Chapter 2 #2
We landed at a small waystation island that evening.
The stable master was an angel in her fifties with the no-nonsense competence of someone who’d been running things alone for longer than she wanted to talk about.
She took one look at Valen and nodded approval, which was the highest compliment she was likely to give anyone.
Then she looked at me and her expression changed in a way I was starting to recognize.
“You’ll want the guest house,” she said.
The guest house turned out to be a small cottage at the edge of the landing field with a bed wider than any military cot I’d slept on in six years and a fireplace already lit.
Three different angels offered, in quick succession, to bring me dinner, to draw a bath, to check if the bedding was adequate.
One of them, younger than the others with bright auburn hair, informed me that her mother was the island’s healer and specialized in treating old battlefield injuries, and would I like her to examine the scar tissue across my shoulders, because she could tell from the way I dismounted that I was carrying tension there that wouldn’t resolve on its own.
I declined as politely as I knew how. She looked at me like I’d declined something obvious and necessary, like refusing to put on a coat in a snowstorm.
“Suit yourself,” she said. “But the offer stands. Some of us know what six years of riding does to a man’s back.”
She was right. My back felt like someone had replaced my spine with a length of rusted chain.
But the idea of lying half-naked on a table while a stranger’s hands worked the knots out of muscles I’d stopped acknowledging years ago felt like more vulnerability than I was prepared to offer a random island one evening.
I thanked her. She left. I lay on the too-wide bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about the way the world had rearranged itself while I was busy not dying.
The next island was worse. And the one after that.
By the third day I’d developed a script for it.
Yes, thank you. No, I’m fine. Yes, the pegasus is well.
No, I don’t need assistance with that. The attention was well-intentioned.
It was also exhausting in a way that six years of military discipline hadn’t prepared me for.
These women weren’t flirting, not exactly.
They were grateful. They were relieved. They were looking at a man who’d come back when so many hadn’t, and their gratitude had nowhere else to go.
I understood it. I just wished it felt less like being a museum exhibit.
On the evening of the third day, the landscape below became something I recognized.
The island formations had a particular pattern here, the way the smaller platforms clustered around the larger agricultural ones, the stone bridges narrower and less ornate than the ones near Eden.
Valen felt it too. His pace picked up. His ears pricked forward.
He knew we were getting close the same way he knew everything, through some combination of instinct and the bond that had kept us alive when neither of us should have made it.
* * *
Oakwind Isle was the island I grew up on, and our farm looked smaller from the air than it had in my memory, which was the opposite of how these things usually worked.
Memories were supposed to shrink things, not the other way around.
But there it was below us in the moonlight, the orchards and the fields and the low stone farmhouse with its porch and its stubborn weather-beaten sign, and I thought: that can’t be all of it.
Six years of carrying this place in my head had turned it into something cathedral-sized.
The reality was humbler and more like home.
Valen banked low over the eastern field where the apple trees stood in their patient rows, their branches silver in the starlight.
Beyond them, the vegetable plots, the herb garden Angelina had always kept despite the farm’s larger priorities, the stone path that led from the stable to the house.
The stable itself was dark. No lantern burning in the window the way there used to be when I was a boy and Angelina left a light for late travelers.
The war had probably cured her of that generosity.
Six years of watching the sky for messengers who might be carrying the wrong kind of news would do that to a person.
We landed in the yard beside the stable, Valen’s hooves touching the packed earth carefully, the way he always did when he knew we’d reached somewhere that mattered.
I swung down from the saddle and stood for a moment in the yard, breathing air that smelled exactly the way I remembered and nothing like I remembered, both at once.
Stone dust, apple blossoms, the faint mineral tang of the well water and the musty sweetness of hay that had been sitting in the stable loft too long.
Then I heard the porch door open, and the creak of a hinge that had needed oiling for as long as I could remember.
A shape appeared in the doorway, backlit by the single lamp burning inside, and for a second neither of us moved.
She was holding something in one hand. A cup, or a book.
Something she’d brought to the porch with her the way she always did when she couldn’t sleep, which had been often when I was growing up and was probably more often now.
Then she stepped forward into the moonlight, and the world stopped.
Angelina, the woman who meant the world to me.
Forty-five years old and the most beautiful angel on the island, which was not affection talking but a simple statement of fact that every man in the village had acknowledged at one point or another, usually after enough cider to loosen their sense of propriety.
Her honey-blonde hair fell loose past her shoulders in the way it only did at night, no pins, no careful arrangement, just the hair of a woman who’d given up on impressing anyone for the day and was better for it.
She was wearing a simple nightdress and a robe belted loosely at the waist, and the curves of her body were clear even in the dim light.
Full breasts, the narrow waist that motherhood had somehow left untouched, the gentle flare of her hips, the way she carried herself that had nothing to do with trying and everything to do with the fact that some women were simply built the way statues wished they could be.
Her beautiful white wings were immaculate despite years of farm work.
She didn’t recognize me at first. Six years will do that.
I was taller than I’d been and broader. She took one step down from the porch, then stopped, her head tilting slightly the way it did when she was working through a puzzle.
Then recognition hit her like a physical thing. Her hand went to her mouth. The cup, whatever she’d been holding, fell to the porch boards with a dull thud. She gasped.
“Gabriel?”
It was my name, but it sounded like she was testing it, making sure it still belonged to the man standing in her yard.
I didn’t get a chance to answer. She was across the yard in seconds, moving faster than I’d ever seen her move, and then her arms and wings were around me and her face was pressed against my chest and she was crying in the way that women cry when their loved ones come home from places they weren’t supposed to survive.
I held her. Her body was warm and solid against mine, her breasts pressed against my chest through the thin fabric of her nightdress and robe, and I was aware of it in the way you’re aware of things you’re not supposed to notice, but can’t help noticing because you’re a man, and she’s a woman and biology is merciless about these distinctions.
I pushed the thought away and held her tighter.
She smelled like lavender and warm skin and the faint sweetness of the apple cider she loved so much.
“I knew you’d come back,” she said into my shirt. Her voice was wrecked. “I knew it. I told them. I told everyone who would listen. My boy doesn’t die in other people’s wars. He’s too strong.”
“I’m here,” I said. It was the only thing that felt true enough to say.
She pulled back slightly, her hands moving to my face, tracing the lines there like she was reading a map of the years I’d been gone.
Her eyes were red and shining and really beautiful.
Even crying, even at forty-five with her hair a mess and her nightclothes rumpled from sleep, she had the kind of face that had been turning heads for as long as I could remember.
Some women aged into their beauty. Angelina had been born into hers and then refused to surrender it to time, which was the most her I could imagine.
“You look like hell,” she said, and then she laughed through the tears, which was also the most her I could imagine.
“So I’ve been told.”
“By who? The queen?”
“The queen was considerably more diplomatic.”
She laughed again, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “I bet she was. I bet she looked at you in your fancy uniform and thought you were the most heroic wreck she’d ever seen.”
“Something like that.”
She hugged me again, shorter this time, a proper squeeze that made my ribs complain and my heart do something complicated I didn’t want to examine.
Then she stepped back and took a breath, composing herself the way she always did when emotion threatened to overtake practicality.
Angelina had raised two daughters on a struggling farm and somehow always found room for me, too. She was a heroine in my eyes.
“They’re asleep,” she said. “Both of them. Went to bed hours ago. Gabriella’s been helping me all week. Sabrina was at the village till late.” She paused, studying my face. “We could wake them. They’d want to be woken. They’ve waited six years for this.”