“‘We hope that you’ll find us in the next village. It lies north-northwest in a straight line, a half day’s hike for a young man or woman. For us, it’ll take a day or more. We no longer have any working vehicles, and we have many wounded, children, and elderly. We thank you for fighting for us, and hope our letter helps you to save others from this horror. And if we don’t make it, please send word of our passing to the two towns below, where many of us have family and friends who’ll tell others that we are gone.’”

Sharine was crying now, her tears quiet and heartbreaking. “It’s signed with what I assume is the name of this settlement. Below that is a description of the angel: tall, with white skin in the few areas where it wasn’t green-black, black curls, and a marking on the left cheek that looked like a lightning bolt.”

Titus hissed out a breath. “Skarde, a courtier of Charisemnon’s—and a man rumored to be one of his best intelligence agents.” The scar hadn’t healed after a decade because it had originally been made by Charisemnon in a temper—the barest graze of archangelic fire.

Carefully folding the letter, Sharine placed it back in the envelope.

They stood in a moment of silence for the dead and the lost. When she looked up at him and said, “We’ll go north-northwest?” he didn’t tell her that there was no hope. He nodded; it was beyond him to abandon people who’d thought of others in their most dire moment.

First, however, they made a second call to his scientists and scholars, giving them this further information. One of the scientists asked Titus to take a sample of any flesh they could find, as well as some bone as a contingency against a disaster that might make the body inaccessible.

He was still speaking on the phone when Sharine moved to fulfill the request. Taking off her backpack, she took out the packet in which she’d kept the energy bars she’d given the children; she used it to scoop up a small wing bone, then set her jaw and used her throwing blade to cut off a piece of mummified skin.

Dropping it into the packet with the bone, she sealed it before thrusting it to the bottom of her backpack, then pulled the backpack on. When she looked around for something with which to clean her blade, he took it from her and wiped it on his pants. One more stain made no difference.

Accepting the blade back as he finished talking to his people, she slid it away into its thigh sheath. Two minutes later, they took flight in grim silence, their eyes searching the land for bones.

A half day’s walk wasn’t so far by the wing even at low speed and the sun was not yet high in the sky when they reached a village that appeared alive, smoke coming from the chimneys and movement in the streets. Bones aplenty they’d seen on their journey here, but none had been human.

Their landing caused fear, chill and black, to ripple through the village, the people going down with their faces pressed to the earth, but Titus was ready for it this time. “Rise!” he ordered, and once they’d done so, he held up the letter. “I come from the village of Dojah. Did any of the survivors make it here?”

A thin girl with a worn face, her skin a light brown and her hair in braids against her skull, stepped forward. “My lord Archangel.” Her voice shook. “Ten of us made it. Two died later, their injuries terrible. Of the remnants, there is one older than me but he battles a fever after our trek here, and isn’t lucid. The others are all children, saved by the courageous actions of others, but wounded in their hearts.”

“Do you know what’s written in this letter?” he asked, striving to keep his voice gentle and knowing he’d failed when she flinched.

“N-no.” A whispery response. “My grandmother is the one who wrote it, b-but she is now gone.” Tears washed her cheeks.

Sharine moved to put her hand on the young woman’s, murmuring to her until awe replaced the terror in her expression and she found her voice again. “I will tell you all that I know, Archangel Titus.” That she addressed him as he preferred told him that Sharine had said something on the point.

I thank you, Sharine. He found it infuriating to deal with these people’s blind terror even knowing it had nothing to do with him.

Sharine’s lovely eyes met his. One day, they will know you. Until then, you must be strong enough to bear their fear. I know you have the shoulders to carry this weight.

It should’ve shaken him, how much her faith in him meant to him, but it settled on his bones as if it had always existed. “Come,” he said to the young woman, “we three will speak under the tree in the distance.”

Once there, separated from the others in the village by a stretch of trampled grassland, he asked her to tell him all she knew. Everything she said dovetailed with the letter. Including that, regardless of the “harsh grate” of his voice, the angel had spoken words intelligible and rational when he first landed.

