Angels Dance

first station—Raphael will want to hear of your remembrance.”
    The landing was flawless, Galen’s wings powerful. He didn’t resist when she reached out to massage her fingers across his shoulders. “Are you tired?” It was not good of her, but she wanted to be in no one’s arms but Galen’s.
    A shake of his head, his face angled toward where Raphael stood talking to the guards. “Come.”
    She waited until they were alone with Raphael inside the large domed cabin to speak. The blue of the archangel’s eyes seared her through and she wondered if the staggering strength of it was a harbinger of things to come. Caliane had had the power to tear apart the minds of other angels, and Raphael was, in many ways, his mother’s son.
    “Jason,” the archangel said in an apparent non sequitur, “has been frustrated for seasons. He was able to get one of his people into Alexander’s stables; and has picked up pieces of knowledge from the gossip of the servants and the soldiers when they frequent the taverns, but he cannot get anyone into Alexander’s court itself. More, he hasn’t been able to find a way to see Alexander in public, attempt to judge his frame of mind.”
    Galen’s wings rustled as he settled them. “That isn’t unusual. Titus’s court would be impossible to infiltrate, and Alexander is a warrior, too.”
    Shaking her head, Jessamy put her hand on his wing. “No. Alexander has long made it a policy to walk and fly among his troops once every five days. He does it rain or shine, hail or snow. He has always led from the front.”
    “The irony,” Raphael continued, “is that I took my example from Alexander on this. Yet Jason has not seen him appear to perform his duty in recent memory.” The archangel paced the confines of the cabin. “While word in the taverns is of his favorite concubine, I assumed that in truth, he was holed up with his generals, in a deliberate attempt to ensure nothing could be gleaned of his battle strategy.”
    “That remains a possibility.” Galen rubbed at his jaw. “But Alexander also has a son. His weapons-master, Rohan.”
    Raphael’s eyes met Galen’s. “Yes. And Rohan is quite capable of mounting a battle campaign.”
    Jessamy’s blood turned ice-cold, as she registered the implications of Galen’s suggestion. If Alexander was dead . . . but no, how could that possibly be? Only another archangel could have killed him, and such killings were always catastrophic events that sent tremors across the world—archangels did not easily die. They took people and places with them. No poison, no stealthy—
    Oh no.

11
    “O nly an archangel can kill another archangel , ” she whispered. “But if he was betrayed by someone he trusted, he could be entombed.” Such a horror had happened just once, long before even Lijuan had been born.
    Cut into pieces after being ambushed in sleep by those he considered friends, the archangel’s body had been scattered and buried deep in far corners of the earth. But archangels could regenerate even from ash. This time, the piece that regenerated into the whole man was buried in a mountain range deep in what was now Uram’s territory.
    That mountain range no longer existed, and neither did anyone who bore even a single drop of blood related to those who had buried the archangel, the carnage so absolute that no one sane would ever dare such an act again. She swallowed, continued. “I don’t think Rohan would be disloyal to his father”—they had a true father-son bond—“but if Alexander is missing, Rohan may well be running the battle campaign, certain his father will soon rise.”
    “Jessamy is right,” Raphael murmured. “But if Alexander has indeed been missing so long, then he is likely to be dead.” A reminder that an archangel regenerated at a speed no ordinary angel could comprehend, and that nothing could keep him contained, earth or rock or water. “If he fell into anshara for some reason,” Raphael continued, naming the deepest of healing sleeps, “and was betrayed to an archangelic enemy, even Alexander may have been unable to fight a burst of angelfire direct to the heart.”
    The ability to create angelfire, Jessamy knew, was a rare gift—and a lethal one. Caliane had possessed it, but her son did not . . . not yet, his power escalating at too rapid a rate to predict anything. “So far as I know, four of the Cadre can call angelfire.”
    “Would the victor not claim Alexander’s