Feather had been unmade.
CHAPTER33
Righteous
Iwanted to be angry at Feather, and I was. The brat had tied my shoelaces together, and I’d been unaware of her prank.
But it hadn’t been a prank at all. It had very effectively hobbled me, giving her time to act. To make the sacrifice I should have known she would make all along. She was smarter than anyone guessed, including me. And more generous. She’d taken on my smut to save me, after all, and I hadn’t even thanked her, beyond encouraging the others in Sanctuary to give her a chance. To get to know this dirty, slightly ridiculous, vivacious Novice who brought laughter and chaos and joy into our realm after so many centuries of silence… and who made us question what we had become.
But I hadn’t even known who she truly was.
I clutched at my chest, at the strange wrenching there as she dissolved before my eyes. Her final words still rang in my mind. Her name.
“I’m Feather, named Inutilia, who lived first as Dina’s sister Tili. I’m Nothing, a Useless Scrap of the Beautiful One, Arabella, friend of Sunny, the Light of Truth, and… soulmate of Mikhail the Great-Souled, the Maker of Sanctuary.”
She’d stood tall, with silver wings sweeping down from her shoulder blades, a grin of pure delight on her face, though her eyes sparkled with tears. In that instant, I recognized her as the vision who had come to me months before, when time stood still at the gate.
She was the dream soul I’d kissed. And somehow, she was also the soul I’d betrayed, four centuries earlier. It shouldn’t have been possible. First missions were planned out decades in advance, and Tili hadn’t known who she was, what she was. Or had she?
But before I could shout anything more than her name, she was beyond my reach.
Tili was unmade before I could beg her forgiveness, and before I could tell her who I was. That we had known each other, long ago. That I’d missed her, and mourned for her, every day since.
I heard Mikhail cry out behind me as she was taken into the Great Gate. Listened to his weeping, to Gavriel’s shout of denial as the wind died down, the warm air around me smelling ever so faintly of old roses.
I closed my eyes and fell into the memory of my greatest failure… until this day.
“Ashtad, help!” Tili, the sister to the human who had been assigned as my charge, had gotten herself into another scrape. I bit my lip to keep from laughing as I snuck away from Master Julian’s horse. He was inside the abbey, eating his noon meal; I could spare a moment to help the young girl.
“Tili, what have you done? How did you get so tangled up?” Her dark hair was completely snarled in a long trailing rose vine, and her limbs were scratched and bleeding slightly. Her hands were the worst, as she’d been fighting to get her hair free for a while, it seemed.
Her words tumbled over each other like water over a streambed, furious and fast and light. “I was getting some roses to dry the petals for Dina’s and my bath tonight. Sister Filomena says we can use the warm water after her, and I want to smell fancy.”
“You’ll want to wash this hair as well,” I teased as I reached into the briars and began untangling her riotous curls one at a time. “It’s so greasy you could start a fire with a piece of it.”
“You afraid of a little dirt, Ashtad?” She sneered, but her lower lip quivered. I’d hurt her feelings.
“I’m not afraid of your dirt, Tili.” I leaned down and cupped her chin. “In fact, you smell like roses already. I can’t imagine how phenomenal you’ll smell after a bath in the things.”
“You like the smell of roses?” she asked, her dark eyes gleaming up at me. “Dina says boys don’t like soft things, pretty smells.”
“Just as there are all sorts of little girls—pretty, dainty ones who never get in trouble, and rapscallions who can’t seem to stay out of it”—I freed the last piece of hair and lifted a thorny vine away from her ankle so she could step free of the rosebush—“there are boys who like roses.” I tapped the end of her nose. “And I’m one of them.”
She laughed, skipping away. The pure joy in her laughter almost made her pretty. I wished she had a better lot in life, a family to spoil her, or at least feed her enough to keep her bones from showing through her worn clothing as they did now.
“Thanks, Ashtad. Honestly, when I saw you appear, I thought you might be my guardian angel. I prayed for help, and you arrived almost that fast!” She snapped her dirty fingers and twirled around, before running toward the stables.
“I hope you have a guardian angel,” I breathed, and sent my own prayer up. This mission was the most difficult one I’d ever been given, with my employer so shadowed I’d thought he was a denizen of the Abyss the first time we’d met. I’d been told that the older sister, though she was a very young woman, would choose to have carnal relations with Julian. I still couldn’t understand how that girl, still a child herself, would make that choice. Something about this mission was wrong.
I was supposed to save Dina’s innocence, and her life. But I was afraid with Dina out of his grasp, little Tili might attract Julian’s attentions. I wasn’t sure I would be able to save them both… or if I was even allowed to.
But something about Tili made me want to do more than what I’d been assigned. I wanted to help her. Save her.
I watched her scamper away, drawing the lingering scent of roses in with each breath, and wondered what I would do when the moment came.
When that moment had arrived, I’d done nothing. Worse than nothing. I’d been the reason Dina and Tili had both died; my hesitancy and inaction had been the end of them both. The centuries that followed had been as tainted with regret and sorrow as Feather had been with smut when she’d arrived here.
I didn’t know how it was possible, how our paths had crossed… It shouldn’t have been possible. I had a feeling Mikhail could explain it, but his broken cries tore at my eardrums. If I told him right now, while he was so mired in the pain of losing his mate—that Feather’s sister was the charge I’d failed—he’d unmake me before I finished the tale. And I wouldn’t blame him.
