Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(23)

“Once, when I was a child. He gave me an inscrutable smile and said I was too young for some knowledge. Perhaps in another few eons, he’d share all with me.” A shake of her head. “He has no fear of anyone, you know. Not even archangels.”

“That’s because he’s outlived all of them,” Alexander pointed out, throwing a tidbit to a curious bird of prey that had landed nearby. “What did he say about the Cadre?”

“That things appear to happen in cycles. Some long, some short. An entire group comes in or goes out—the transition might be scattered over a few decades or a century, but it’s a pattern that holds. He says the current cycle has been one of the longest—many of the present Cadre weren’t even close to being Ancients at the beginning of their reign.”

Alexander whistled. “A long time to rule.” Considering this new information, he said, “Makes sense, doesn’t it? The cycling. It means that each Cadre has enough time to become a battle unit in case it’s ever needed. You can’t do that as effectively with constant change.”

“Can you imagine a storm that unites us all?” Caliane murmured, the date she’d taken forgotten in her hand. “It’d have to be a terrible threat indeed.”

“Let’s hope it never comes to that.” It might well augur the end of the world. “How goes it in your lands?”

“Rumaia’s stirring on my border for no reason but that she’s bored. It’s like a game to the old ones, their loyal warriors just bodies to be fed into the fire to fuel a brief respite from ennui.”

Alexander’s muscles tensed, his skin frigid—and it had little to do with his hatred of Rumaia. “Is that our future, Callie? An aimless existence devoid of challenge or growth?”

“I hope not, Alex,” Caliane said, but he knew the fear would haunt her, as it did him.

“Let’s vow to stay young in our hearts. Always.” He held out a forearm as snow began to dust their shoulders. One of his ravens landed on his shoulder at the same instant, stark black against the falling white.

Though Caliane returned the hold in the way of warriors, her expression was solemn through the snow. “I’m not certain that’s a vow we’ll be able to keep. Immortality is a slow and relentless march that crushes everything in its path. We are but its foot soldiers.”





13


Nine hundred years.

That was how long it took for Zanaya to rise to the post of first general to Archangel Inj’ra. No one could’ve predicted that she’d make it to the position so startlingly young, but she’d proven herself many times over—and she’d brought Aureline and Meher with her.

For her best friend had survived the blow that haunted Zanaya to this day.

Two years they’d spent without her, while she lay in a healing sleep. Not anshara, for she’d been too young to take herself into that rest designed to allow a badly wounded angelic body to heal. This had been a rest induced and enforced by the healers.

Two long years that Zanaya’s world had been too quiet, too solemn. It would’ve been easy to say then that loving people wasn’t worth it, that it led only to devastation and anguish. But Aureline had made Zanaya better than that, had taught her to understand subtleties of emotion that Zanaya’s own mother had long forsaken. Yet Rzia had taught her something too: that to hold on to rage forever was to poison your own existence.

With each step she took, Zanaya moved further away from Rzia and the coldhearted and isolated child she’d attempted to raise. Those very steps had also brought her to this moment where she wore the intricately carved golden arm sheaths that were the right of Inj’ra’s first general.

Aureline and Meher, as her first and second lieutenants respectively, had been presented with a single metal cuff each. The two had forced themselves to keep up with her as she blazed her way through the ranks. Neither wanted Zanaya in a leading role without her most trusted people at her back.

“You have enough ambition for all three of us,” Meher said on that memorable day after Inj’ra promoted Zanaya to first general.

He was lying flat on his back on the grass as they spoke, staring up at the cloudless blue sky. “I’m exhausted from just being in your shadow.” Except he was smiling as he said that. “My entire clan is agog—I was meant to be the black sheep, the jokester they loved but who never achieved anything important, and here I am, in an archangel’s most elite squadron.”

Shooting Zanaya a salute from his supine position, he said, “Thank you for forcing me to be ambitious, though I’m sure I’d have made a perfectly charming layabout.”

“I don’t think it was me,” Zanaya replied, amused at his antics. “You were following Auri.” Theirs had been an interesting love story to say the least, but when it had finally begun in earnest at long last, it had been like watching two interlocking pieces come together with a satisfying snap.

Zanaya had never been anything but happy for them. Well, except for the times they’d aggravated her during their courtship. Heavens but they’d been young and dramatic. As she’d been so painfully young without ever being aware of it.

To think she’d believed she could handle an archangel!

She snorted inwardly. Confidence was one thing, foolish arrogance quite another.