality
had laid itself over my youthful features. "Yes, I would think you would do quite well," she decided. "I'm surprised
your father hasn't sent you off to one of the angel holds already to see what conquests you might make there."
"I believe my husband expects her to marry for property and not prestige," my mother interposed.
Ariel laughed, "Oh, so then he's looking to Semorrah, not Monteverde," she said, seeming not at all offended.
"Well, I wish you good luck getting her to conform to your wishes. I tried very hard to steer my sister in a proper
direction and she fell in love where it was most disastrous, so I am no longer quite so sure about the wisdom of
arranging marriages. But perhaps you will have more success than I did."
"My husband almost always achieves his goals."
Ariel's eyes strayed across the room, where my father was locked in a combative conversation with someone I
didn't know. The other man was well-dressed and haughty, so I assumed he was a Harth or a Garone who just hadn't
come my way yet. "Yes, it is what one most admires about him," the angel said. Her voice was solemn but her face was
still amused, and I thought, Here is someone else who doesn't like my father. But I was hardly in a position to ask her
if I was right.
At dinner that night, I sat in the very middle of the company, away from all the most interesting conversation at the
head of the table, where my father sat, and the foot, where Ariel was placed. I could catch a few phrases here and
there; I could tell that the people sitting nearest Ariel were enjoying themselves immensely, while the people sitting by
my father appeared to be engaged in heated argument. Those around me were the less important members of the
group, the younger brother of a landowner or the third daughter of a merchant. We spoke to each other politely but
mostly concentrated on our food.
Conversation only became general once, when a sudden lull across the table allowed my father's words to be
carried across the room. "We'd sort it out quickly enough if the angels didn't stick their fingers into business that had
nothing to do with them," he said.
All eyes immediately went to Ariel, who was smiling. "Ah, Joseph, without the constant supervision of the angels,
the Manadawi would impose repression upon the whole of Samaria," she said easily. "You would re-enslave the Edori,
you would cheat the Jansai, you would require tithes and concessions from the river cities, and turn the entire world
into a feudal state, with yourselves as lords over all. The angels exist merely to keep some balance in the three regions,
and we do not care that you hate us for it."
My father seemed not at all discomposed to be caught out saying something so highly uncomplimentary to an
invited—and powerful—guest. He leaned forward across the table, as if he could somehow annihilate the thirty feet of
polished wood that separated them, and spit his words directly into her face. "The angels ceased to care about balance
when Raphael was lost," he said intensely. "Gabriel cares nothing about the accepted order of the world. He cares
nothing about traditions and natural hierarchies. He is a sloppy egalitarian who would rather watch the whole world
fall to ruin than to see true leaders come to power."
"Gabriel is the wisest man I know," Ariel said simply.
"He saved us all from the destruction that Raphael would have loosed upon Samaria. I would follow Gabriel into a
thicket of thunderbolts—and so would any other angel, and so would most of the other citizens of Samaria. You will
not overthrow Gabriel, Joseph, no matter how much you hate him. If you ever hope to have any power in this alliance,
you had better learn to work with the Archangel."
My father's eyes narrowed with real hatred. "If he expects an easy time of the last years of his tenure," my father
said quietly, "he had better learn to work with me."
There was silence at the table a moment, and then someone near Ariel asked a question, and the conversation split
into halves once again. This time, by concentrating more closely, I was able to catch whole, long segments of
conversation between Ariel and her tablemates. Rather quickly they seemed to lose interest in my father's incendiary
words and turned instead to gossip about matters in the angel hold.
"But tell me if the rumors are true," said one well-dressed woman who seemed to be a Harth matriarch. "That boy is
in trouble again—the one who created such a stir last year at the Gloria."
Ariel grimaced. "I have no idea what to do with him next," she said. "I sent him to Gabriel after last year's disasters,
but he wouldn't stay at the Eyrie. So he's back with me, and I'm completely at a loss. I don't know how to discipline an
angel who doesn't seem to care about any of the punishments I might devise. I cannot come up with a dire enough
consequence. I don't know how to control him."