“But his skin was like a bruise almost all over,” she added, “and it was peeling away in places, shriveled in others. His fingers were hooked, his nails like claws, and it seemed as if his tongue was rotting green, his lips too plump and red.”

When Titus asked who she’d told of the angel, her eyes got very big. “Our hosts,” she whispered. “We didn’t want them surprised if it happened here.”

Titus’s blood turned to black ice: the entire village knew of the diseased angel.

The people to whom they’d given safe haven had sentenced them all to death.

27

Sire, I thank you for allowing me to serve in your court for the past five hundred years. Though I leave now to explore other courts and lands, I will return often to challenge you to a climb—it’s my duty to ensure you maintain your strength.

Watch over my mother. I know she is your first general and tougher than I’ll ever be, but for me, she is my mother. But please never ever mention my request to her. She would strike me dead with her gaze, then revive me to sit me down and flay me alive with her words.

I will never forget all that you have taught me.

—Letter from Titus to Archangel Alexander

28

Sharine said nothing as they walked the young woman back to the village soon afterward. But once they were alone again, back at the tree, she touched her hand to Titus’s, closing her fingers around his fisted one as his wings began to glow.

“There are only two choices,” he ground out. “I steal a piece of their memory—or I end their lives.” Distant sounds of children’s voices raised in play added a painful coda to his words.

Having misty memories of her own from her lost years, Sharine had a very personal view into what it did to a person to not know their entire history; it was a hollow ache of helplessness and loss. “The decision is an awful one.” She squeezed his hand, her heart breaking and her eyes hot. “It’ll always be an awful one, but such choices maintain the balance of the world. Some knowledge dooms mortals to a life without freedom.”

“Alexander told me a story once,” Titus said, his voice sounding thick. “Of a small mountain town in what is now Italy. The people there decided to rise up against the cruelty of their ruling angel—she, the angel, wiped out the entire populace, down to the smallest mewling babe.”

Sharine’s entire body went rigid. “Why? Children would’ve done her no harm.” They were the most innocent of innocents; even Caliane, in her insanity, had not done direct harm to the smallest hearts.

“I asked the same.” Opening out his fisted hand, Titus wove his fingers through hers and she clung to the rough warmth of him. “Alexander told me it was because she was cruel beyond all sense of reason. Then he said, ‘I tell you this not to advocate for senseless mass slaughter, but to remind you that you must never permit rebellion to foment. Because in the end, it’ll lead only to endless mortal graves.’”

He blew out a breath but his chest remained tight. “So I know what must be done. It just seems such a terrible thing to do to people who have already lost so much.” Titus took in the village again, alive against the day’s light. “The only mercy is they won’t know what they’ve lost.”

Titus was old enough to have learned how to erase memories with pinprick precision, and he could do it from a distance. Still, it took him several hours to erase all knowledge of the infected angel from the village.

“It’s their courage,” he said to Sharine afterward, a sadness in his bones. “The way these mortals fought and how they thought of others to the very end . . . It’s a thing of honor, of bravery such as I would laud in any of my warriors. Yet I’ve stolen from them the memory of their own brave hearts in fighting off an angel who wanted only to butcher.”

Sharine’s pupils flared, dark against the sunshine of her irises. “But you know. You’ll honor them in your memories—as I’ll honor them in my art.” Shifting her gaze on those determined words, she took in the village in the distance. “After it is permitted, I’ll tell Jessamy, so she may write this chapter in the angelic histories. Their courage won’t be forgotten.”

He looked at the fine line of her profile, her skin shimmering with a slight golden hue that was ethereal—but she was very much real, very much a creature of flesh and blood, her skin warm and her grip firm. He didn’t release her hand, even though he knew he shouldn’t be so familiar with a treasure of angelkind. “You understand this can’t be spoken of yet, even to angels?”

A nod that drew his attention to the way she wore her hair; she could’ve been a young warrior in his court just barely stepping out into the world. “It would spread terror among our own kind and could lead to needless massacres.”

Slim shoulders rising as she inhaled. “There are some among us who’d think nothing of scouring an entire continent to bare earth in order to halt the spread of a possible infection.” She brushed her wing against his. “There’s been too much death already, Titus. We must find a way to stop this without drenching the earth in further blood.”