Guild Hunter 02 - Angels' Flight

savage.
     
    “I remember now.” Jessamy’s liquid silk voice pouring over him in an unintentional caress. “Your tutor was a former student I recommended for the post—he told me you were taught alone.”
     
    “Yes.” Titus had not wanted the feminine softness of his daughters to affect Galen’s development.
     
    “A lonely life.”
     
    He shrugged, because he’d survived and he’d grown up strong—he’d been a capable fighter at an age when most angels were yet considered children. Perhaps he had not had the usual playmates, but it was all he knew, and a life that had formed him into the man he was today. That man wanted to bend, sniff the scent at the curve of Jessamy’s elegant neck.“I’ll escort you the rest of the way,” he said, rather than giving in to the primitive urge.
     
    J essamy fell into step beside the big—and rather physically overwhelming—angel, his wings raised up off the floor with such effortless ease, she knew it was no conscious choice, but the honed training of a warrior. No one would ever trip him up by using his wings, this male who had looked at the book he held as if at some foreign object. “Do you read?” she asked without thought.
    The incredible, exquisite red of his hair shimmered with droplets of mist that had collected on the strands as he shook his head, and she wondered if 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.ȝ
     
    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…