Angels Dance

stronghold, with Illium and Aodhan’s help, but the two angels were yet young.
    Raphael carried Jessamy’s letter back to him.
    * * *
    J essamy touched the letter for the thousandth time, tracing the hard, angular lines of Galen’s pen. She could almost feel his energy, his raw power in the terse words another woman might have taken as disinterest. Smiling because she understood that a warrior had no time or inclination to learn poetry and gentle wooing skills, she kissed the letter and put it on top of the book she was carrying as she headed home for the day.
    “Daughter.”
    Jessamy turned at the sound of that familiar voice, sliding Galen’s letter between the pages of the book as she did so—but her mother had already seen. “From your barbarian.” It was said with a smile, affectionate rather than judgmental.
    Jessamy laughed. “Yes.” She didn’t tell her mother that Galen wasn’t as much the barbarian as he appeared—not only because the fact people constantly underestimated his intelligence gave him an advantage, but because he needed no such defense. She adored every part of him, the rough and the secret sweetness. Such as that which had led him to send her a daisy pressed in the leaves of his letter.
    I flew past the field today, and I remembered how you talked to the flowers
,
he’d written, almost driving her to tears, the big beast.
    “You love him.” Her mother’s words were followed by a deeper, yet somehow more tentative smile. “I can see it in your eyes.”
    Unable to bear that hesitancy, Jessamy walked into the arms her mother held out. The scent of her was intimately familiar, warm and loving, a sensory reminder of the childhood nights Jessamy had spent silent and stiff in Rhoswen’s lap—after truly understanding that her wings weren’t ever going to form like those of her friends, that she’d never be able to join them in their sky games.
    “I do,” she whispered, squeezing her mother tight, because Rhoswen had rocked her night after night, a fierce protective love in her voice as she attempted to give solace to a child who hurt too much to accept it. “And he loves me, too,” she said, aware her mother needed to hear it. “I’m happy.”
    Rhoswen drew back from the embrace, a sheen of wet over the lush brown of her eyes. “No, you’re not.”
    “Mother—”
    “Hush.” Laughing through the tears, her mother squeezed her hands. “You ache with missing that warrior of yours.”
    Jessamy laughed and it was a little teary, too, because she hadn’t realized until this instant how very much she’d missed talking about Galen with her mother. It hadn’t been a conscious choice not to, simply an extension of the painful silence that had grown between them over the years. “Will you come home with me?” she asked, reaching for Rhoswen’s hand. “I’d like to talk.”
    “I’d like that, too.” Fingers, slender and long, stroking her cheek. “I’m so happy to see the sadness gone from your heart.”
    That was when Jessamy realized the distance between them had had as much to do with her as her mother. She’d thought she’d masked her sorrow as she grew older and became a respected figure in the Refuge, but what mother who loved her child would not be able to taste the salt of that child’s hidden tears?
    Linking her arm with Rhoswen’s, their wings overlapping in a warm intimacy between mother and child, she made a decision—no matter what happened going forward, Rhoswen would never again taste such pain in her daughter. Galen had helped Jessamy find her wings, but the joy of spirit that bubbled within her was hers to nurture and she would fight to hold on to it.
    “What does he write, the big brute who kissed you in front of the entire Refuge?” Rhoswen asked with a teasing smile. “Do let me see.”
    “Only if you let me see the love notes I know Father still writes to you.”
    Her mother’s cheeks turned as pink as the color that marked the tips of her primaries, the very shade on the inner edges of Jessamy’s own wings. “Terrible girl!”
    Jessamy giggled and held the book and Galen’s letter close to her heart. Those letters kept winging their way across the world as the seasons changed. She wrote pages and pages full of stories about life in the Refuge—including about the three small angels who were waiting for Galen right along with Jessamy.
    They assure me their flight technique has improved considerably—they’ve been very