Chapter 3 #3
We walked the fence line, and I saw where posts had rotted at the base and been propped with stones instead of replaced.
We passed the tool shed, and Sabrina pointed out the empty hooks where equipment had been sold during the worst of the war years, when coin was scarce and food was the priority.
She showed me the herb garden, which was thriving, and the vegetable plots, which were smaller than I remembered but meticulously tended, every row straight, every plant healthy.
“We kept what we could keep,” she said, and for the first time the teasing note had left her voice entirely, replaced by something quieter and steadier.
“Some things had to go. The south field. The sheep. Half the tools. But the important things stayed. The orchard, the house and each other.” She looked at me then, her eyes clear and direct in a way that belonged to a woman considerably older than twenty-two.
“We’re still here, Gabriel. That’s the part that matters. ”
I looked at her, standing in the morning sun with dust on her bare feet and fruit stains on her fingers and the set to her shoulders that said she had carried weights I hadn’t been here to help with, and I thought: I missed it all.
Every hard day. Every impossible choice.
Every morning when the three of them got up and looked at the work ahead and did it anyway because someone had to.
But I hadn’t missed what mattered. They were still here. The farm was still here. Diminished, patched, carrying the evidence of six years of survival in every weathered board and fallow field, but standing. Beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when they’ve endured.
Sabrina saw something in my face and reached out, brushing a strand of hair from my forehead with her thumb the way Angelina had done the night before.
“Stop it,” she said gently. “Whatever you’re thinking, stop.
You came home. That’s the only part of this story that ends with a period instead of a question mark. ”
Then she grinned, the teasing back in full force, and hooked her arm through mine.
“Now. Tell me absolutely everything about the queen. Is she as terrifying as they say? Did she actually knight you? Because if she did, I’m going to need you to start referring to yourself as Sir Gabriel at family dinners, and I am not joking about this. ”
I let her pull me back toward the house, answering questions I hadn’t prepared answers for, watching the way the light moved across the farm we’d almost lost, and thought: I’m home.
* * *
Breakfast was chaos and I loved every second of it.
Angelina had bread and eggs and the sharp cheese she made from the milk of our remaining two goats, and Sabrina talked through the entire meal without apparently needing to breathe, switching subjects mid-sentence the way she’d always done, asking me about the queen, telling me about her skybird whose name was Sora, describing a harvest festival she’d organized three years ago that apparently involved a drunk harpy and a pumpkin catapult, all while Gabriella rolled her eyes and Angelina smiled into her tea and the morning light poured across the kitchen table like something poured from a jug labeled “ordinary happiness, handle with care.”
When the plates were cleared, Angelina reached for my empty mug and held it just out of my reach, her eyes serious.
“You’re resting today,” she said. “Six years of war, three days of flying, and one emotional reunion does not equal a man who’s ready for a full day’s work. The orchard can wait. You cannot.”
I took the mug from her fingers gently. “I’ve been waiting six years to help. I think I win this argument.”
“Stubborn,” Angelina said, but she was already reaching for her apron, the battle lost before it began. She knew me. She’d always known me. “Just like your father. God help us all.”
So we divided the day the way we’d always divided days.
Gabriella took the chickens and the garden.
Sabrina took the eastern field where the late summer berries were coming in.
Angelina took the kitchen and the preserves and the hundred small tasks that kept a farmhouse from falling into disrepair one creaking hinge at a time.
And I took whatever needed a man’s height and a soldier’s shoulders, which turned out to be most of it.
I carried water from the well until my arms remembered what carrying felt like when the thing you’re carrying isn’t a weapon.
I mucked Valen’s stall and brushed him down while he regarded me with the mild disappointment of an animal who finds human industriousness vaguely suspicious before noon.
I hauled feed sacks from the barn to the chicken coop and discovered, to my genuine humiliation, that chickens had not become less vindictive in my absence.
One particularly ambitious hen waited until I’d bent to refill the water trough before launching herself at my head with the specific malice of a creature who has decided that today, this specific human will know fear.
