Chapter 4 #2
Then we walked. Neither of us suggested turning back, neither of us suggested talking.
We just walked, following the path that curved away from the village and up toward the eastern ridge where the trees thinned and the sky opened.
My chest felt tight, the guilt sitting behind my ribs like something with weight and temperature, and Gabriella walked beside me with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes on the ground, and the silence between us was the kind that happens after something true has been said and neither person knows quite what to do with the space it leaves behind.
The path climbed. The orchard gave way to scrubby meadow, then to rocky outcrop, and then we were at the place we’d always called the lookout, though it had no official name and probably never would.
A flat shelf of pale stone jutting from the island’s edge, wide enough for two people to sit side by side with their legs dangling over nothing, and beyond it, the endless sky.
We sat. The stone was warm from the morning sun.
Below us, the island dropped away in a sheer cliff face veined with hardy scrub and the occasional stubborn tree growing sideways from a crack.
Beyond that, nothing but air and distance and clouds, and beyond the clouds, the vague blue suggestion of the endless sea far below, so distant it was more idea than reality.
We’d found this place when Gabriella was nine and I was sixteen, exploring the island’s edges on a summer afternoon when we were supposed to be helping with the harvest. I remembered her sitting exactly where she sat now, her small feet kicking at the empty air, her face full of a wonder that had nothing to do with the fact that she couldn’t fly and everything to do with the fact that the world was larger and more beautiful than either of us had known.
“Remember when we found this?” she asked quietly.
“I remember you almost gave Angelina a heart attack when we got back and told her where we’d been.”
She smiled, just a little. “Worth it.”
The silence settled again, comfortable this time. I looked out at the sky and thought about distance, about how six years of war had taught me that distance was measured in more than miles.
“I never told anyone this,” I said.
She turned to look at me, her eyes questioning.
“The war,” I said. “The fighting. None of it scared me the way people think it did.” I picked up a small stone from the ledge and turned it between my fingers.
“What scared me was the thought of never coming home. Every battle, every charge, every time I mounted Valen and took to the air, I wondered whether that was the day. Whether that was the engagement where something went wrong, where the formation broke, where the arrow found the gap in the armor or the blade found the opening I hadn’t seen coming. ”
The stone was smooth, worn by wind and time.
I set it down carefully on the ledge between us.
“Death didn’t frighten me. What frightened me was the possibility that you would spend the rest of your life believing I’d abandoned you.
That you’d wake up one morning to a messenger at the door and a letter with a seal on it, and from that moment on you’d carry the certainty that I’d chosen something else over coming back to you.
” I looked at her. “That was the thing I couldn’t live with.
The thought of you alone, thinking I’d left you by choice. ”
Something broke in her face. A careful restraint, held for so long it had become part of her architecture, crumbling all at once.
Her breath caught. Her eyes filled. And then she was in my arms, her face pressed against my chest, her body shaking with the force of what she’d been holding back, and she was crying in a way that had nothing performative about it, nothing guarded, just a young woman finally letting six years of loneliness and fear find their voice.
I held her. One hand on the back of her head, her dark blonde hair soft against my palm, the other arm around her shoulders, feeling the narrow frame of her and the strength in it and the vulnerability she only showed to people she trusted completely.
She cried into my shirt and I held her and didn’t try to stop it or hurry it or make it smaller than it was.
She’d earned every tear. She’d carried the weight of my absence without complaint for six years, and if the weight needed somewhere to go now that I was back, my shirt was the least I could offer.
“I’m here,” I said quietly. “I’m not going anywhere. Not unless I have no choice, and even then I’ll find a way back. I promise you that.”
She nodded against my chest, a small movement I felt more than saw.
Her breathing gradually steadied, the shaking subsiding, and for a long time we sat like that on the stone ledge with the endless sky spread out below us and nothing between us but the simple fact of presence, of being here, together, after six years of absence.
