Today, she dug back through her memories in an effort to remember what he’d attempted to teach her. She hadn’t paid enough attention at the time, still partially lost in the kaleidoscope, so her retention wasn’t as sharp as usual.
But Sharine was through with giving up.
Jaw set, she touched different parts of the screen, activating things until the device began to look familiar at last. Even faded and hazy, her memory was one of her greatest advantages, the reason she could paint so true to life.
Teeth biting down on her lower lip, she created a message: my son, are you awake? i would speak to you. It didn’t look pretty, but it would do. She sent it. She didn’t know what time it was in his city, and she didn’t know what duties lay on his shoulders, but she knew he must be very busy.
Yet the phone began to buzz in her hand a moment later, a still portrait of Illium coming onscreen. She glanced frantically at the available options, not knowing which part to touch. Thinking that red was almost universally the color of warning, she decided to touch the green. And her boy’s living face appeared on the screen.
He was sweaty, the blue-tipped black of his hair damp against a background of darkness lit up by the lights in the windows of a building behind him, and he had the most enormous smile on his face. “Mother, did you do that yourself?”
Squaring her shoulders, she said, “Of course. You shouldn’t doubt your mother.”
His laughter made her lips curve, everything inside her suddenly warm and happy. He was so beautiful, her boy. With his golden eyes and his skin kissed by sunshine, and his wings of astonishing silver-blue. But the most beautiful thing about Illium was his heart. He loved so fiercely, her son. And he mourned so deeply that it was pure devastation.
“I am going to Titus’s territory,” she told him. “Will I be able to use this device there?”
He nodded. “I’ve set it up so you can use it anywhere. If you want, I can give your contact number to Raphael and Elena and anyone else you want to stay in touch with.”
“Yes, I’d like that.” No longer would she isolate herself in ways big and small. “Teach me how to retrieve the number and I will give it to my people, too.” It was certain that she’d have access to all of Titus’s technology while in his court, but Sharine was discovering that she wasn’t happy being reliant on others.
Illium taught her how to navigate the phone, then reminded her that she must charge it with electrical energy, as she’d been doing every few days since he first gave her the device. Afterward, she took in his face, the angles of it thinner than usual. “Tell me of your city.”
“People say we were lucky.” He thrust a hand through his hair. “It’s true we don’t have to worry about a reborn scourge like so many other territories—but that’s only because of how much of the city was destroyed. The earth itself is so badly scorched in places . . .”
A lowering of his head, his voice tight when he next spoke. “There were so many dead, Mother.” Golden eyes shiny-wet, he looked away for a second before meeting her gaze again. “So many biers to fly to the Refuge, so many graves to dig, so many friends to mourn whose bodies had to be incinerated after what Lijuan did to them.”
His shoulder muscles bunched, his jaw working. “We had to effectively sanitize the entire city before the vulnerable could be permitted to move back in. Aside from a small respite offered by the glittering rain that fell during Suyin’s ascension, the smell from the rotting corpses of Lijuan’s black-eyed army wouldn’t leave. For a while even Raphael worried we’d have to burn the entire city to the ground and start again.”
Sharine wanted to reach out and hold him, but all she could do was listen.
“Too many of our own are gone, including the Legion,” he told her. “It’s too silent in the city. It feels strange to say that when the Legion barely spoke, but they were always around—sitting on tops of buildings like gargoyles or flying in small groups, or just gathering on balconies. I miss them. We all miss them.”
Sharine didn’t truly understand who and what the Legion had been, but she understood the loss of friends. War was not kind, and war did not discriminate. “From what I’ve heard, your friends gave of their energy so that a great evil could be defeated. They went with honor.” Such a thing would make no difference to her should her son have died in the war, but she knew it mattered.
Illium nodded. From the arc of his wings above his shoulders, she could tell that he was holding them with his usual muscle control even though his feathers remained soft and downy. As they’d been when he’d first grown his feathers. A smudged sky blue those baby feathers had been, so delicate and airy that she’d worried about damaging them each time she gave him a bath.
“How are your wings?” He’d lost both during the war, but was growing them back at a pace that terrified her for what it meant for his power levels.
Her sweet boy’s father was an archangel. An Ancient. Not every child who had an archangelic parent ended up being Cadre themselves, but that was looking like a certainty with Illium. He was only just over five hundred years old, and already, there were those in the world who thought he should have control of a territory.
She knew he’d been offered many positions, but he stayed with Raphael both out of a deep sense of loyalty and love—and because he was intelligent enough to know that he wasn’t ready. But sometimes, power didn’t give its wielders a choice. If Illium ascended . . .
No, she wouldn’t think about that. Her son would be torn apart by the forces of ascension should he rise too young. She could still remember how difficult it had been for Raphael—and he’d been a thousand years of age. She’d been terrified Caliane’s beloved boy would die, simply fragment into a million pieces from the power surging through his veins.
When he landed, his eyes had been blue fire, his skin crackling with lightning—and his wings ablaze in a way that had reminded her of Nadiel’s fiery fall. She’d been distant from the site of the battle where Caliane had executed her true love, but she’d seen Nadiel’s beautiful wings crumple, seen fire devour him as he fell—a star that had burned too bright and consumed itself.
7
On the small screen of the phone, her son spread his wings so she could see the progress of his healing. “Getting there,” he said. “In the meantime, I’m working on the ground. It keeps my muscles conditioned, and it also helps with wing strength because I’m constantly shifting those muscles when I lift or bend or turn.”
They spoke of other things in the time that followed, such things as might be spoken of between a mother and her son. At one point, she said, “How is Aodhan?” Illium’s best friend had been so often in their house as a child that she felt entitled to maternal worry.