I ducked. The hen missed. Sabrina, who had been ostensibly picking blackberries twenty yards away and had in fact been waiting for exactly this moment, laughed so hard she dropped half her basket.
“Welcome home,” she called, wiping tears from her eyes. “The chickens have been training. They have strategies now. That one’s name is Vengeance. Don’t ask me why. Gabriella named her.”
Gabriella, passing with an armful of fresh-cut herbs, didn’t break stride. “She pecked an angel when she tried to steal eggs. I respect her commitment to justice.”
By midday my back had remembered that farm work uses muscles cavalry training doesn’t bother with, and those muscles were making their opinions known with the vivid vocabulary of tissue that hasn’t been asked to perform in six years.
We ate lunch on the porch steps, bread and cheese and apples from last season’s store, and Angelina fussed over the long scar on my forearm until I gently moved her hand away and told her it had stopped hurting approximately five years and eleven months ago.
“It’s still there,” she said quietly. “That’s recent enough for me.”
After lunch, we moved to the orchard. The early apples were coming in, the branches heavy with fruit that gleamed pale green and blush-pink in the afternoon light.
Angelina handed out baskets and set us to work with the authority of an angel who’d been running harvests since before any of us were born.
Gabriella took the lower branches, her hands quick and sure on each apple stem.
Sabrina, naturally, scaled the taller trees with the help of her wings, perching on branches that should not have held her weight and reaching for fruit while singing something bawdy about a merchant’s daughter and a skybird groom that made Angelina pretend to be deaf and Gabriella blush to the roots of her hair.
I took the middle ground, literally and figuratively, working the branches within arm’s reach and trying to remember the twist that separates a ripe apple from one that needs another week.
My body knew the motion before my brain did, muscle memory waking up from whatever deep civilian hibernation it had been in since I was twenty, and for a while I lost myself in the simple rhythm of it.
Reach, twist, place in basket. Reach, twist, place.
The sound of the orchard around us, leaves moving in the breeze, the occasional soft thud of an overripe apple hitting the grass, Sabrina’s voice floating down from above, Gabriella’s quieter responses from below, Angelina humming as she worked the western row.
It was ordinary. It was perfect. It was so far from the world I’d been living in for six years that sometimes I had to stop, hand on a branch, and just breathe through the disorientation of it.
No urgency. No consequence greater than whether the apples made it into the basket without bruising.
No fear sitting at the base of my skull like a cold stone.
Just work, and family, and the contentment that comes from doing something useful with your hands on land you care about.
We repaired the chicken coop door in the late afternoon, Gabriella holding the new hinge steady while I drove the nails, and she told me about the ledger system she’d developed for tracking the farm’s accounts, her voice bright with the pride of someone who has discovered they’re good at something and is still slightly surprised by it.
We fixed the loose step on the porch, Sabrina handing me tools with unnecessary commentary on my technique.
“No, like this, you great lumbering cavalryman, gently, it’s wood not an enemy skull. ”
And Angelina brought us cider in the old clay cups that had survived every harvest since I was born.
My body ached by sundown. I sat on the porch step with a cup of cider and watched the light go gold across the orchard, and Sabrina dropped onto the step beside me, close enough that her wing brushed my shoulder, and didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said quietly, “You okay?”
I looked at her. Her face was serious in a way Sabrina’s face rarely was, the teasing set aside, and I realized she’d been watching me all day, the way she’d always watched me, seeing more than she let on.
“I’m good,” I said. And for the first time since landing on Eden Isle’s ceremonial field, I meant it completely.
She nodded, and bumped her shoulder against mine.
“You will be. It just takes time.” Then the grin was back, bright and merciless.
“Also, you run from chickens like a man who’s never faced actual danger, and I will be telling this story at every family gathering for the remainder of your natural life. Fair warning.”
I laughed. The sound felt less strange each time, more like something that belonged to me.