Lilith sucked in a breath. “How did that happen?”
I hesitated. “I believe…there was an accident. Both Eve Lovejoy and your brother fell.”
“She’s alive and he’s not,” Lilith said sharply, her blue eyes finding mine and then darting away again. I could practically taste her bitterness in the air.
Nodding, I crossed my arms. “She may have landed on top of him. I wasn’t there; I was with you.”
She stiffened, but I couldn’t see her face. “Was he in pain?”
“Gabriel told me he died instantly,” I said truthfully.
Lilith nodded, crossing her arms, and sniffed. “Herald, can you help him pass quietly and easily? He…he might not deserve it. But I know it would comfort my mother.”
I stared at her. Damn, this was the Herald part I knew nothing about. I knew that, of the four gods in the human world, the Church of the Love of His Divine Saints worshiped Erlik, God of Death and Beyond. I’d even seen some statues of Erlik, always shrouded in gray, always depicted with an hourglass and a shepherd’s staff. He was not as popular as his twin children, but there were still plenty of churches and reverends around. Everyone died, so I supposed Erlik’s services would always be needed. Erlik was supposed to have messengers and guides—spirits who brought the newly dead into his realm and guarded the edges of the Beyond to make sure nothing escaped into the world that shouldn’t be there.
But a Herald? Especially a Herald as defined by cult leader Zorababel Grimshaw? Not a clue.
“I will do what I can,” I murmured, hoping it was the right answer.
She sniffed again, and I imagined draping one wing around her shoulders. I didn’t; I wasn’t stupid. “He..he wasn’t a kind man, but he truly believed in what Reverend Grimshaw preached. Belief matters, doesn’t it?”
“Mmm.” I should probably find Erlik’s scriptures and familiarize myself with it. Though hopefully I’d be in and out. Lilith had said she’d seen the illumination of the stained glass in an old manuscript sitting on Grimshaw’s desk. So a couple of days. I hoped.
Lilith turned abruptly toward the inn, closing the conversation. Then she stopped. “What about you?”
I did not feel like handling a group of people desperate for favors or blessings or the suspicious people who viewed me as a threat. When we first Fell we’d stayed hidden while we learned about the world we were trapped in. We’d mostly kept to that code. Everyone had their own reasons. Mine was that while I enjoyed watching humans, I didn’t like the expectations that came from them once they saw my wings.
“Those beds aren’t made for seraph wings,” I told her, stretching one wing out as an example.
Her breath hitched as she watched the nearly six feet of wing unfold. It was dark, so the bronze didn’t glint from the sun, but perhaps the strength of the wing and the long primary feathers were eye-catching enough, because her face changed to…not quite awe. Perhaps admiration.
I’d nearly forgotten how beautiful humans found wings, no matter the color. Brown was quite ordinary in my world, found among farmers and tradesmen typically. My heart lifted at the light in her eyes.
Then Lilith snapped free and glanced at my face, her expression turning wide, open, and completely shallow. Like a veil had fallen. “See you tomorrow.”
I nodded, smothering my disappointment. She’d been all spark and flame when I’d taken her into the air yesterday, but that had been snuffed out. Or she was hiding it from me now. “In the morning, then.”
That night I slept under the stars on a soft bed of moss. It wasn’t luxurious, but I was a warrior. My body ran hotter than humans, and I’d been in a war. I’d slept in far worse places. My last thought before drifting to sleep was of how small she’d looked, how worried and uncertain, when she didn’t think anyone was watching her.
Two days later we reached a neighborhood at the edge of Lownden City. My eyes scanned the edge of the teeming, smoky town. It was a foul, dirty place, full of poor masses and a few wealthy families who pulled the strings in the city. But I was glad to see it. Two days of travel at a cart’s pace almost made me lose my mind. I found myself thinking wistfully of the great wooden platforms we used to transport goods in Aerie. We had magical energy created and stored to keep them afloat, hundreds of feet off the earth, but still had mighty beasts pull and push them from peak to peak. Every warrior had hated cloudstore duty. But somehow I missed it, after being tied to the walking pace of an old horse pulling a decrepit cart across Anglian moors and farmland.
A small cluster of gray stone terraced houses and brown-shingled roofs sat beneath me at the very edge of the city. Amidst several oak trees a church stood, one gray belltower reaching upward. Behind the church was a strange glass structure I couldn’t make sense of. Shadows rolled across the ground, casting the church in darkness. A faint scent of rot wafted up to me.
People milled about, some women coming out of their homes and peering as the cart rattled to a stop outside the front of the church.
I glided to the belltower, caught a grip in between stone and cracked mortar, and sat on the edge of the stone parapet, letting my bare feet dangle over. I watched the display below.
Tomes got down from the cart and turned to three men dressed in black suits, stiff-necked and somber. The other elders, likely. While he conversed with them, Lilith climbed down from her perch of the cart, her movements ginger and careful, as if she was sore from the journey.
My hands twitched, nearly reaching out to assist her down. I stilled myself. Heralds probably didn’t do things like that.
Several women approached, most of them middle-aged. One had graying blond hair and wore a dress similar to Lilith’s. Her mother, I presumed. I expected the woman to embrace her daughter, but instead she crossed her arms and spoke to her a foot or two away.
Lilith crossed her arms and huddled, mirroring the woman’s posture, then pointed to the cart.
The older woman turned and tripped over her skirts running to the cart. A wail went up, and then all the women were crowding around, removing the straw and melting ice blocks. More came out of their homes until there was a crowd. Men arrived, too, though not as many. The elders in black shoved their way to the cart, pushing and snapping at the women.
I took in the scene. Movement flickered at the corner of my eyes. I glanced over and saw a young woman standing beneath one of the bare oak trees, a shawl wrapped around her. She alone did not surge around the cart. Her face was like pale limestone, and her grip on her shawl turned her fingers to claws. She wavered in the wind, as thin as a sapling, and her black hair was drawn tightly back from her face.