"But who are you talking about?" another woman demanded. "I don't know these stories."
Now Ariel sighed. "His name is Jesse. His parentage is—murky. His mother was a young woman who showed up
at Monteverde when the baby was an infant. None of my angels admitted to having any dealings with her, and she
would never tell me who his father was."
"That's odd," said the Harth woman. "Most angel-seekers are only too proud to talk of all the angels they've
ensnared."
"That's just it," Ariel said. "I'm not sure she was an angel-seeker. I had the impression—but I could be
wrong—that she was a well-brought-up young woman, perhaps a farmer's daughter, who had caught the attention of
an angel without intending to. She was quite lovely in a rather dark, exotic way. She may have been part Edori, in fact.
At any rate, it occurred to me more than once that this angel may have forced himself upon her, and that she was too
embarrassed or too enraged to go to him when she discovered she was pregnant. And once she had the child, and it
was angelic, she came to me."
"But—" Now it was an older, patrician man who joined the interrogation. "But surely angels do not go about
raping young women in the countryside? I mean, I know that not everyone holds angels in high esteem"—and here he
glanced at my father—"but that is not the sort of behavior that I have ever heard attributed to them."
Ariel nodded emphatically. "No. You're right. I am the first to admit that angels have their flaws, but it is generally
so easy for them to find a willing partner that they do not engage in such acts of violence. But if it is true—well—" She
shrugged, and her wings shimmered and fell behind her. "I have a guess or two as to who might have shamed her in
such a way."
The others sitting near her exchanged glances. "Not— not Raphael?" the Harth woman asked.
Ariel shrugged again, causing candlelight to dance down her feathers. "Possibly. Or an angel named Saul, who
was his closest companion, and a despicable, loathsome creature. I was afraid of Saul myself—and generally, you
know, I have no reason to fear anyone."
"So, this young man, what has he done that's so terrible?" asked the older man. I was glad he'd asked, for I wanted
to know the answer myself.
Ariel laughed a little. "What hasn't he done? He is constantly fighting—with angels and mortals—bloody
fist-fights that always end up with someone being severely injured. Once it was a knife fight! But it wasn't Jesse who
pulled the weapon. And—oh, he gambles, he drinks. If I send him off on a weather intercession, he's gone for four
days and I never have any idea what he's been up to until some merchant or farmer writes me to complain. There
doesn't seem to be any great malice in him, just this— this—restlessness. This uncontainability. Life is too tame for
him, I think. He wants worlds to conquer and enemies to overcome. And instead we live in a peaceful, prosperous
country in which the only malcontents are wealthy landowners who have too much to lose to really descend to
anarchy. I don't know what will become of him. He's only seventeen and he's already wreaked havoc in two holds.
What will he do next? What isn't he capable of? That's what keeps me awake at night, once I stop worrying about the
Manadawi and how to accommodate them."
She was laughing again, and she had effectively turned the subject. I stopped listening to her conversation and
started meditating on the words she had just spoken. I had limited experience of angels and no experience at all of
restless young men, angel or mortal. But I thought this wild uncontainable Jesse sounded more interesting and
exciting than anyone I'd ever encountered in my grandfather's house. I wished enviously that I might meet him
someday, while he was still wild and untamed, and I wished still more that I was the kind of woman who would attract
the notice of a man like that. I had no idea what kind of woman that would be, but I was pretty certain that a placid,
docile, highly mannered Manadawi girl was not the sort who would draw his attention.
