“I know he orchestrated a massacre,” Illium said to Aodhan during one stop, while the boy examined a frozen bloom on the edge of the clearing, “but right now, all I see is a child.”
Aodhan, seated right beside him on a large rock from which they’d cleared the snow, opened his wings in a slide over Illium’s, closed them back in. “Mentally speaking,” he said, never taking his eyes off Jinhai, “he’s younger than his chronological age.”
Illium agreed. “My gut says he’s around eighty, but he acts more like a child of fifty.” In mortal terms, it’d be the difference between a ten- or eleven-year-old and a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old.
An enormous gap in maturity and experience.
Illium had been offered a gorge aerie at Jinhai’s age and had already begun to run drills with what eventually became his squadron. He hadn’t accepted the offer, aware his mother wasn’t yet at a point where she could let him go, but that the offer had been made had been a source of enormous pride for him.
“Did she keep him immature on purpose, you think?” he asked Aodhan. His friend had always had a better insight into why people did the things they did. It was what made him such an extraordinary artist. He saw inside people, to their dreams and hopes and secrets.
“I don’t have enough information to say for certain.” Aodhan pushed back his sleeves, his skin warm against Illium’s when he put his arm back down. “But it could just be a consequence of his life. A flower won’t grow if deprived of light. How could he grow? He was in a place designed to make him small, make him less.”
In the distance, Jinhai went to pick the frozen bloom, hesitated, left it where it was. Again, a sense of loss stabbed at Illium. He’d never forget what they’d discovered in the hamlet—hell, the images would haunt his nightmares—but he found himself unable to simply condemn this boy. It would be like condemning a dog that had been trained to bite.
Jinhai’s most authoritative source of information about the world had been an insane and cruel archangel. The others around him were his jailors. Where was he supposed to learn empathy when Illium very much doubted anyone had ever been kind to him.
“I wonder,” he said, “who I would’ve been had it been my mother who went into Sleep and my father who raised me?” Looking out into the snow-draped dark green of the trees, he shook his head. “I wouldn’t be this Illium, that I know.”
Aegaeon was brash and selfish, a man capable of an intense and calculated cruelty, all of which he concealed behind a mask of bluff charm. Illium’s mother might’ve had a fractured mind during much of his childhood, but she was innately good and kind, and oh, how she loved.
Never, in all his life, had Illium questioned his mother’s love for him.
Aodhan’s hand closing around his nape, his skin a little rough in the same way as Illium’s. Every so often, especially with repetitive injuries such as the small stresses caused by regular weapons-work, immortal cells decided to callus rather than heal damage over and over.
Aodhan ran the pad of his thumb over the pulse in Illium’s neck. “Don’t let that fucker get into your head,” he ordered in a voice that vibrated in Illium’s bones. “You know that would make him happy.”
Illium scowled. “I’m having a crisis of personality and you tell me to knock it off? Sensitive.” Also exactly what he’d needed to hear. He’d rather gnaw off his own foot than do anything that might give Aegaeon even a tiny smidgen of joy.
Right then, Jinhai returned to the frozen bloom, ripped it off, then stomped on it.
They flew on.
Regardless of their regular breaks, since they were traveling with a small party and following a trail already cleared of major hazards, they made much better time than the initial caravan and caught up with Suyin within a matter of twenty-four hours.
She’d flown back toward them, not wanting to expose the rest of the survivors to Jinhai or Jinhai to them. With her had come General Arzaleya, a compact and deadly woman with wings of a red so dark it held undertones of black, hair the shade of burnt oak, and skin like Dmitri’s—it held its light brown color no matter the season. She also had Dmitri’s air of competence, her strikingly pale eyes watchful.
“I’d have thought she’d leave the general with the caravan,” Illium had murmured to Aodhan when he first spotted Arzaleya’s wings. “She’s the third in rank, right?”
Aodhan had looked thoughtful. “Suyin has a decision to make, and, by my calculation, the caravan is now at the safest part of their trek. Vetra is also there. And one—or two—of us three will join her soon, so there is little to no risk.”
Illium hadn’t had the chance to dig further on that before the group landed. Also with Suyin and Arzaleya was a small squadron of senior angels who were to guard Jinhai until Suyin assigned him a final team.
Aodhan had already warned her to rotate that team out with multiple others to ensure Jinhai couldn’t work his tactics of manipulation on them—his abilities might not be strong enough to affect angels, but he was still a master at subtle psychological ploys.
Suyin had brought along senior healer, Fana as well. Not a specialist in ailments of the mind, but of a skill and kindness that would make her a help to Jinhai until the arrival of the specialist healers. Aodhan knew Keir himself was on the way—Jinhai could have no better help.
Jinhai’s face lit up with piercing joy the instant Suyin landed in front of them. “Ma!” he cried. “Ma!” The happiness and hope and childish innocence in his voice was heart-wrenching.
He was almost to Suyin when he slowed down, a questioning lilt in his voice as he said, “Ma?”
“I am not Lijuan, child,” Suyin murmured. “But I am kin. I am your cousin and your archangel.”
Jinhai seemed momentarily nonplussed by that. A second later, he exploded, launching himself at Suyin with hands fashioned into claws. “I am her only skin! I am her! I am her skin!”
Though everyone reacted to protect Suyin, she was an archangel, had no need of their assistance. She controlled the boy without doing him harm, her arms locked around him as she took them to the snowy ground. When he stopped screaming and struggling at last, she held him tight as he sobbed for his mother.
To harm a child is an act of dishonor beyond forgiveness.
—Angelic Law
47
Later, after Jinhai had worn himself out and fallen into an exhausted sleep, Suyin told Aodhan and Illium to join the caravan. “I will go with Jinhai to his new home. For better or worse, he sees the familiar in me, and I think it’s best he begin to learn to look at me with trust. As such, I need you to protect the caravan.”