Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(65)

Sorry, she said to Cassandra. I don’t know why I’m like that.

Do you not? Eons in her voice, such a heaviness of age that it threatened to crush Zanaya’s ribs, compress her lungs. Your mother was a woman who would hear only one voice. Her own.

It had been a long, long time since Zanaya thought of Rzia, bitter and determinedly lonely, but now her stomach tensed. I’ve moved far beyond that. She was an archangel, a being of great power. I’m no child.

We are all our parents’ children, was Cassandra’s calm response. But you . . . you carry a piece of another now.

Ice in Zanaya’s blood, shards in her bones. “Lijuan.” She spat out the name like a curse. “She infected me with her viciousness?”

I have no answer to that, battle-born Zanaya. What I do know is that you’re not the same archangel who woke prior to the war. Do you wish to rise now? I’ve protected you in my fire, but it is no cage.

Zanaya stared at the rippling golds and reds of the flames, thought of Sleep . . . and came to a screeching halt. I can’t initiate Sleep. It was a gift that came centuries into adulthood and was a given; all angels past that age could choose to go into the state that suspended them between life and death.

Something is broken in me. Do you know what? Zanaya might be proud but she’d never been stupid; she was with Cassandra, Seer of Seers. To not ask the question would’ve been to waste a precious resource.

A long pause. So many pathways, Cassandra murmured again. So many choices.

Zanaya stayed silent, loath to disrupt the seer’s thoughts.

Not broken . . . but damaged, Cassandra said at long last. I truly cannot see your path beyond today, so I cannot tell you whether the wound is permanent or temporary. But one thing I now know, Queen of Tempests: you wake because it is your season to wake.

Zanaya stared at the fire around her. Sleep or not, she could remain in this strange in-between place for a long time without going mad. She had the will. And if the world needed it, she would do it. Perhaps, however, such a sacrifice wasn’t necessary. “How many archangels are awake in the world? Do you know?”

I listen as I watch over my Sleepers. I slip into a deeper rest now and again in an effort to avoid the slipstreams of time, but then I wake, and my owls tell me what I missed. Nine. There are nine.

Zanaya exhaled. “Then I will rise.” The Cadre was meant to be ten, was the strongest and most stable at ten. And unless one among the Cadre wanted to hoard land, there was plenty enough territory to parcel out between ten. “Cassandra?”

Yes, Queen of Tempests?

Throat dry, she made herself say it: Is Alexander awake or does he Sleep? She couldn’t even whisper the other option: that he was dead, had died in the battle against Lijuan.

The silver-winged warrior walks the world. A pause, followed by soft words almost drowned out by the roar in Zanaya’s ears. Silver wings and tempest winds. Storms unfettered. This time . . . will be the end.

The liquid fire around Zanaya parted even as she struggled against the shock of those final words. Wait! What does that mean?

Her only answer was a whispered sigh, the brush of an old, old power over her skin . . . and then Cassandra was gone, returned to her watchful rest.

Zanaya rose.





32


Ten years after the war that had ended the reign of the Archangel of Death, and Alexander had managed to go on, managed to pretend that he was the same man as before the war. He’d fooled Xander, but hadn’t even tried with Titus or Callie. It would’ve been pointless; unlike his grandson, his friends had known him far too long, seen him through too many seasons of life.

Now he stood atop Kilimanjaro, this demanding mountain in the lands of his friend. Clouds ringed the mountain, hiding the flat canopies of the umbrella trees he’d overflown on his way here, along with the forms of the many species of fauna that roamed this land. In contrast, the immediate area around him was an alpine barrenness.

Alone in the clouds, the Archangel of Persia found himself lost in a way he hadn’t been for the entirety of his existence.

His mother, whose gentle heart would shatter when she next woke, had oft commented on his confidence. “Oh, my Alexander,” she’d say with a laugh, “you’ve always known your mind. Such a strong will you had, even as a mere babe—why, you even managed to get Ojewo himself to give you a future when he never gave one to a child!”

That future had been unspecific in the extreme. When, as a halfling, he’d asked the seer to tell him his future, Ojewo had looked at him with a soft smile and said, “No angel should know the entirety of his future, Alexander, far less an angel of your resolve. You will shape your own future.”

“One thing,” a frustrated and barefoot Alexander had bargained. “Tell me one thing.”

Ojewo had been dressed in a flowing robe of darkest blue at the time, his feet clad in formal sandals, and the dusky green of his eyes lined with kohl. He’d been on the way to a court function when Alexander had waylaid him.

But Ojewo hadn’t been angry or impatient.

Tilting his head the slightest fraction, a mischievous glint to his eye, the seer had said, “She will be a luminous and fierce wind that lights up your existence.”

Alexander, youthful and full of himself, had groaned. He’d hoped for stories of glory in war and of territories won. Instead Ojewo gave him what Alexander had privately labeled romantic fluff. Then had come Zanaya and at long last he’d realized that the seer had told him the most important piece of his future.