IT was two years before I actually did meet Jesse, and in the interim, my life had expanded greatly. By the age of
sixteen, I had become a fixture on the Manadawi social scene. I had learned what colors to wear to flatter my dark eyes
and pale hair; I had memorized all the names of the wealthy men in the three provinces, and their family histories and
genealogical trees; I had attended dinners in Semorrah and theatre performances in Luminaux. I had spent one whole
summer in Monteverde, one of many young men and women invited to the hold to cement allegiances and watch
firsthand some of the political maneuvering that went on between the purveyors of power in Samaria. I had sung at
two Glorias. I had been introduced to the Archangel Gabriel. I had danced with his oldest son. I had made friends with
Ariel's daughter. I was highly polished, perfectly well-bred and totally bored.
I didn't realize it, of course. I thought I was happy. I thought I was living the life that poorer girls would envy as
they married inferior men and lived in small houses and took no part in the great events of the day.
I never forgot Ariel's description of Jesse, though, and any time I was going to be at a gathering that included
angels, I always looked for him. But he was not the sort of angel who would be invited to attend weddings in Semorrah
or to sing a solo at the Gloria. He must have been there on the Plain of Sharon during both of those Glorias that I
attended, but I did not meet him. He was not at Monteverde the summer that I lived there, for he had been sent to
Cedar Hills as a punishment for some infraction. I heard his name often— young girls told stories about him and
giggled behind their hands; older women whispered of his misdeeds and warned each other to keep him away from the
girls in their charge. There were a number of tales about women who been led astray by his charms—he was nineteen
now and had apparently added seduction to his other vices—but I never met anyone who claimed to have been his
lover. I caught the echoes of his name in every hold and mansion that I visited, and the very syllables gave me a
delicious set of shivers. He was still wild. He was still untamed. The more refined and artificial my own world became,
the more I reveled at the news that someone else was still quite free.
And then I attended a summer fete in northern Gaza, and I met him, and my world changed.
We were all there to celebrate the wedding of Emmanuel Lesh's daughter to Luke Avalone, the son of a Castelana
merchant. Emmanuel Lesh was not as wealthy as the Karshes or the Harths, but he had a better relationship with
Monteverde and Ariel trusted him above all the Manadawi. Any affair at his house was attended by all the elite of the
three provinces, and it was no different for his daughter Abigail's wedding. Every Manadawi in the country, or so it
seemed, had been invited, as well as representatives from all the angel holds, and rich river merchants, and a few
cultured Luminauzi, and even a Jansai or two. Someone said that five hundred people were attending the event, and I
had no reason to dispute it.
My family arrived a few days early, as did many of the angels and the other honored guests. There were to be
many events to entertain us—dinners, dances, theatrical performances, hunts and games. Present were Ariel with her
daughter; Gabriel with his wife, Rachel, and his sons; angels from the hold of Cedar Hills; the Harths, the Garones, the
Semorran merchants—everyone that anyone cared about.
With the contingent from the Eyrie came the angel Jesse.
I did not know who he was at first. I had been there a day and I had just heard the commotion of new arrivals, so I
had wandered down the wide white marble staircase to investigate. Gabriel and Rachel were standing near a heap of
luggage, talking seriously with Emmanuel and his son. Just out through the great double doors I could spot a knot of
younger angels, all teenaged boys, laughing and joking. One was Gabriel's oldest son, Gideon, with whom I had
become friendly. I didn't know the other two, but I had long ago lost any shyness of angels. I pushed through the
doors and stepped out into the bright light of a summer noon.
"Hello, Gideon," I greeted him. "Have you come for the wedding? It's so good to see you."
Gideon turned immediately at the sound of his name. He was a thin and awkward thirteen, too tall and still unsure
of himself, but you just had to look at him to see the man he would become. He had his father's blue eyes and his
mother's golden hair, and the bones of his body seemed to have been stretched too far, so that it was clear he would
one day grow to an imposing height. His wings, though, were glorious— a vivid white that spilled so far in both
directions that you thought he could fill a ballroom with them. "Eden," he said, breaking into a genuine smile. His voice
trembled a little between the high register and the low. "I didn't know you would be here."
