Angels and other extraor.., p.1
Angels and Other Extraordinary Beings, page 1
Angels and Other Extraordinary Beings
Sharon Shinn
Angels and Other Extraordinary Beings
Angels and Other Extraordinary Beings copyright © 2021 Sharon Shinn
Fallen Angel © 2004
Nocturne © 2011
When Winter Comes © 2006
Bargain With the Wind © 2007
The Wrong Bridegroom © 2009
All rights reserved.
This edition published 2021
Cover by Cynthia Lucas
ISBN: 978-1-68068-248-9
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
This book is published on behalf of the author by the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency.
You can reach the author at:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/sharonshinnbooks
Website: www.sharonshinn.net
Books by Sharon Shinn
Uncommon Echoes
Echo in Onyx
Echo in Emerald
Echo in Amethyst
The Samaria series
Archangel
Jovah’s Angel
The Alleluia Files
Angelica
Angel-Seeker
The Twelve Houses series
Mystic and Rider
The Thirteenth House
Dark Moon Defender
Reader and Raelynx
Fortune and Fate
The Elemental Blessings series
Troubled Waters
Royal Airs
Jeweled Fire
Unquiet Land
The Shifting Circle series
The Shape of Desire
Still-Life with Shape-Shifter
The Turning Season
Young adult novels
The Safe-Keeper’s Secret
The Truth-Teller’s Tale
The Dream-Maker’s Magic
General Winston’s Daughter
Gateway
Standalones, Collections, and Graphic Novels
Angels and Other Extraordinary Beings
Heart of Gold
Jenna Starborn
Quatrain
Shadows of the Past
Shattered Warrior
Summers at Castle Auburn
The Shape-Changer’s Wife
Wrapt in Crystal
Table of Contents
Introduction
Fallen Angel
Nocturne
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
When Winter Comes
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Bargain With the Wind
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
The Wrong Bridegroom
Chapter One: The Beautiful Princess
Chapter Two: The Dashing Suitor
Chapter Three: The Magical Journey
Chapter Four: The Wicked Stepmother
Chapter Five: The Dreadful Secret
Chapter Six: The Wise Old Grandmother
Chapter Seven: The Cursed Destination
Chapter Eight: The Cruel Father
Epilogue: The Happy Ending
About the Author
About the Publisher
Introduction
When I think of story ideas, I tend to think in big sweeping arcs with lots of characters moving through detailed landscapes. In other words, I think in novels. But in recent years, I’ve found myself drawn to the novella form. At roughly 100 pages, a novella offers enough space for me to tell a complex story with a reasonably large cast, but it’s short enough to make me focus intently on the tale I want to tell.
In 2009, I published Quatrain, a collection of novellas set in four of my created worlds, but I’ve also contributed novellas to five anthologies published by Ace Books. With Angels and Other Extraordinary Beings, I’ve had the chance to bring together those five novellas in one volume.
Three of the stories are related to two of my series, although they can be read as standalones.
“Fallen Angel” is set in the world of Samaria and takes place about eighteen years after the events of Archangel. In fact, Gabriel makes a brief appearance, and so does his son. In this story, a Manadavvi heiress has a disastrous flirtation with a rebellious young angel, but she’s about to learn that even worse things can happen than romance gone awry. The story contains some of my favorite descriptions of flying—and praying for thunderbolts. It was published in 2004 in To Weave a Web of Magic.
“Nocturne” is also set in Samaria, about seventy years after Archangel. I think of it as my “gothic angel story,” because it features a broken angel who is hiding away in the attic of an old house on a remote property—and a plucky young woman who is determined to learn the truth about his existence. It appeared in the collection Angels of Darkness in 2011.
“When Winter Comes” takes place in the world of the Twelve Houses, directly between the events of Mystic and Rider and The Thirteenth House. Two young women who have become embroiled in magic are kicked out of their father’s house and travel across Gillengaria, looking for safety. A few characters from the novels make appearances here—and I liked some of the new characters so much that I brought them into the third and fourth books of the series. The novella was published in 2006 in The Queen in Winter.
Two of the novellas exist in worlds of their own.
“Bargain with the Wind” is based on a poetry cycle I wrote in college. As I’ve said before, it’s a Cinderella tale as told by Emily Brontë, and it’s almost as gothic as “Nocturne.” A wealthy landowner impetuously marries a beautiful but mysterious woman who turns out to have some terrible secrets. It was included in the 2007 anthology Elemental Magic, in which each novella was centered around one of the four elements.
