That might’ve been a point of difficulty for him and Illium when Illium first arrived, but they were past that now . . . though nothing was back to normal. A tension hovered between them, a knowledge of drastic change.
So be it.
He’d been stuck in amber far too long. He needed to grow, to break out of that rigid shell. That it’d leave behind shattered debris was manifest—and a fact he hadn’t considered enough.
Not once, however, had he thought of Illium as a piece of that debris. No matter how angry he’d been, how angry he still became at times, Illium was as much a part of his life as the sky and the air. A necessity.
He couldn’t imagine—didn’t want to imagine a life without his Blue.
“Here.” Illium thrust a bowl of stew into his hand. “I tasted a spoonful. It’s weirdly delicious.”
Taking it, Aodhan sat. Illium followed, half his wing lying atop Aodhan’s. With every other person in this world, Aodhan was always aware of any such contact. Even with those whose touch he welcomed, some small part of his brain was always conscious of the physical contact.
The sole exception was Illium.
Any contact between them felt natural, just the way it should be. Today, however, he found himself conscious of the warmth and weight and strength of Illium’s wings. Another time, he’d have thought nothing of reaching out and examining a feather, checking a tendon. But . . . things had changed.
Aodhan had changed them.
Sitting back, he forced himself to eat a bite of the salami concoction. “This is the strangest stew I’ve ever eaten, but it’s good.”
“Told you.” Illium propped his feet up on an ottoman he’d dragged over, then leaned forward and grabbed a hunk of the bread that Aodhan had chopped. Chopped, not sliced. The weird shapes went well with the angry stew.
They ate in silence for a while, until Aodhan found himself speaking. Jinhai was too far away to hear them, even had he been feigning sleep. Which he wasn’t. That kind of almost-not- breathing only occurred when an angel was in a deep resting state so profound it was close to the healing rest of anshara.
“I think,” he said, “what scarred me most of all was the mundanity of Sachieri and Bathar.”
Putting down his empty bowl, Illium picked up half of the enormous olive-free sandwich that Aodhan had prepared. And he listened.
“They were so ordinary,” Aodhan continued, his food forgotten. “It wasn’t like with Lijuan—and seeing her megalomania in full bloom really brought that into focus for me. She was evil on a grand scale. A being of power and age who either chose to use that power in a terrible way—or who lost herself over the course of her long lifetime.”
Illium snorted. “You’re being too kind.” A glance at the window nook. “She was evil. She chose evil. Over and over again, she chose evil.”
Aodhan couldn’t do anything but agree. “She was also what we think monsters should be—a storm of malevolence. Not an angel you’d walk past and not notice except as a fleeting passerby. Not dangerous. Not a threat.”
When Illium nudged at his bowl to remind him to eat, Aodhan snapped, “Leave me be.” He knew he was being irrational, but at this point in time, even the smallest hint from Illium that he needed care of any kind was sandpaper on his skin.
Illium’s chest expanded as he took a deep breath, but rather than arguing, he returned to demolishing his half of the sandwich.
Aodhan put down his bowl. He had too much inside him, needed to release it. “But Sachieri and Bathar, I never really noticed them. I knew of them in a vague way because they were a limited part of Elijah’s wider court, but otherwise, they were just ordinary angels going about their business.” He looked at Illium. “Does that make me sound arrogant?”
“No,” Illium said at once, his eyes staring off into the distance. “In simple terms, they weren’t a part of your life or your duties—you had no reason to pay them any special attention. You know of Priya Anjalika, don’t you? She’s shy and small and hides away in her office, but you know of her because she’s part of your world.
“But if I asked a senior squadron commander in Titus’s court about her, he’d just look at me blankly. She might be an important component of the Tower’s internal machinery, but she’s not a threat he has to monitor—and is otherwise not in the orbit of his attention.”
“You put it so clearly.” Cutting through the fog. “Priya Anjalika, however, is critical to the Tower.” A specialist in accounts, she could do sums in her head faster than anyone else Aodhan knew. “Sachieri and Bathar were only tied to Elijah in the most nominal way, and otherwise just lived their lives.”