Raphael by R. A. MacAvoy Page A

worry. You’re safe. I went instead of you.”
    â€œYou did what?” He pulled himself toward the cot of branches, a look of dazed gratitude illuminating his ill-assorted features. “You took my sins upon yourself? You went to hell? Suffered for me?”
    Saara flung herself to her feet and peered vaguely around for her dress. “I went to his hall, yes, and it was no joke. But if you want to know who is suffering, it is your teacher. Your Raphael.”
    â€œThe angel?” Gaspare squatted at Saara’s feet, growing numb from too many surprises. “Raphael is suffering for my sins?”
    Finding nothing around except Gaspare’s shirt, she put that on. It did not quite reach her knees. “Sin I know nothing about,” she stated. “Just suffering.”
    She ran her hands through her hair; they snarled among the blackened burned ends of her braids. She looked into the woods about her, as though marshaling unseen forces.
    â€œLet me cut the damage out of your hair, Lady Saara,” offered Gaspare, in order to put the conversation on a more manageable level. And he added, half-regretfully, “And then we will try to find you more suitable clothing. After that we will be more in a position to talk about sin and suffering.”
    She shot him a glance of such coldness he might have been Satan himself, with a voice of treacherous temptation. “I don’t have such time! I was asked by Dami to protect your Raphael, and I have failed! I must find what the Liar has done with him—for a spirit cannot be destroyed, you know. The Eagle is somewhere, in a dungeon. Or a jar, perhaps.”
    â€œA jar?” echoed Gaspare, uncertainly.
    She ignored him. “I will find him and I will bring him away, unless death comes first. This I vow, who have made no vows since leaving the Saami.” She raised both her arms into the air.
    â€œWait!” Gaspare made an expert dive and caught the woman about the waist. “Don’t turn into anything, Lady! Tell me where we’re going?”
    She peered down at the redhead clinging to her, with irritation mixed with surprise. “I am going,” she corrected him. “Home, to Lombardy, first.
    â€œAnd then to Satan’s Hall, or Hell, or whatever you call it.” Without further discussion, Saara grew feathers and flew.
    After she had gone Gaspare sat back into his bed of branches and stared at the scurf of dead needles that coated the ground. Gaspare was thinking about his sins, which he knew to be many. He was thinking about his sins of commission rather than those of omission, and especially thinking about his sins of the body.
    Gaspare’s sins of this nature had actually been few and exploratory in nature, but whenever he thought of sins, they were the ones to come immediately to mind.
    And he was feeling very badly, for though it might be the act of a bravo to follow a giggling girl into the dark, as Gaspare had done more than once (but less than four times), it was the act of a worm to let a pure angel take the blame for it.
    He was very fond of his lute teacher, with a hesitant and wary sort of affection which sprang from his knowledge that they were very different sorts of people, Raphael and himself. Without the fortuitous chance that Damiano had been the friend of both, they would have had no reason to meet.
    And Gaspare felt, too, that Raphael in his sinlessness never had been able to recognize just how wicked Gaspare himself could be.
    And now, unfortunately, Raphael had caught the brunt of that wickedness and was suffering. In a jar, of all things. Gaspare cringed queasily and tried to feel repentance.
    What he felt, he found, was resentment. Gesu the Christ had been enough, he considered. What other load of guilt did a man have to bear? And even the Lady Saara… (Thinking of Saara as he had just seen her, his thoughts digressed immediately. It was a number of minutes before he could get them