CHAPTER TWO

THE ANGEL

ROMMER ENSGRIFT backed away from Mery, who watched him go without much expression.

“A word outside,” the thin, almost skeletal leic muttered to Leoff.

He followed obediently. Once on the stoop, Ensgrift mopped his forehead with a rag.

“I’ve heard stories,” he said, his voice quivering. “Maryspellen. But I never thought there could be any truth.”

Leoff couldn’t think of anything to say or do until the leic composed himself, which he did in a moment.

“She’s half-alive,” he said.

“Half-alive,” Leoff said, repeating the nonsensical phrase.

“Auy. Her heart beats, but very slowly. Her blood crawls through her veins. She should never be able to walk or talk like that, but she does, and I can only think that is because she is half-animated by something else, something other than breath.”

“Something else?”

“I don’t know. I set bones and give herbs for the gout; I don’t deal with things like this. A demon? A ghost? This is for a sacritor, not me.”

Leoff flinched. For years he hadn’t had much interest in the organized Church. Since being tortured by one of its praifecs, he hadn’t had any use for it at all. Even if he did, given the present climate in the holy institution, they more likely than not would burn her immediately. If he could even find a sacritor, which in Crotheny wasn’t an easy thing these days, given the queen’s ban on them.

“Isn’t there anything you can suggest?” he asked.

The old fellow shook his head. “There’s nothing natural about this. I can’t see that anything good can come from it.”

“Thank you, then, for your time,” Leoff said.

The leic left in a fuss of relief, and Leoff reentered the house. Mery still was sitting where he had left her.

“I’m sorry if I frighten you,” the girl said in a small voice.

“Do you know what happened to you, Mery?” he asked.

She nodded. “I was at the well. I thought I might see my mother again, but I didn’t. There was an angel there instead.”

“An angel.” It was an old word, one that people didn’t hear much outside of Virgenya. It was a sort of keeper of the dead, a servant of Saint Dun or Under.

“Mery, what did it look like?

“I didn’t see anything. I felt him all around me, though, and he talked to me. He told me I was on my way over anyway, that if I crossed to where the singing was, I could hear it better and even sing with them.

He said I would be able to help you better, too.”

“Help me?”

“Write your music. To heal the law of death.”

“And then?”

“It hurt at first, when I first breathed in, but then it was all right. And then I went to sleep and woke up in my room.”

That she spoke so matter-of-factly about the whole thing was the most awful part, the thing that was hardest for him to accept.

Was she like Robert, then? But the queen said that Robert had no heartbeat, that when stabbed he didn’t bleed. How many varieties of the walking dead were there?

But the leic had said that Mery wasn’t dead. She just wasn’t fully alive, whatever that meant.

He was a composer. All he had wanted to do was write music, hear it played, live a decent life. His hiring by the court at Eslen had been a proud moment, the opportunity of a lifetime. But he had walked straight into a Black Mary of terror and death, and now this. Why had the saints put this on him?

But then Areana laid her hand on his, saying nothing, and he remembered that if he hadn’t come to Eslen, he wouldn’t have met her. And although he had written the most hideous thing of his life, he also had written the most sublime.

And he had befriended Mery and come to love her. Mending the law of death was an awfully big thing, too big for him to comprehend. The angel—whether it was real or Mery’s own genius coming out again—knew that. The saints had given him something smaller to do, something real to him. They had suggested a way to save Mery or at least to make a start at it.

“Mery,” he said. “Go find your thaurnharp. You and I are going to play.” And for the first time in a long while, she smiled at him.