I made him an exaggerated curtsey. "You can always find me at the most elegant events of the season," I said in a
haughty voice. "Naturally, I can be found anywhere the elite of Samaria congregate."
Two of the other boys turned away to discuss some topic that could only be dissected by men. The fourth angel
remained standing to one side of Gideon and regarded me with a stranger's half-caught attention. He was clearly older
than Gideon, with the solid build and effortless stance of a man used to his body, not a boy growing into his. His hair
was black and thick, tangled by the wind of flight and a little too long for his narrow face. His eyes were a brooding
green and his expression was sullen. I thought he was one of the most handsome men I'd ever seen, even before I
learned his name.
"Do you know Jesse?" Gideon asked. "He lives at the Eyrie. Sometimes."
"Jesse?" I repeated, and I heard the squeak in my voice, which embarrassed me no end. "You live at the Eyrie?"
Jesse laughed, and Gideon laughed with him as if at some private joke. "Sometimes I do," Jesse said. "When I
haven't been sent off somewhere less dangerous."
"I can't think of too many places that are less dangerous than the Eyrie," I said without thinking. My heart was still
repeating his name—-Jesse? Jesse?—and my mind was trying to come up with something interesting to say. I could
tell already nothing was likely to occur to me.
Both the boys laughed again, even harder. "Yes, maybe I said it wrong," Jesse replied. "Sometimes I get sent off
when I'm the one who's too dangerous for the Eyrie."
"But my father likes you," Gideon said. "He always lets you come back."
Jesse shook his head. "Your father wants me to fly away to the other side of the world and never return."
Gideon was grinning. "My father wants you where he can watch you every minute of the day. That's why you're
here at the wedding and not back at the hold."
I spared a moment to think that the Archangel Gabriel probably would not be best-pleased to learn that his oldest
son and the most incorrigible young angel of Samaria had apparently formed a fast friendship, despite differences in
age, parentage and general expectations.
"I think it'll be a fun wedding, though," I said, still unable to come up with any but the most inane conversation. I
could talk to a Manadawi lordling for three straight hours and never once seem stupid, but I didn't know how to
converse with a handsome young angel of questionable character.
Jesse laughed and looked away. Gideon rolled his eyes. "If you like balls and formal dinners and pointless
conversation," the Archangel's son said.
"Well, I do," I said.
Jesse turned his eyes back our way. "We're not far, though," he said to Gideon. "We can go to the water's edge
tonight or tomorrow. You'll see."
"See what?" I demanded.
Now Jesse looked at me. "The ocean. Gideon's only seen the water off the western coast. But it's so calm there.
You can't appreciate the ocean until you've seen it off the northern edge of the continent. It's so beautiful, it's scary."
Gideon grunted, as if to convey his doubts, but the phrasing caught my attention. It's so beautiful, it's scary. I
thought the same words might be applied to Jesse himself—though he had not done anything particularly scary yet. It
just seemed possible that, at any moment, he might.
"I'd like to see the ocean," I said.
Jesse's dark eyebrows rose. He was still looking at me, but I couldn't tell what he was seeing. A spoiled, silly
daughter of privilege? A pretty blond girl with a dimpled smile? Someone intriguing, someone annoying? A stranger
who interested him not in the slightest?
"Would you?" he said. "Then you can come with us when we go."
AND that was how I ended up going on an expedition that would surely have enraged my father and disturbed my
mother, had they known about it, as we headed out to view the sea. Gabriel's son and Ariel's daughter were
respectable enough to please both of my parents, and my mother and father could have had no objection to the other
two mortals who accompanied us, a girl and a boy about my age, siblings in one of the extended Harth clans. But they
would not have been pleased to know that the troubled young angel Jesse was one of our number, or that he was the
one who carried me from the Lesh house to a slaty gray cliff overlooking the northern ocean.