In “The Wrong Bridegroom,” a princess is set to be married off to whoever can pass three tests devised by her scheming father. She’s elated when the winner is a handsome and charming magician—but a second man has also won the competition, and she’s far less thrilled with him. I wrote it for the 2009 anthology Never After, in which every story features an unwilling bride and a subversion of the usual fairy tale tropes. I had fun playing with ideas like the magical journey, the wicked stepmother, and the dreadful secret.
Happy reading!
Fallen Angel
The first time an angel kissed me, I was too young to remember. The Archangel Raphael had come to visit my parents, for he was a great friend of my grandfather Karsh, and he kissed me as I lay sleeping in my cradle.
The second time an angel kissed me, I was fourteen, and the Archangel Gabriel was complimenting me for a solo I had just sung at the Gloria. I was one of a handful of Manadavvi girls who had been chosen to sing that year, and Gabriel had given each of us a chaste kiss on the cheek after we performed.
The third time an angel kissed me, he was not an Archangel at all. He was a fatherless wanderer, the wildest of wild young men, and he kissed me as he suffered in exile for having killed a mortal man.
What made it worse was that the man he had killed was my father.
Actually, if I were telling the truth, I would have to admit that that was not the first time Jesse had kissed me, when I was eighteen and he was twenty-one, and I had come to find him shackled to a mountaintop. He had kissed me twice before, on a single autumn day, when it was clear he was only flirting and it was equally clear I had no business flirting back. I was a Manadavvi woman and he was a wayward, reckless, sullen boy completely without prospects. Manadavvi women were not permitted to love men like that—and we were certainly not allowed to marry them.
My grandfather Karsh was one of the richest men in Samaria. He owned so much property in the fertile northern plains of Gaza that, the story went, he could not walk from one end of it to the other in a single day. His house was so huge that it could accommodate a hundred overnight guests. He had more servants than family members, more money than love, and he hated the Archangel Gabriel. His entire life was spent scheming—how to make more money, how to acquire more property, how to outmaneuver his neighbor and best friend Ebenezer Harth. The Harths and the Karshes and the Leshes and the Garones and a smattering of other families made up the people collectively known as the Manadavvi, the wealthy elite in the country we called Samaria. For me, until I sang at my first Gloria at the age of fourteen, they made up the entire world.
“A Manadavvi woman owes a debt to the family and to the property,” my mother told me more often than I cared to count. “You will marry a man your father or your grandfather chooses. He will be a Harth, perhaps, or a Lesh, or possibly a merchant’s son. But only a merchant from Semorrah or Castelana. He must be respectable.”
“Could I marry an angel?” I asked her one time when I was thirteen.
My mother frowned, as if considering. “Possibly,” she said.
This particular conversation was taking place a few days before we were to hold a very large dinner party. We had just gone through every single item of clothing in my wardrobe to determine which pieces might be appropriate for me to wear at the afternoon tea and the morning breakfast that would bracket the main event. To wear at the dinner itself, of course, new gowns had been commissioned for both of us. Now we were looking through my jewelry case to see if I had the right necklaces, earrings, bracelets and rings to complement the outfits we had already chosen.
“But how will I know?” I asked, pulling off a short opal necklace and trying on a strand of pearls instead.
“How will you know what?”
“If the angel will be Archangel? No one has been chosen yet to succeed Gabriel.”
“Gabriel has served a little over half his term, silly girl. The god will not need to choose another Archangel for seven or eight years.”
“But then how will I know if the angel I fall in love with is good enough?” I asked.
She laughed a little, the merest sound of exhaled breath. “Silly,” she said again, her voice soft and affectionate. “You won’t be in love with this man you marry. He will be chosen for you because he is a proper husband.”
“But I want to fall in love,” I argued.
“Love comes after marriage for a Manadavvi woman,” she said firmly. She began picking through my jewelry box to search for a suitable ring.
I looked in the mirror to try to read the expression on her face. She was looking downward and all I could see were her slanted cheekbones and the perfect fall of her loose, fine, honey-colored hair. “So you didn’t love my father the day you married him?” I asked.
“Oh, I was quite pleased at the idea of marrying him,” she said, her face still tilted downward. “Quite a handsome man was Joseph Karsh when he was only twenty-five! He still has that dark hair and those dark eyes, and his face was even more handsome when he was young.” She glanced up, meeting my eyes in the mirror, and smiled. “You have the shape of his mouth and the color of his eyes, but you have my cheeks and my hair,” she said. “Your grandfather said you took the best of us both when you were born.”
I was frowning at her in the mirror. “But when did you fall in love with him?” I insisted.
She laughed. “I’ve had life with him,” she said. “Three children and fourteen years of running his house. That’s what a marriage is, Eden. It’s not this sweet romance you seem to have concocted in your head.”
“I want romance,” I said. “I want to fall in love. I don’t want to marry a Manadavvi or some other man just because he’s rich.”
