“Sshhh,” I said, patting his head, where the long curls were knotted from a rough wind and a night in the open. “Here. Have some water before you tell the rest.”
He took a ragged breath. “I’m so thirsty. Thank you, thank you—”
I didn’t speak again until he had practically emptied the flask with quick, greedy swallows. “You must try to compose yourself,” I said, my voice more brisk. “Tell me how badly you’re hurt. Alma and I came in a wagon and we can—”
“Alma’s here?” he demanded, sitting up straighter and actually wiping his sleeve across his nose. I had never seen him make such an inelegant gesture. “Where?”
“I left her with the horses. She’s the one who let me know you were missing, so you must be properly grateful to her. But the road is a little distance that way. Can you walk?”
He took another shaky breath. I could see him trying to impose an iron calm. I wondered how much practice he’d had doing that during the darkest days after his blinding, how often he had let himself give in to grief before pulling himself back together. Not often, I guessed. “I don’t think anything is broken,” he said. “I came down hard, but I didn’t crash. But I didn’t have any idea where I was—or how to get back—” He pressed his lips together.
“The windmill has fallen over completely—that’s why you couldn’t hear it,” I said. “Even so, you’re not too far away. You did a good job navigating with absolutely no clues.”
“I didn’t think you’d be able to find me.”
“Well, I did,” I said. He was still holding on to me with one hand, so now I stood and drew him up beside me. He was unsteady for a moment, but didn’t cry out in pain and fold back to the ground, which I took as a good sign.
“What about your wings?” I said, for they still hung behind him, limp as laundry. “Were they injured?”
He shook his head and spread them out to their fullest extent. I saw a few bent quills, a couple of patches where the feathers might have been scratched off by an overeager branch, but from what I could tell, he was remarkably unscathed. If he’d been able to figure out which way to go, he could have made his way home.
“We brought the wagon in case you were hurt,” I said. “But if you want, we’ll just drive it back to the school, singing the whole way. You can take flight and follow us home.”
He gathered his wings tightly behind him and shook his head. “I’ll ride,” he said in a quiet voice. “I’m never flying again.”
It was, of course, a cause for goggling eyes and disbelieving cries when Alma and I returned to the Gabriel School with the angel hunched in the back of the wagon. He had accepted the food we’d brought and gratefully finished off a second flask of water, but once we had gotten under way, he had refused to speak in anything but monosyllables. It was a return to the depressed, despairing Corban I had met two weeks before, and I was not sure I would be able to jolt him out of his melancholy a second time.
And obviously, this was not the day to try.
I pulled over when the school was just around the next bend. “It’s broad daylight, and people will be watching for our return,” I said. “Would you like us to leave you somewhere safe until nightfall, when I’ll come back for you?”
His arms rested on his updrawn knees, and his face tilted downward as if he were staring at the floorboards. He shrugged. “I don’t care.”
I glanced at Alma. “You don’t care if everyone sees you being helped from the wagon? If everyone knows that there’s an angel living in the Great House, and that he’s broken?”
I used the word deliberately, but he barely flinched. “No.”
“Corban, are you sure? It’s no trouble to come back for you after sundown.”
“I’m sure,” he said, and slumped back against the side of the wagon. He didn’t speak another word for the rest of the drive.
I stopped again at the front of the Great House and let Alma help him up the shallow stairs. I kept my hands lax on the reins and most of my attention on the school grounds, where an afternoon break meant dozens of students and ten or twelve teachers were milling around outside, playing games, enjoying the spring sunshine, and watching the angel stumble into the house. Most of them looked from me to the angel and back at me.
I sighed and tsked at the horses, guiding them downhill toward the stable. I didn’t feel up to the exclamations and the demands for information and the repeated protestations of amazement. Despite the fact that I was unspeakably relieved that Corban’s adventure had been no worse than it was, I felt as listless and exhausted as the angel himself.
I didn’t see Corban for four more days. I did try. I took supplies up to the Great House once a day, paused to speak briefly to Alma, then headed up the stairs to knock on the angel’s door. Then I kept knocking, sometimes for ten minutes or more, until he called, “Go away!” By that, and the fact that he continued to swap the breakfast and dinner trays Alma left on a table outside his door, I knew he was still alive.
