Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Raphael missed his fellow archangel more than he would’ve predicted. Astaad had always been one of the calmer heads in the Cadre, a man content in his skin and with his life and loves.
Fingers curling into his palm at his side, he looked up as the first drops of the afternoon shower hit the glass of the roof.
“No, I do not wish to freshen up!” Aegaeon bellowed, his hair damp either from sweat or from a quick dunk in the sea. “If Raphael’s already here, then let’s get on with it!”
“In that we are in agreement.” Raphael strode into the chamber proper.
“Rafe,” he said, and Raphael knew it was meant to irritate.
“Ah, age is catching up with you, old one,” he murmured. “That you forget my preferred name once again.”
Aegaeon’s face mottled, his fists clenching into mallets at his sides.
Before the Archangel of the Deep could descend into the rage that was his natural state around the man on whom he blamed his son’s refusal to join his court, Raphael turned to General Atu. “Qin must have left instructions.”
Atu nodded. “I last saw the archangel ten days past. On that night, he told me others of the Cadre would come here, perhaps even all, and that when they did, I was to take them to a locked chamber inside his suite.”
Jaw tight and body held with warrior precision, Atu stepped forward. “If you will follow me, archangels.”
Aegaeon was scowling when Raphael looked up, but he’d moved on from his continued anger at Raphael. An anger all the more ridiculous because of the truth behind Illium’s lack of allegiance to his father. Aegaeon had abandoned his son and the extraordinary woman who’d borne Aegaeon his only child, damaged both in ways unique and terrible.
How had the man expected any other outcome?
Arrogance truly did lead to idiocy.
“Qin planned this,” Aegaeon muttered. “It was no spur-of-the-moment decision driven by emotion. That makes it worse.”
“Yes.” The archangel who’d taken over rule of the Pacific Isles, but never the name, hadn’t given in to depression, hadn’t been driven to this drastic act by his knowledge that he could never walk in the world with Cassandra by his side.
Such a wrenching call, a part of Raphael would’ve forgiven. People broke. Even immortals broke. And Qin had been thrust out of Sleep by the Cascade, then forced into the Cadre when Astaad fell during the war.
But for Qin to do what he’d done with conscious intent, while aware of the fragile stability of the world? No. That could not be forgiven. “It remains very much Astaad’s home, doesn’t it?” he commented as they followed Atu through wide hallways lit by natural light from skylights awash in fat droplets that Raphael knew would be warm to the skin.
He nodded at the wall to his right. “I remember that tapa cloth hanging from my last visit to him, and one of Mele’s sisters of the harem did that painting of the children jumping in the waves.”
“I was never at this residence before Astaad’s Sleep,” Aegaeon reminded him. “We met over a different island, then spent most of our time dealing with the various messes of the Cascade.
“I also do not believe he would’ve invited me here on a short acquaintance. With what you say of the art, the design of this place, and from what I saw of the gardens during my approach, this feels like a home and not a court.”
If Raphael had a blind spot with Aegaeon, it was that he tended to focus on the other man’s ugly choices and forget his intelligence and capacity for subtle understanding. Such blind spots got archangels killed. He had to put aside his prejudices and treat Aegaeon as both a fellow archangel—and a possible threat.
“Yes,” he said, “you’re right. I wasn’t invited here until two hundred years into my reign, when we’d come to know each other well enough to understand we thought the same on many matters of the Cadre. It was not a place for casual acquaintances.”
“Given your words about the house still feeling like Astaad’s”—a muscle twitched in Aegaeon’s jaw—“Qin never intended to remain here long-term. He put down no roots.”
“No, that much he made clear from the first—but I thought his short term would give us a century at the least.” Enough to stabilize the world, banish the final lingering shadows of a war built on a foundation of disease and death.
“I don’t want to be awake, either,” Aegaeon muttered, because of course this must be about him. “But here I am.”
Raphael made a noncommittal noise in response. While the turbulent energies of the Cascade may have hauled Aegaeon out of Sleep, the Archangel of the Deep was enjoying being back in power. What he wasn’t enjoying was that his son had disavowed him.
Illium hadn’t said a single public word on the matter.