Chapter 5 #2
I approached Sora slowly, the way you approach any animal that’s still deciding whether you’re friend or food.
She watched me, her head following my movement.
I extended my hand, palm flat, and she sniffed it once, twice, then nudged my fingers with her beak hard enough to let me know she could have removed them if she’d wanted to.
“She likes you,” Sabrina said.
“That’s what that meant?”
“That meant she’s considering not throwing you off at altitude.
It’s the closest thing to affection you’re going to get on the first meeting.
” Sabrina moved to my side, her body close enough that I could feel the warmth of her through the thin fabric of my shirt.
“Here. I’ll help you up. The stirrup’s higher than it looks, and skybirds don’t appreciate being kicked in the ribs by clumsy soldiers. ”
She placed her hand on my lower back and gave me a push that was more playful than helpful, her palm flat and warm against the base of my spine.
I swung my leg over the saddle, found the stirrup with my boot, and pulled myself up.
The motion was different from mounting Valen.
The saddle sat higher, the bird’s body narrower, the center of gravity was different in ways my muscle memory hadn’t anticipated.
I settled into the seat, adjusted my weight, and felt Sora move beneath me, her wings giving a single testing flap that sent dust swirling across the stable floor.
“There,” Sabrina said, sounding pleased with herself. “Not so hard, was it?”
Before I could answer, she was moving. One hand on the saddle horn, one foot in the stirrup, and then she was up behind me, her body settling against mine.
Her thighs pressed against the outside of mine.
Her arms came around my waist, her hands gripping the front of the saddle.
And then the rest of her, her chest, the full warm weight of her breasts pressing against my back through my shirt and her dress, the contact immediate and impossible to pretend wasn’t happening.
I held very still. My body, the traitorous thing, was already cataloging the sensation: the softness, the warmth, the impossible awareness of exactly how close she was.
My mind, entirely unhelpfully, supplied a detailed inventory of everything that was wrong with this situation and everything that felt disturbingly right about it.
Sabrina settled more comfortably against me, and the movement sent a wave of heat through my chest that had nothing to do with the morning air.
“You ready?” she asked, her voice close to my ear, her breath warm against my neck.
I cleared my throat. “For what?”
“For flying, dummy. What did you think I meant?” The teasing was back.
She squeezed my waist once, a quick, friendly pressure that shouldn’t have made my pulse do what it was doing.
“Unless you had something else in mind, in which case we should probably discuss where exactly your mind has wandered before takeoff.”
“I’m ready,” I said, which was approximately forty percent true.
“Good.” She leaned forward and reached past my hip for the reins.
Her arm brushed my stomach as she did, and I thought very deliberately about military logistics, about supply chain management, about the specific grain yield of the south field, about anything that wasn’t the woman wrapped around me like she belonged there. “So, what are you waiting for?”
I glanced back, giving her a funny look. “What do you mean? This is your skybird, not mine.”
Sabrina rolled her eyes so hard I half expected them to detach and roll across the stable floor. “You can ride a pegasus into battle, but you can’t fly a skybird?”
“It’s a completely different animal.”
She sighed dramatically, the sound accompanied by an eye roll that was its own form of communication.
She unwound herself from behind me, her body pulling away from mine in a slow separation that my nervous system tracked.
Her wings spread wide. She hovered there for a moment, her feet leaving the stirrups, her body suspended above the saddle by the steady beat of her wings.
The air moved around us, warm and scented with hay and bird and the clean smell of her.
“Move back,” she said, gesturing with her chin toward the rear of the saddle. “I’ll take the front. You can hold on to me and try not to fall off. Think you can manage that, war hero?”
“Yes, captain.” I slid back along the saddle until I was pressed against the cantle. The leather creaked beneath me. Sabrina drifted forward, her wings adjusting with small movements, and then she was descending, her body settling into the space I’d vacated.
Her back pressed against my chest. Her wings folded against my arms. And her breasts, which had been pressed against my back moments ago, were now pressed against my forearms as my hands found the saddle horn on either side of her body, and the contact was immediate and warm.
