I set down my water glass, turned away, and began stacking the dirty dishes on the tray. “I’m going to take these down to the kitchen—”
He caught my arm and turned me back to face him. His darkened eyes were half closed, as if to aid his other senses in picking up information I didn’t want to impart. “So you were in an angel’s arms, but you didn’t want to be,” he mused. “Maybe you were embroiled in some kind of legal dispute. Perhaps—were you being brought to an angel hold for a trial? Or even a sentencing?”
Again I refused to answer, but I knew he could feel me trembling. I didn’t even bother trying to pull away; his grip was too tight, and I already knew how strong he was.
“An adjudication,” he decided. “Your word against someone else’s. What was the accusation? And who was your accuser?”
“I’ll tell you if you let me go.”
He smiled, genuinely amused. “If I let you go, you’ll run from the room.”
“Corban, this is an old story.”
“But one that still haunts you,” he said. “I want to hear it.” When I still didn’t answer, he prompted, “At least tell me where the trial occurred. If an angel was transporting you, you must have gone to one of the holds.”
“The Eyrie,” I said reluctantly.
His eyebrows rose. “And your case was put before the Archangel?”
“Yes.”
“Impressive! Who was your accuser?”
“My employer. A Manadavvi lord who owned property up by Monteverde.”
“And what was the crime?”
I took a deep breath. “Attempted murder.”
That surprised him so much he actually released me. I almost bolted for the door, but I knew it was pointless. Even if I made good my escape, he would just insist on hearing the tale some other day. He would give me no peace until he knew the details—or until I left him, and the Gabriel School, behind.
I was so tired of running.
“I tried to kill a man,” I said in an even voice. “And my only regret is that I was unsuccessful.”
Corban nodded and, to my surprise, pulled out one of the narrowbacked chairs. “I think this is a story I have to hear straight through,” he said, dropping down and arranging his wings behind him. “So why don’t you sit and tell it from the beginning?”
I slowly took a seat across from him. He poured more water, first for himself, then for me, not spilling a drop. It was the first time I’d wished that Alma had included wine with the angel’s dinner.
“A few years ago, I got a job working in a Manadavvi household—”
“From the beginning,” he interrupted. “Farther back than that.”
Sweet Jovah singing, he wanted to trace the entire route of my life. I grimaced, though he couldn’t see me, and began speaking with exaggerated patience. “I told you. I was an angel-seeker’s daughter, and for years I ran wild on the streets of Monteverde. One day I was begging for bread at a bakery when the owner said she needed extra hands in the kitchen, and if I’d work for my keep she’d train me in a profession. I was smart enough to say yes, and I stayed with her for thirteen years.”
I shrugged. Dorothea had been practical, honest, exhausted, and not particularly warm; I’d never come to love her, and she’d never loved me. But I respected her, and I learned a lot from her, and I explored every building and byway in Monteverde when I was making deliveries for her business.
“When she got old enough to retire, she sold the bakery to her nephew and helped me look for another situation. The nephew and I had never gotten along,” I added. Not since I’d kneed him in the groin after he tried to slip a hand under my shirt. “I ended up taking a position in the household of a Manadavvi lord—a good job, anyone would have thought.”
“But it didn’t turn out that way.”
“It started out pretty well,” I said. “The pay was good, the work was no harder than I was used to, and I got along with most of the other servants.” I had become particularly friendly with a woman about my age with antecedents even fuzzier than my own. I always assumed Olive was the bastard child of a Manadavvi landowner and one of his housemaids. She had that Manadavvi look to her, all high cheekbones and flawless skin. All the grooms and footmen were wild for her, but she was good at holding them off. It was going to be marriage or nothing for Olive. She didn’t want to go her mother’s route, that was plain; she talked about saving enough money to start her own business in Monteverde or one of the river towns. Actually, we talked about pooling our resources and going into business together. It was the first time I could remember having a dream.
“I can guess what happened,” Corban said quietly. “The lord took an interest in you, rather forcefully, and you protested.”
I made a small snorting sound. “Oh, no, I wasn’t built to catch an aristocrat’s eye,” I said. “And I knew how to dress and how to behave so I didn’t get the kind of attention I didn’t want. But another girl—Olive. She was the one the lord couldn’t stop thinking about.”