She put her hands on either side of my head and turned me back to face the mirror. “Let me give you a little piece of advice,” she said. “Never say that to your father.”
* * *
In fact, I rarely said anything to my father at all. He was as my mother had described—a handsome, dark-haired man, with intent brown eyes and a restless energy. As my grandfather was always scheming, my father was always striding—off to look over the fields of whatever crop was due to ripen, off to inspect some new shipment from Luminaux merchants, off to argue with the angels at the nearby hold of Monteverde. He was impatient, intelligent and frequently ill-tempered. The only time he seemed truly happy was when he had just completed some business deal that was extravagantly advantageous to the Karshes. He was impossible to like and—I finally realized after this conversation with my mother—impossible to love.
It had never occurred to me that others might hate my father as much as I did. Not that there was anyone else to ask. My brother Evan, five years younger than I was, looked like a smaller, angrier version of my father. He was only happy when my father allowed him to trail behind him through the fields or to the negotiating table, absorbing every word, every gesture that my father used. The rest of the time he was throwing tantrums and engaging in displays of temper. I avoided him whenever I could—easier now that I was almost a young lady. I spent less time in the schoolroom with my brothers, more time with my mother being groomed for my entrance into society.
My youngest brother, Paul, was only two, and so had no opinion on anything other than the food he wanted to eat and the times he did not want to go to sleep. He looked more like my mother than Evan did and had a much sunnier disposition. I admit I spent more time with him than I did with Evan, but I did not make much effort to interact with either of my brothers. We were not a close family. The five of us did not sit down to intimate meals; the children did not visit with the parents at the close of day to recount our adventures and lessons. The very patterns of our lives separated us—and once I turned thirteen, I had even less time to spend with my brothers.
From that time on, I was required to take part in the social events that regularly occurred at my grandfather’s house. We often had other Manadavvi over to dine, for instance, and many river merchants were considered respectable enough to be included in the Karsh hospitality. Ariel—the leader of the host at Monteverde—was a frequent guest, and despite the fact that my father and grandfather would just as soon do away with all angels and their interference in Manadavvi schemes, she was always treated with the greatest respect. I met her for the first time at a small dinner held at our house shortly after I turned fourteen.
“So you’re Joseph Karsh’s little girl,” Ariel said when my mother introduced me to her. Ariel was tall, energetic and full of laughter, and I liked her at once. “You’re very pretty.”
“Thank you, angela,” I said politely.
She tilted her head as if to inspect me, taking in the shape of my face, perhaps, and whatever stamp of personality had laid itself over my youthful features. “Yes, I would think you would do quite well,” she decided. “I’m surprised your father hasn’t sent you off to one of the angel holds already to see what conquests you might make there.”
“I believe my husband expects her to marry for property and not prestige,” my mother interposed.
Ariel laughed. “Oh, so then he’s looking to Semorrah, not Monteverde,” she said, seeming not at all offended. “Well, I wish you good luck getting her to conform to your wishes. I tried very hard to steer my sister in a proper direction and she fell in love where it was most disastrous, so I am no longer quite so sure about the wisdom of arranging marriages. But perhaps you will have more success than I did.”
“My husband almost always achieves his goals.”
Ariel’s eyes strayed across the room, where my father was locked in a combative conversation with someone I didn’t know. The other man was well-dressed and haughty, so I assumed he was a Harth or a Garone who just hadn’t come my way yet. “Yes, it is what one most admires about him,” the angel said. Her voice was solemn but her face was still amused, and I thought, Here is someone else who doesn’t like my father. But I was hardly in a position to ask her if I was right.
At dinner that night, I sat in the very middle of the company, away from all the most interesting conversation at the head of the table, where my father sat, and the foot, where Ariel was placed. I could catch a few phrases here and there; I could tell that the people sitting nearest Ariel were enjoying themselves immensely, while the people sitting by my father appeared to be engaged in heated argument. Those around me were the less important members of the group, the younger brother of a landowner or the third daughter of a merchant. We spoke to each other politely but mostly concentrated on our food.
Conversation only became general once, when a sudden lull across the table allowed my father’s words to be carried across the room. “We’d sort it out quickly enough if the angels didn’t stick their fingers into business that had nothing to do with them,” he said.
All eyes immediately went to Ariel, who was smiling. “Ah, Joseph, without the constant supervision of the angels, the Manadavvi would impose repression upon the whole of Samaria,” she said easily. “You would re-enslave the Edori, you would cheat the Jansai, you would require tithes and concessions from the river cities, and turn the entire world into a feudal state, with yourselves as lords over all. The angels exist merely to keep some balance in the three regions, and we do not care that you hate us for it.”