The flight took half an hour, for we were only about twenty miles from the sea. In deference to the summer clothes
of the mortals, the three angels flew low to the ground,seeking out warmer air, but it was still a cold flight. I had been
carried in an angel's arms before, many times, while I stayed at Monteverde and visited the Eyrie, but I didn't remember
any flight being quite like this. Jesse held me close to his body, so that I was always aware of the heat of his skin and
the tireless, effortless, almost automatic working of his wings. He didn't bother to speak to me, so most of the way I
fretted that he was sorry he had invited me on the trip, sorry he had drawn me as a passenger—but as we landed and
he set me carefully on my feet, he gave me a dazzling smile. It was full of mischief and pure uncomplicated pleasure,
and I smiled back for all I was worth.
"Thank you," I said.
"I enjoyed it," he replied and turned away to greet the others.
We had come to rest on a high, rocky promontory attached to Gaza by a rough and nearly impassable strip of land.
A few scrubby trees and dispirited flowers poked their way up through the hard soil, but for the most part, the cliff was
hard, flat and unadorned. Its only claim to beauty lay in the view.
For it overlooked the ocean, and the ocean, from this place, was magnificent. It lashed and foamed against the
cliffs with no buffer of beach to impede its headlong motion. The water seemed to snarl against the rock, and then claw
upward in white fists of foam. Farther out, the vast surface of the ocean seemed to boil with a perpetual internal rage; it
sent up great jagged plates of water to war with oncoming waves and create a clashing of white-edged fury.
I was mesmerized. I could only stare out at the fierce continual combat and wonder at the forces that drove the
water to such senseless passion. Why did it not lie calm, like the water in the ponds on my grandfather's estate? Why
did it not roll in on slow, leisurely waves, as it did off the western coast? There, the ocean was an impressive but
hardly fearful sight. This was nature in a much more raw and frenzied state. I would not be desirous of setting off in a
boat to cross these treacherous waters.
"It's pretty," the Harth girl said, casting one cursory look over the sea. "But I'm hungry. Gideon, do you have the
basket of food?"
Gideon had come to stand beside me, silent as I. He nodded and pointed to a level stretch of rock where the angels
had laid down their various burdens—some blankets, a satchel of food, a few canteens of water. He didn't answer her
in words, though, and after waiting a moment, she tossed her head and stomped off to where the provisions were
piled.
Ariel's daughter Persis swept up to stand beside me. She was about my age, thin, brown-haired and bossy. It was
clear she would be leader of the host at Monteverde once her mother stepped down. "Marvelous, isn't it?" she said to
Gideon and me. "It doesn't really look this way anywhere else."
"It does if you fly out from the coast a ways," Jesse said. He had drifted back toward us, as if irresistibly drawn by
the call of the ocean. "Miles and miles, I mean—so far you can't see the land behind you. Then the water almost
always looks like this. So powerful and so vast it makes you feel helpless and small."
Persis glanced at him. "Then why fly out that far?" she demanded. "I'd be afraid. What if I lost my way? What if I
got caught in a storm and couldn't fly back? What if I fell into the ocean?"
"Then you'd drown," Jesse said.
There was a short silence after that.
Gideon was the first to turn away. "I agree with Persis. I don't need to go courting reminders of death. If I flew out
that far, the whole time I'd be worrying that I would drop in the ocean and die. I can think of a lot of other things I'd
rather be doing."
He and Persis joined the mortals sorting through our provisions. I stood beside Jesse for another five minutes and
watched the raging restlessness of the sea. "Thank you," I said again, finally breaking the silence. He smiled again,
watching me, and he nodded. He didn't say anything else. We turned back to join the others.
We had left the Lesh compound in early afternoon, promising our parents and other guardians that we would be
back in time for the evening's festivities—a dinner and a ball. I had to concentrate to remember what activity we were
missing during our outing—a hunt, I decided, organized to catch some of the wild boar that were plentiful in this part
of the country. I couldn't begin to say how much happier I was to be here, with this group of people, rather than off on
such a ride.
"I'm hungry," said the Harth girl. "Let's eat something."
