Chapter 3 #2
We stood in the stable for a while after that, not talking much, letting the morning settle around us.
Valen went back to dozing. The chickens outside resumed their mindless pecking.
Somewhere beyond the stable walls, the farm was waking up properly, the ordinary machinery of a day beginning its familiar rotation.
I watched her wipe her face on her sleeve and straighten her dress and recompose herself into the capable young woman the village had apparently learned to take seriously, and I thought: I missed everything.
Every birthday. Every harvest. Every small victory and quiet defeat. I missed all of it.
But I was here now. And the thing about missing everything is that it makes what’s left feel impossibly precious.
* * *
We were still standing in the stable doorway, Gabriella telling me about the chicken that had learned to open the feed bin and was now the self-appointed leader of what she called “the feathered proletariat,” when the sound of wings came.
The sound rolled across the farmyard from the east, growing louder, and Gabriella’s head came up the way an animal does when it recognizes a familiar pattern.
“That’s Sabrina,” she said, and something in her voice suggested this was not an unusual occurrence but rather the morning’s scheduled entertainment, arriving right on cue.
I followed her out into the yard and looked up.
The skybird came in low over the eastern orchard, its broad wings pumping in steady strokes, its plumage a riot of white and pale blue that caught the morning sun and scattered it.
On its back, perched with the confidence of someone who’d been born to it, sat Sabrina.
Sabrina. Twenty-two years old and riding a skybird the way most people ride pegasi, one hand on the reins, the other holding a woven basket balanced against her hip, her body moving with the mount’s rhythm like they were sharing a single nervous system.
Her light blonde hair streamed behind her in the wind, loose and wild, and her wings were half-extended for balance, the feathers gleaming.
She wore a simple dress the color of summer sky, and even from a distance I could see the way she sat in the saddle, straight-backed and relaxed, like flying was nothing more complicated than walking and slightly more fun.
She brought the skybird down in the open yard with a talent that would have made cavalry instructors nod approval, the great wings folding, the taloned feet touching earth with barely a sound.
Her attention was entirely on the bird, checking the reins, murmuring something to it I couldn’t hear, reaching into the basket to pull out what looked like an apple and offering it to the mount with a gesture that was equal parts reward and affection.
The skybird took the apple delicately, with a beak that could have severed a man’s arm, and Sabrina patted its neck with the casual fondness of someone greeting an old friend.
Then she turned around. The basket hit the ground.
Fruit scattered across the packed earth, apples and pears rolling in every direction, and Sabrina didn’t notice or care.
She stood perfectly still in the center of the yard with one hand still extended toward the skybird’s reins and her eyes locked on my face with an expression I couldn’t have described if you’d held a blade to my throat.
For one heartbeat she didn’t move. For one heartbeat the farmyard held its breath.
Then her face did something extraordinary.
It broke open, every careful composure and practiced charm falling away at once, and what emerged wasn’t the polished social smile of a pageant winner or the teasing grin of the hot girl I remembered.
It was joy. Her eyes went bright. Her mouth curved. And then she was running.
She crossed the yard and launched herself at me, arms and wings and the full weight of six years of pent-up affection coming at my chest like a friendly artillery barrage.
I caught her, barely, her body hitting mine with enough force to knock the wind out of a man who hadn’t spent six years bracing for impacts considerably less welcome than this one, and then her arms were around my neck and her wings were wrapped around both of us and she was laughing and crying at the same time, the sound bright and wrecked and entirely Sabrina.
“Gabriel,” she said into my shoulder, and then she said it again, like she was testing the word, making sure it still meant what it had always meant. “Gabriel, you absolute bastard, you’re here, you’re actually here.”
“I’m here,” I said, my voice muffled against her hair.
She pulled back, her hands gripping my shoulders, her eyes scanning my face with an intensity that made me feel like I was being cataloged feature by feature.
Then she grinned, the Sabrina grin that had been demolishing local boys’ composure since she was fourteen, and punched me in the arm hard enough to leave a mark.
“That’s for making me wait six years,” she said. “And this” she hugged me again, tighter “is because I’m so glad you didn’t die that I might actually forgive you for the waiting part. Eventually. Don’t get comfortable.”
I laughed. The sound felt less strange this time, more like something my body remembered how to do. “Noted.”
Behind us, the skybird lowered its head to another fallen apple, apparently deciding the family reunion didn’t require its participation. Gabriella stooped to gather the scattered fruit while Sabrina absentmindedly slipped the reins over a fence post without taking her eyes off me.
She stepped back, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand, and I got my first proper look at the woman she had become.
The girl I’d left behind at sixteen had been beautiful in the way young things often are, all potential and promise and not yet settled into what she would be.
The woman standing in front of me had settled.
Every promise had been kept, and then some.
Her face had the same bones but better architecture, the cheekbones sharper, the jaw more defined, the smile wider and more deliberate.
Her body had the curves that pageant judges write poems about and local boys develop drinking problems over, full breasts, natural cleavage, a narrow waist, and hips that flared in a way that made the simple sky-blue dress look like it was working harder than it had signed up for.
Her wings were magnificent, thick and light blonde and currently half-spread with the residual excitement of the moment.
Sixteen to twenty-two. I’d missed the entire transformation, and the missing sat in my chest like a stone.
“You’re staring,” Sabrina said, and the teasing note was back in her voice, the lilt that meant she’d caught me doing something embarrassing and was about to make sure everyone within earshot knew about it.
“Do I have something on my face? Chicken feed? Tears? The visible evidence that you’re a war hero who can’t recognize me without looking like you’ve been hit with a board? ”
“You look different,” I said.
“Different good or different horrifying?”
“Different grown up,” I said, which was the most honest thing I could manage without walking into territory I had no business exploring.
She considered this, head tilted, and then her grin returned, brighter than before.
“Good answer. You’re learning. Now come on.
” She grabbed my wrist and pulled, already moving, her energy infectious and impossible to resist. “I’m giving you the tour.
Six years of changes, and you’re getting the abbreviated version because I have approximately eight hundred things to tell you and the morning is wasting itself. ”
Gabriella rolled her eyes. “She’s been planning this tour since approximately the day you left. I’d let her have it. Resistance is medically inadvisable.”
So Sabrina took my hand and led me across the farm, talking a mile a minute, pointing at everything with the enthusiasm of someone showing off a palace they’d built with their own hands. And as we walked, the farm began to tell its own story, quieter than Sabrina’s but just as clear.
The south field, the one Angelina had mentioned, was visibly fallow, not neglected, exactly.
The weeds had been kept in check, the boundary stones were still in place, but the rich dark soil lay unturned, waiting for hands that hadn’t been available to turn it.
Beyond it, the eastern pasture where we’d once grazed twenty sheep held maybe eight, their wool pale against the summer grass.
The barn roof had a patch near the eastern corner where the thatch had been replaced with something cheaper and less durable, a temporary fix that had become permanent through necessity.
The orchard, when we reached it, showed gaps I hadn’t noticed from the air, empty spaces where apple trees had stood for decades, now just stumps or nothing at all, the disease or age that had taken them evident in the ragged edges of the remaining trunks.
“Pear blight,” Sabrina said when she caught me looking.
“Took seven trees two summers ago. We tried everything. Angelina even sent for a healer from another island who charged us three silver crowns to tell us what we already knew, which is that sometimes trees die and there’s nothing you can do but plant new ones and wait twenty years.
” She shrugged, the gesture casual but the weight behind it anything but.
“We planted two. Couldn’t afford more. The soil’s good, though. They’ll take.”