Sharine’s lovely eyes met his. One day, they will know you. Until then, you must be strong enough to bear their fear. I know you have the shoulders to carry this weight.
It should’ve shaken him, how much her faith in him meant to him, but it settled on his bones as if it had always existed. “Come,” he said to the young woman, “we three will speak under the tree in the distance.”
Once there, separated from the others in the village by a stretch of trampled grassland, he asked her to tell him all she knew. Everything she said dovetailed with the letter. Including that, regardless of the “harsh grate” of his voice, the angel had spoken words intelligible and rational when he first landed.
“But his skin was like a bruise almost all over,” she added, “and it was peeling away in places, shriveled in others. His fingers were hooked, his nails like claws, and it seemed as if his tongue was rotting green, his lips too plump and red.”
When Titus asked who she’d told of the angel, her eyes got very big. “Our hosts,” she whispered. “We didn’t want them surprised if it happened here.”
Titus’s blood turned to black ice: the entire village knew of the diseased angel.
The people to whom they’d given safe haven had sentenced them all to death.
27
Sire, I thank you for allowing me to serve in your court for the past five hundred years. Though I leave now to explore other courts and lands, I will return often to challenge you to a climb—it’s my duty to ensure you maintain your strength.
Watch over my mother. I know she is your first general and tougher than I’ll ever be, but for me, she is my mother. But please never ever mention my request to her. She would strike me dead with her gaze, then revive me to sit me down and flay me alive with her words.
I will never forget all that you have taught me.
—Letter from Titus to Archangel Alexander
28
Sharine said nothing as they walked the young woman back to the village soon afterward. But once they were alone again, back at the tree, she touched her hand to Titus’s, closing her fingers around his fisted one as his wings began to glow.
“There are only two choices,” he ground out. “I steal a piece of their memory—or I end their lives.” Distant sounds of children’s voices raised in play added a painful coda to his words.
Having misty memories of her own from her lost years, Sharine had a very personal view into what it did to a person to not know their entire history; it was a hollow ache of helplessness and loss. “The decision is an awful one.” She squeezed his hand, her heart breaking and her eyes hot. “It’ll always be an awful one, but such choices maintain the balance of the world. Some knowledge dooms mortals to a life without freedom.”
“Alexander told me a story once,” Titus said, his voice sounding thick. “Of a small mountain town in what is now Italy. The people there decided to rise up against the cruelty of their ruling angel—she, the angel, wiped out the entire populace, down to the smallest mewling babe.”
Sharine’s entire body went rigid. “Why? Children would’ve done her no harm.” They were the most innocent of innocents; even Caliane, in her insanity, had not done direct harm to the smallest hearts.
“I asked the same.” Opening out his fisted hand, Titus wove his fingers through hers and she clung to the rough warmth of him. “Alexander told me it was because she was cruel beyond all sense of reason. Then he said, ‘I tell you this not to advocate for senseless mass slaughter, but to remind you that you must never permit rebellion to foment. Because in the end, it’ll lead only to endless mortal graves.’”
He blew out a breath but his chest remained tight. “So I know what must be done. It just seems such a terrible thing to do to people who have already lost so much.” Titus took in the village again, alive against the day’s light. “The only mercy is they won’t know what they’ve lost.”
Titus was old enough to have learned how to erase memories with pinprick precision, and he could do it from a distance. Still, it took him several hours to erase all knowledge of the infected angel from the village.
“It’s their courage,” he said to Sharine afterward, a sadness in his bones. “The way these mortals fought and how they thought of others to the very end . . . It’s a thing of honor, of bravery such as I would laud in any of my warriors. Yet I’ve stolen from them the memory of their own brave hearts in fighting off an angel who wanted only to butcher.”
Sharine’s pupils flared, dark against the sunshine of her irises. “But you know. You’ll honor them in your memories—as I’ll honor them in my art.” Shifting her gaze on those determined words, she took in the village in the distance. “After it is permitted, I’ll tell Jessamy, so she may write this chapter in the angelic histories. Their courage won’t be forgotten.”
He looked at the fine line of her profile, her skin shimmering with a slight golden hue that was ethereal—but she was very much real, very much a creature of flesh and blood, her skin warm and her grip firm. He didn’t release her hand, even though he knew he shouldn’t be so familiar with a treasure of angelkind. “You understand this can’t be spoken of yet, even to angels?”
A nod that drew his attention to the way she wore her hair; she could’ve been a young warrior in his court just barely stepping out into the world. “It would spread terror among our own kind and could lead to needless massacres.”
Slim shoulders rising as she inhaled. “There are some among us who’d think nothing of scouring an entire continent to bare earth in order to halt the spread of a possible infection.” She brushed her wing against his. “There’s been too much death already, Titus. We must find a way to stop this without drenching the earth in further blood.”
Titus had no disagreement with her words. But he was an archangel. “I must inform the Cadre.” It wasn’t a matter of choice but of his duty to the office he held. “I’ll take full responsibility for stopping the scourge. No one will argue with all else that’s going on—they’re all too busy battling their own fires.” And when it came down to it, he was the final authority on this continent.
Titus contacted the Cadre as soon as he and Sharine returned to the citadel.
He could tell she was exhausted after the brutal speed of their return flight—even the fact he’d carried her couldn’t ameliorate the impact. She’d curled into as small a ball as possible to reduce drag and now slowly stretched out her limbs under a cloud-heavy and dull afternoon, shaking life back into her wings, arms, and legs. “I want a bath more than anything.”
So did Titus. But this had to be done first.
“Would you like to sit in on the meeting?” he found himself asking when he should’ve been ordering her to rest.
She stared at him for a moment. “Yes.” Her expression was inscrutable.
“I need only to make a stop to put on my breastplate.” Gold, it curved over his shoulders and bore the emblem of a sun in the center, lightning bolts of power arcing out from it.
But the breastplate wasn’t a thing of vanity. Neither was it a warrior’s armor in the strictest sense, for an archangel had no need for such—anything that took him down wouldn’t be halted by a shield of metal. No, this was a symbol of power, and today, he needed the symbolism.
Sharine waited silently while he put it on, then gave a crisp nod. “Your face bears streaks of dirt and sweat, as do your arms. You look exactly what you are—an archangel fighting a battle.”
Warmth spreading inside him, he led her first to his most senior technical specialist, and asked her to hand over her phone for a minute so the relevant photographs could be copied.