Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Six

It was a night of bitter cold. Aldric had built the fire up as high as he dared, and Mira was asleep in the big bed, and Seraphel sat on the other side of the hearth, watching the flames with an expression he couldn't read.

"Ask it," he said.

She looked at him.

"Whatever you've been not-asking for the past hour. Ask."

A pause. "What were the Crusades like?"

He had expected something about angels, about heaven, about what came next after death. Not this. "Hot," he said. "The first thing is the heat. You think you understand it from the word, but the reality of it, the specific weight of air that has been heated past what air should be, you can't imagine it from England." He paused. "It was also loud. And fast. And nothing like what they told us it would be, in any particular."

"What did they tell you it would be?"

"Holy." He said the word flatly, without inflexion. "They told us we would feel the hand of God. That the cause would sanctify the cost." He looked at his own hands. "I felt no hand of God. I felt heat and noise and men killing men for reasons that grew less legible the closer I stood to them. I stopped believing somewhere in the second year. Not in God, I couldn't afford to lose that entirely. Just in the idea that God was there specifically, approving."

Seraphel was very still.

"Now you," he said.

"I was not bargaining for an exchange."

"I know. But I answered honestly, and it's late, and I want to know." He met her eyes. "What is Heaven like?"

She looked at the fire for a long time. "Vast. The first thing is the vastness. Not emptiness fullness, but a fullness so complete it has no edges to measure itself against. And quiet. Not the quiet of absence, but the quiet of everything being resolved. Complete."

"That sounds peaceful."

"Yes."

"But?"

She glanced at him sharply. "There is no 'but.'"

"There was a 'but' in your voice."

"Angels do not have 'buts' in there."

"Seraphel."

Her name in his mouth. She had noticed that he used it rarely and deliberately, and that each time he said it, the word landed somewhere specific in her.

"It is peaceful," she said at last, more quietly. "It is whole. It is correct. Everything in its place, everything in its purpose." A very long pause. "I did not know until recently what was absent from it."

"What is?"

She looked at Mira, sleeping. At Aldric. At the fire, the old house, the frost on the window glass.

"Interruption," she said, finally.

He thought about that. "You mean surprise."

"I mean the experience of not knowing what comes next. In heaven, there is a quality of completion. One does not wonder. One does not wait and find the waiting itself to be a thing with weight and texture." She paused. "Here every moment proceeds from the one before it into something not yet determined. Even now, sitting in this room, I do not know what you will say next, and that not-knowing is."

She stopped.

"Is what?" he asked, very quietly.

She looked at him with those grey eyes that were doing something she was fairly certain angel's eyes were not meant to do. "Extraordinary," she said.

Outside, the wind moved across the Ashenmere fields, and the fire crackled, and neither of them said anything for a long while. But the silence had a different quality than it had an hour ago, warmer, heavier, felt less like the absence of words and more like something they were both living inside.

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