Angels Dance

the color would stain her skin a glorious sunset should she weave her fingers through the thickness of it.
    “I can,” he added almost curtly, “but there’s not much use for it in my world.” An unexpected brush of heat across his cheekbones. “My reading skills are . . . rusty at best.”
    Jessamy didn’t understand how anyone could live without words, without story . . . but then, she had been entombed in the Refuge for millennia. If she, too, had wings as magnificent as Galen’s, perhaps—though it seemed an altogether impossible thing—she would not have cared so much for words either. “I can’t fly,” she found herself saying, because she’d embarrassed him, and she hadn’t meant to. “It gives me much time to read.”
    Galen didn’t turn, didn’t stare at the twisted wing that meant she’d never take flight. Keir, their greatest healer, had tried to heal her a thousand times over the years as his strength grew with age, but her left wing always formed into the same twisted shape, regardless of how many times it was broken and reset, or excised and allowed to grow back. Until she had said enough. No more. No more.
    “Your inability to fly,” Galen said even as she fought the painful echo of a decision that had broken her heart, “is obvious.”
    Her mouth fell open. No one had ever been so unkind about her disability. Most people preferred to pretend it didn’t exist, and she didn’t push them to acknowledge it. What was the point in causing those around her discomfort? As for her charges—and those like Illium who had once been her charges—they had only ever known her as Jessamy, who had a twisted wing and whom they had to behave with, because she couldn’t chase them into the sky. All she had to do was step outside the schoolroom and raise her arm, and even the naughtiest child came back down to earth at once.
    This one, however, she thought, glancing askance at the large male she couldn’t imagine as a lonely boy making his way in a court filled with the clang of blades and the cries of combat, would have done exactly as he pleased.
    “Were you born this way?” he asked, blunt as the edge of a dull axe.
    Jessamy decided he wasn’t being rude, at least not in a purposeful way. “Subtle,” as Illium had said, didn’t seem to be in Galen’s vocabulary. “Yes.”
    “They say Keir is a talented healer.”
    “He is . . . He did his best.” And he had blamed himself when he failed. She didn’t blame Keir. Neither did she blame her mother—who found it difficult to look at the child she’d borne, though not because of a lack of love.
    “Her guilt is too huge.” Keir’s young-old eyes, his voice layered with potent emotion. “She will not listen when I tell her there is no need for it. Nothing she did or did not do caused your wing to form as it did.”
    Jessamy’s mother wouldn’t listen to her daughter either, not for the longest time. Even now, there was a haunted kind of pain on Rhoswen’s fine-boned face on the rare occasions Jessamy caught her looking at her child’s malformed wing. Rare . . . and getting ever rarer, as the wrenching silence between them, created of all the things they did not say, grew into an impenetrable black wall.
    The heavy wooden doors to the library appeared out of the mist at that instant, as impenetrable in their bulk, the gold that inlaid the exquisite carvings waiting for the sun’s kiss to shine. Reaching out, Galen pulled open one of the doors, the ropes of muscle on his arm flexing and bunching in a way that had her mouth going dry, her heart slamming hard against her ribs.
    Shaken by the depth and swiftness of her response—unmistakably physical and carnal—she averted her gaze and held out her hand for the book.
    “Do you not eat?” he asked, sliding it into her hold, a jaundiced look in his eyes as he ran his gaze over her body.
    The dark pulse of attraction morphed into sharp irritation. As a young woman, she’d attempted to do everything in her power to put more flesh on her bones, to no avail. This was simply how she was meant to be. “No,” she said, ice in her tone, “I prefer to starve,” and stalked into the library, certain the infuriating male had been raised by wolves.
    * * *
    I t was not long afterward, the sun’s blaze having burned away the mist to reveal the bright flecks of precious metals embedded in the marble buildings of the Refuge, that Galen saw Illium’s distinctive wings sweep