"I'm cold," said her brother. "Can anyone build a fire?"
There was general laughter at this. "What do you think we are, Edori?" asked Gideon. "We don't spend our lives
traveling across the country and camping out every night. I don't think there's an angel in the three provinces who
knows how to build a fire."
"I do," Jesse said, and knelt on the hard ground. "But we'll need some fuel."
I agreed with the Harths; I was both cold and hungry. Angels, with their higher body temperatures and general
indifference to weather, might feel perfectly comfortable on this windy cliff, but I was beginning to shiver. "What kind
of fuel?" I asked. "I'll help look for it."
So Jesse sent us off to find dry dead branches and spindly twigs—rather a search in this inhospitable place—and
finally we had gathered enough wood to satisfy him. He had told the truth: he knew how to start a fire, a skill I had
never seen practiced by anyone in my social circle. Within minutes, we had a welcome blaze dancing away within a
circle of rocks. The girls spread the blankets around the fire, and we all settled down before it.
"Now food," said Persis, opening the satchel and distributing its contents. No one had thought to pack plates and
silver, so we handed around loaves of bread and chunks of cheese, tearing or biting off suitable portions, and passed
them to our neighbors. The water containers were similarly shared. Usually I'm a fastidious eater and don't even like
one of my little brothers to sip from my glass, but this afternoon I was so grateful for heat and food and water that I
didn't mind the communal style of the meal. I bit off a large mouthful of cheese and handed it over to Gideon.
He grinned at me. "Never thought anything could taste so good, did you?" he asked, in his pleasant, uncertain
voice.
"Wait till sometime when you're really hungry," Jesse said, breaking off a chunk of bread. "If you haven't eaten for
a whole day, or two, and finally you come across a place with food. Then you'll eat anything—carrot scrapings, beef
fat, stale bread, old wine—and think it tastes like a feast."
We all looked at him. "When did you ever go two days without food?" Persis demanded.
Jesse grinned, chewed his bread, and swallowed. "Lots of times," he said. "When I was off wandering."
"Away from the holds and the cities?" the Harth girl asked, as if she could not imagine that any land existed
between these points of civilization. "Where did you get the food, then?"
Jesse shrugged. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground and his wings bunched out behind him, bulky and
muscular. "At a farmhouse sometimes. At an Edori campsite sometimes. I've eaten with the Jansai now and then, but I
like the Edori better. The Jansai are—" He shrugged again.
"My father hates the Jansai," Gideon remarked.
"Well, my father thinks they're the key to Samarian wealth and commerce," the Harth boy shot back. "And that
your father has set out to ruin all the trading alliances of the three provinces with his attitude toward the Jansai."
My father had expressed much the same opinion, but I was not about to say so now. Anyway, Persis took
immediate and competent control of the conversation. "Well, we're not going to sit here and ruin a lovely day by
arguing our parents' politics," she said. "Let's talk about something else."
"I'm still cold," the Harth girl said and held her hands out to the fire.
She was sitting between Jesse and Persis, facing the ocean. My guess was that Jesse had chosen his spot for the
view, and she had chosen hers for the company. It made me dislike her, suddenly and strongly, though up until this
point I had had no opinion of her one way or another.
Persis shook her head. "You thin-blooded mortals," she said, teasing. "You're troublesome no matter where we
take you."
摘要：

FallenAngelSHARONSHINN THEfirsttimeanangelkissedme,Iwastooyoungtoremember.TheArchangelRaphaelhadcometovisitmyparents,forhewasagreatfriendofmygrandfatherKarsh,andhekissedmeasIlaysleepinginmycradle.Thesecondtimeanangelkissedme,Iwasfourteen,andtheArchangelGabrielwascomplimentingmeforasoloIhadjustsungat...

收起<<
Sharon Shinn - Fallen Angel.pdf

共35页,预览7页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：35 页 大小：321.75KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-20

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 35
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注