When she finally pulled back, her eyes were red and her cheeks were wet. She wiped her face on her sleeve and didn’t apologize for the crying, which I was grateful for. Apologies after something that real would have felt like a betrayal of the moment.
“We should head back,” she said. Her voice was rough but steady. “Angelina will be wondering.”
We stood. She reached for my hand without looking at me, the way she had when she was small and uncertain, and I took it, and we walked back down the path side by side, her fingers warm in mine.
As we walked, I found myself looking at her with fresh attention.
The way she moved through the tall grass, confident and sure-footed.
The set of her shoulders, straight and unapologetic.
The quiet competence in her hands as she pushed a low branch aside and held it for me to pass.
This wasn’t the frightened thirteen-year-old I’d carried in my memory for six years.
This was a woman who had faced loneliness and difference and the cruelty of children and had emerged not just intact but remarkable, her kindness undiminished, her humor sharp and warm, her resilience something she wore without making a show of it.
She had become extraordinary while I was gone.
We reached the family farm as the morning was tipping toward midday, the sun high and warm over the orchard, and Gabriella squeezed my hand.
The farmyard was quiet when we returned.
Angelina was somewhere in the house, the sound of her moving between rooms carrying through the open windows.
Sabrina was still out, probably with her skybird or her friends or both.
The chickens had dispersed to their various territories of spite and purpose.
Gabriella was quiet. She picked up a stick from the yard and traced patterns in the dust, her eyes distant, and I recognized the look because it was the same one I wore when memories found their way to the surface and demanded attention.
“We could do something different,” I said.
She looked up. “Like what?”
“Like I could show you some of what I learned out there. The useful parts. The parts that didn’t involve getting shot at.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “You mean fight stuff?”
“I mean skill stuff. Archery. Spear work. The boomerang, if you’re curious.”
That got her. Her eyes lit, the distance evaporating. “The boomerang? The one from the letters? The one that came back to your hand while you were riding?”
“That’s the one.”
“Show me. Show me everything.”
We found a clearing on the north edge of the farm where the meadow opened and the tree line offered a natural backstop.
The grass was knee-high and pale gold, bending in the steady breeze that came off the island’s edge.
I’d practiced here as a boy, shooting at targets propped against the far trees, learning the feel of a bow in my hands before I’d learned much else about myself.
The clearing remembered me. The quality of light through the leaves was exactly as I remembered it, dappled and shifting, and for a moment I was sixteen again, nothing ahead of me but open sky and the arrogance of youth that mistakes possibility for destiny.
I shrugged out of my shirt. The fabric caught on my shoulders, and I pulled it over my head and dropped it on the grass beside my boots, and then I was standing in the clearing in nothing but my trousers, and the morning air was cool on my skin, and I heard Gabriella’s breath catch.
She was staring at my back. At the scars.
I’d forgotten, in the moment, that they hadn’t been there when I left.
The long diagonal across my upper back from Mirrath, pale and raised, the tissue a different texture than the skin around it.
The puckered knot below my ribs, smaller but uglier, the kind of scar that tells you something went through and came out the other side.
Dozens of others. A map written in damaged tissue, each one a place where the war had reached out and touched me and left its signature.
Gabriella didn’t say anything. She just stood there with her stick forgotten in her hand, her eyes moving over my back, her face doing something complicated that moved from shock to something that looked like pain and then settled into a stillness I couldn’t read.
“Gabriel,” she said quietly.
“It looks worse than it is.”
“It looks like you almost died. Repeatedly.”
I turned to face her. “I didn’t, though. That’s the part that matters.”
She was still looking at the scars, her eyes tracing the patterns like she was trying to memorize them, and I saw something change in her expression, a realization landing with its full weight: every one of those marks was a moment when I had been fighting, hurting, surviving, while she was here waiting, helpless, with nothing but letters and hope to hold onto.
The distance between those two experiences was suddenly, terribly visible to both of us, written across my skin in a language neither of us had chosen to learn.