We developed the habit of working in pairs, and I at least always kept a knife concealed under my skirts. But Olive wasn’t afraid of him; she didn’t seem to realize he was dangerous. She avoided him when she could, but she didn’t lie awake at night and worry what he might do to her.
As she should have.
She also didn’t spend her free hours sneaking around the ancient, labyrinthine mansion, exploring which stairways led where and which servants’ doors opened onto private suites. As I did. There was a day I could have navigated that entire fifty-room house if I had been as blind as Corban. I knew passageways that I swear no one but me remembered. Even the mice had forgotten them.
“What happened to Olive?” Corban prompted when I had been quiet too long.
I didn’t want to say the words, didn’t want to remember the scene, didn’t want in my mind, again, those images of horror. So I spoke as quickly as I could. “He brought her to his room one night against her will. She struggled, he reacted, and by the time I found them, she was no longer breathing.” I took a deep breath, because I had somehow run out of air. “By the time I left them, he was bleeding so much that I thought he would surely die.”
For a moment, the silence between us was absolute. Well, there’s the worst of it, I thought. There’s the truth that defines me. Try to hurt me and I will hurt you back. No matter who you are, no matter how much it costs. And I’m always on guard, waiting for the next blow to fall.
I waited in some defiance for Corban’s expressions of disgust and outrage. I realized—much to my fury—that my attitude was tinged with regret. Now he will order you from the room. Now he will never wish to see you again. Who cared? He was an angel, self-absorbed and self-righteous and allying himself with power, like all the rest of them. My story would shock him, I was certain, but not because a Manadavvi lord had committed murder in the name of lust. He would be shocked because a servant girl had thought she had the right to fight back.
I couldn’t even look at him as I waited for him to denounce me.
His voice, when it came, was threaded with amazement. “That was you?” he demanded. “You’re the one who cut up Reuel Harth?”
I risked a quick look at him and saw nothing but astonishment on his face. “You know him?”
“Knew him. Everyone did. You’ll be happy to know he’s dead now.”
I took a quick breath. “Did he suffer?”
Corban’s mouth opened in a soundless laugh. “Not as much as you’d like, I imagine, but his last three years were unpleasant enough. His face was heavily scarred, you know, from whatever weapon you used. And his reputation was wholly shredded. He was ostracized by Manadavvi and angels alike.”
“Because he raped a servant girl?” I said scornfully.
“Because he killed her,” Corban corrected me. “I see you have the lowest possible opinion of Samarian justice, but the Archangel has reasonable ethical standards, and she had never liked Reuel to begin with. She was happy to levy a steep fine and censure him in public—she would have liked to do more, but Reuel wouldn’t confess to the crime and there was no absolute proof that he’d strangled that poor girl. The servants were mostly afraid to give testimony and his wife wouldn’t speak at the trial at all.”
“I could have told them—” I began in a hot voice, and then abruptly fell silent.
“Exactly. But the woman who had come to her friend’s aid so dramatically—and who had been brought to the Eyrie specifically to speak accusations against Reuel Harth—somehow disappeared before the trial began.”
I crossed my arms and glared at him, but I felt a gaping hole open in my stomach. The Manadavvi lord escaped some measure of punishment because I had run away? Had I been the one to betray Olive after all?
He answered my unspoken wail of remorse. “It wouldn’t have made much difference, I expect. The fine might have been heavier—the condemnation more sharply worded. But the end result would have been much the same.”
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“I always wondered, though,” he said. “How did you get out of the Eyrie? There’s the new road that lets people go up and down the mountain, but it was still under construction when the trial was going on. I assume you weren’t kept under lock and key—but back then, the only way to get off the Eyrie was in an angel’s arms. How did you manage to disappear?”
“I went exploring,” I said shortly. I was so shaken by the various revelations of the evening that I was having trouble finishing the conversation in a normal tone of voice. “And one day I found this—I can’t explain it—this open shaft in the back of the hold. With a contraption that moved up and down from the top of the mountain to the base. I figured out how to use the ropes and pulleys to ride the thing down to the ground.”