I had managed to give the thinnest possible explanation to Deborah and my fellow cooks. I knew there was a sick man in the house, but I didn’t know it was an angel. Yes, I suppose he must have been there for weeks. No, I don’t know what’s wrong with him. No, I don’t know what happened when he tried to fly. Yes, it certainly is a tragedy.
They kept asking questions, but I never volunteered more information. Besides, I didn’t see the other workers too often, because I was back on the solitary overnight shift. Most of the staff and students had recovered from the first wave of the stomach sickness, but now the disease was making the rounds for a second time, and Rhesa was among those who succumbed. I didn’t mind resuming the night duties while she lay on her bed, fevered and miserable. The schedule suited me well enough—and afforded me the greatest freedom.
On that fourth night, all my chores done and the bread prematurely mixed and kneaded, I took off my apron, crept out of the school, climbed the hill, and quietly let myself into the Great House. The door to Alma’s room was closed, though I wouldn’t have put it past her to be lying awake, listening for my footsteps. You should come back some night, she had said just the day before. Make him talk to you. She hadn’t gone so far as to say she would leave the door unlocked, but she had left the chain off. It had been simple to get inside.
The harder task would be making it through the door at the top of the stairs. I knocked for a few minutes, not expecting an answer, and I didn’t get one. So I set the lamp on the table and picked the lock, which yielded without a fight. Then I retrieved the lamp and stepped into the room.
Corban stood in the center, his body tense, his wings quivering behind him in visible indignation. He looked wretched—his clothes disarrayed, his hair unkempt, even his face unshaven. The room was a mess, with clothes littered across the floor, a few plates stacked on a corner table, the cello on its side as if it had been kicked over. All that was missing was the smell of alcohol and vomit, and he would have been entirely dissolute.
It was clear he was not going to speak first. I took a moment to survey the room. “Well,” I drawled finally, “I see you managed to control your frustration with your usual genteel restrain.”
His hands balled into fists and he took a step forward. “Yes, your mockery is all that’s been missing during my week of agony.”
“It hasn’t been a week,” I said. “It’s been four days. Have you lost your sense of time along with your pride?”
The anger on his face deepened. I could see he was fighting the urge to respond. My guess was he had promised himself he wouldn’t speak at all, and he hated me for goading him into one unwary reply already. Oh, but I had just begun.
“I swear, I’ve never met anyone worse than you at coping with adversity,” I said. “The slightest setback, and you instantly stop trying.”
“The slightest setback?” he demanded. “I fell from the sky! I could have broken my neck—been paralyzed—even killed! It was catastrophe, not—not inconvenience.”
“As far as I’m concerned, if you’re not dead, you have no excuse for giving up,” I said.
“Oh—that’s right. I want to take advice about moral courage from the woman who tried to murder a man and then spent the next four years running from the crime.”
I had expected him to throw that in my face; I was braced for it. So I laughed, which only infuriated him more. “Well, at least my instincts for survival are well honed,” I said. “Unlike yours.”
“You don’t understand—you’ve never understood,” he exclaimed, losing a little more of his self-control. He gestured broadly. “Flying was my life. If I cannot fly, I cannot be any of the things I was meant to be! I’m useless! I don’t care about survival because there’s nothing to survive for.”
“Well, I’ve never had much use for angels, but surely you could find some constructive way to pass your time,” I said unsympathetically. “There are plenty of blind people who make lace or throw pots or weave fabric or sort objects or do any number of valuable tasks.”
He gaped at me as if he could not believe even I could be so insensitive. I grinned and went on. “But surely you have some more specialized skills! You’re a musician. Can’t you teach singing or playing? There’s a whole school of young people just down the hill. Start a class. You might discover a prodigy.”
“I have little aptitude for teaching,” he ground out.
I remembered that he had been blinded while teaching a young angel how to sing the prayer for thunderbolts, so I abandoned this tack. “Well, then,” I said in a considering voice, “what else could you—I know! Aren’t angels desperate to populate the world with more little angels? Couldn’t you hire yourself out as a sort of stud service?”