“They must leave the village and interact with the wider world to keep an eye on things that might affect Alexander’s Sleep.” Andromeda thought of Caliane again. “If I had to guess, I’d say the fruit and other trees we’ve seen, exist to provide a front, stop awkward questions about how the tribe survives. Alexander will have left them funds enough to sustain the entire tribe for untold centuries.” She bit her lower lip. “We didn’t see any wings. Alexander had very loyal squadrons.”
“Wings are highly visible,” Naasir pointed out. “Vampires, on the other hand, can quietly relocate with no one paying attention, so long as the vampire in question doesn’t hold a high-level position like Dmitri—or if his or her archangel is no longer in the world. Some do not want to serve any other.”
“You’re right.” No takeoffs or landings to draw attention to this place; just a quiet village held by vampires who had withdrawn from life after their archangel chose to Sleep, and those who were likely descended from vampire-mortal matings, or who were family by blood.
Only the deeply trusted must live here, for that was the only way a secret this big could be kept. If a child was brought up as a warrior among warriors, and told he watched over an archangel, Andromeda didn’t think that child would ever break the faith—for what greater honor was there in the world?
At that instant, Naasir once again lifted a finger to his lips. Andromeda went silent, ears straining, but she heard nothing beyond the normal noises of a moonlit night. A rustle of wind, the trees creaking slightly, the bark of another dog on the opposite side of the village. Naasir, however, remained on high alert as they continued on, his muscles bunched in readiness for an attack.
There was no attack. Not then. That came just before dawn, when the world was misty gray and they thought themselves safe. A crossbow bolt whipped by an inch from Andromeda’s face—would’ve been embedded in that face if Naasir hadn’t moved at the last second to push her out of the way.
Acting on instinct, she slammed behind a tree while Naasir dropped to the ground and crawled over to join her. “There are many of them.”
Andromeda pointed to the quivering crossbow bolt embedded in the trunk of another tree. It was black with distinctive silver etchings. Silver had always been Alexander’s color. “We’re friends!” Andromeda called out, going with her gut and judging these were Alexander’s people. “The enemy is coming!”
A hail of crossbow bolts was her answer. Pressing her back against the tree, her wings tightly curved in, she glanced at Naasir. “It was worth a try.”
His eyes gleamed as bright a silver as that on the bolts, but more liquid, more alive. Even as she admired the wild beauty of him, the part of Andromeda that made her a scholar was wondering at the color that marked Naasir. Silver was a distinctive shade in terms of angelic wings. Illium had fine silver filaments in his wings and so did some other angels, but Alexander alone had borne wings of pure silver.
There was a feather in the Archives that came from Alexander and it was a glittering shade she’d seen in such concentrated form on no other living creature but Naasir. Not even on Rohan. Alexander’s son’s wings were a paler silver at the top that flowed into a charcoal gray; he’d inherited his coloration from both parents.
Where had Naasir inherited his coloration? If someone had Made him, if there had even been an ordinary Making involved in his case, was it possible Alexander had something to do with it? But if that was true, why would Naasir have grown up in Raphael’s stronghold?
And how could he have grown up if he’d been Made? Only adults were Made, for not only did the transformation all but freeze a person in time, children went insane or died. None had ever survived an attempt—all of those attempts made by angels who were themselves insane, or believed they could flout angelic law without repercussions.
That repercussion was always death. None ever escaped it and so it wasn’t worth the risk. Alexander, however, was no ordinary angel. He could’ve done as he pleased and escaped execution, but had he Made a child, he would’ve still been uniformly shunned by their people. There was no record of any such shunning, and nothing Andromeda knew about Alexander indicated he’d break such a fundamental rule of behavior.
Alexander believed in laws, in rules, in a society with a foundation of discipline.
The thoughts tumbled though her head in the split seconds before Naasir reached up to grab hold of a branch and swung himself onto the tree. Realizing what he planned to do, she gave him enough time to get directly over Alexander’s sentinels, then grabbed some of the crossbow bolts that had fallen nearby and started to throw them at their attackers. As a distraction, it was a success.
Another hail of bolts.
Going to her knees to give the shooters less of a target, she used her sword to deflect a few bolts that came too close, and she hoped that Naasir was safe.
* * *
Naasir had climbed along the treetops soundlessly, heading toward the scents he could barely smell. The windless dawn had kept the sentinels’ secret, but the trajectory of their crossbow strikes had given him a direction.
He couldn’t have as effectively used the tree road had the oasis been surrounded only by the tall spires of date palms, but the villagers had planted and nurtured many kinds of trees, including those with spreading branches. While Andromeda was right about the planting being used as a front to stave off the curious, the true reason had likely been to create shadows below, where the sentinels could mount an ambush.