She’d done this on purpose. I was certain of it.
First her breasts pressed against my back.
Then the switch, the rearrangement, the way she’d positioned herself so the most generous parts of her anatomy were now resting against my forearms. None of it was accidental.
Sabrina didn’t do accidental. Sabrina did deliberate, and then she did it with a smile that made you question whether you were the one being unreasonable.
“Comfortable?” she asked.
“Perfectly,” I said, which was a lie of such magnitude that I half expected the saddle to collapse beneath us.
She gathered the reins, and then we lifted from the farmyard, Sabrina in front with the reins, me behind with my arms around her waist. Her wings were half-extended for balance, the feathers brushing against my forearms, and the smell of her hair filled my senses.
The first island we reached was small, agricultural. We hadn’t even landed properly when the greetings started.
“Sabrina! Sweetheart!”
“Sabrina, you gorgeous thing, where have you been?”
“Sabrina, the preserves arrived, they’re divine, absolutely divine—”
We dismounted, and Sabrina was immediately enveloped by three angels who looked like they’d been waiting for her specifically.
They hugged her, kissed her cheeks, pulled her into rapid-fire conversation about preserves and festivals and someone’s cousin’s wedding, and I stood beside the skybird feeling approximately as useful as a screen door on a submarine.
Then one of them noticed me. “Oh my God,” she said, her eyes widening. “This is him. This is actually him.”
And just like that, I was the exhibit. Three pairs of eyes fixed on me.
They were beautiful, all of them, young angels with bright eyes and summer dresses and wings in various shades of white and cream, the kind of women who turned heads without trying, and they were looking at me like I was the answer to a question they’d been asking for a very long time.
Sabrina beamed, her arm sliding through mine proudly. “Ladies, meet Gabriel, the legendary war hero, the Queen’s Falcon, the man who breaks hearts by existing and doesn’t even know it.”
I shot her a look. She ignored it completely.
“Hi,” I said.
They introduced themselves in a flurry I didn’t catch, names blending together, and then the questions started.
About the war. About Eden Isle. About the queen, about Valen, about aerial combat and northern campaigns and whether it was true that I’d once shot an arrow through the eye of a rebel officer at three hundred yards, which was absolutely not true but had apparently made for excellent storytelling at village gatherings for the past several years.
I answered as best I could. Sabrina watched, her eyes bright with satisfaction, occasionally interjecting with corrections that were actually embellishments, and by the time we’d been there twenty minutes I had three attractive angels hanging on every moderately heroic anecdote I could dredge up, and Sabrina was radiating the smugness of a woman who had planned this exact scenario and was now witnessing its perfect execution.
Eventually I asked where all the men were.
One of the older women smiled sadly before explaining that most had died in the war.
The warmth of the welcome suddenly made a little more sense.
In villages where so many young men had never returned, a decorated veteran was something none of them had expected to see again.
Before we left, they all gave me kisses on the cheeks and warm hugs.
This was a routine I could definitely get used to.
“Told you,” she murmured in my ear as we mounted Sora again. “They’ve been waiting.”
We visited three more islands that morning.
The pattern held. Land, dismount, Sabrina and I enveloped in hugs and conversation, me introduced, me questioned, me gradually realizing that she had built me into something between a folk hero and a romantic fantasy for the entire local population, and none of them seemed remotely bothered by the discrepancy between the legend and the moderately tired man currently standing in front of them.
At the next island, called Ginger Isle, we met what I gathered were Sabrina’s closest friends, a pair of redheaded twins, Olivia and Livia with matching grins, red wings and the energy of people who had been causing trouble alongside Sabrina since childhood.
They hugged her, then turned to me with expressions that suggested they’d been preparing for this moment for approximately six years.
“So,” said the first one, her eyes doing a frankly alarming assessment of my shoulders, “you’re real. She didn’t make you up.”
“Mostly real,” I said.
The second twin snorted. “She talked about you so much we started taking bets on whether you existed. I lost three silver crowns because I said you were at least fifty percent fictional.”
Sabrina punched her arm. “I did not exaggerate.”