Chapter 5 #3
“You described him as ‘literally carved from marble by disappointed gods,’” the first twin said. “I have it written down. I keep it for blackmail purposes.”
I looked at Sabrina. She looked at the sky.
“Poetic license,” she said.
The twins laughed, and then they were pulling us toward a shaded table where someone had laid out fresh cider and small cakes, and for the next hour I sat answering questions and deflecting compliments and watching her move through the gathering like she’d been born to it, which she had.
She knew everyone’s name. She remembered their children’s ages, their harvest concerns, the specific variety of apple they were proud of.
She teased the older women and charmed the younger ones and generally behaved like someone who had never met a social situation she couldn’t transform into something warmer and more alive.
“It’s always been this way,” she told me later, as we flew between islands, the wind carrying her words back to me. “Even as a kid. Everyone wanted to be my friend. Winning that pageant just … cemented it, I guess. Made me the local celebrity instead of just the pretty girl.”
She banked the skybird gently, following the curve of a cloud formation, and her profile against the blue was something a painter would have given up everything to capture.
“Then the war happened, and suddenly there were … fewer options. For everyone. Families started introducing me to every eligible bachelor within flying distance, which was sweet and also deeply depressing, because none of them were …” She trailed off.
“None of them were what?”
She glanced back at me, her eyes doing that complicated thing where teasing and something more genuine occupied the same space. “Attractive,” she said finally. “None of them were attractive.”
We landed at another island, and the pattern repeated.
Hugs, questions, Sabrina at the center of everything, pulling me along in her wake like a friendly riptide.
By midday I had told the story of the northern crossing so many times I could have done it in my sleep, and Sabrina’s friends had teased her about her six-year campaign of Gabriel-worship so thoroughly that her cheeks were actually pink, which I hadn’t thought was physically possible for Sabrina.
Her gorgeous friends competed for my attention, and I had to admit I felt a little overwhelmed by so much female attention.
I watched Sabrina, laughing with a group of young angels, her wings half-extended, her head thrown back, completely at ease in her skin and her social habitat, and I felt something warm and complicated settle in my chest.
Some things never changed. Sabrina had always been the one who could walk into a room of strangers and leave with twelve new friends, three dinner invitations, and at least one marriage proposal she would politely decline.
The war had taken many things from many people, but it hadn’t taken that from her.
If anything, it had distilled it, turned her natural charm into something necessary, a light that people gathered around when the world felt dark.
She caught me watching and grinned, raising her cup in a small toast across the crowd.
I raised mine back while being flanked by two beautiful angels, holding onto me for dear life.
* * *
We left her friends behind with promises to return, and the moment we were airborne, Sabrina turned in the saddle and fixed me with a look that I recognized from approximately ten thousand childhood dares.
“Race you,” she said.
“To where?”
“Everywhere. Through the islands. First one to touch the western rim wins.”
“You’re on a skybird. I’m on a skybird. With you. How exactly am I supposed to race?”
“Call for Valen, dummy.”
I laughed and put two fingers to my mouth, the whistle I’d used a thousand times in training fields and battle formations, the sharp two-tone call that carried across open sky the way nothing else did.
It left my lips and cut through the warm air, and for a moment there was nothing but the sound of Sora’s wings and the wind and Sabrina’s grin.
We waited. The islands hung below us, green and gold in the midday light, and I scanned the horizon the way I’d scanned it a thousand times before, looking for the shape of a pegasus against open blue.
There … a white shape breaking from behind a cloud formation, moving fast. Valen. He’d heard me. He always heard me, the way I always heard him, the bond working in both directions whether we were in the same field or separated by miles of open sky.
He banked toward us, his wings pulling tight, his body a white arrow against the blue. He closed the distance in seconds, his dark eyes finding mine across the gap, and I could read the question in them as clearly as if he’d spoken: Where are we going and why is there a skybird involved?
“There’s my boy,” I said.
Sabrina guided Sora into a slow circle, giving Valen space to approach.
He came in from below, his wings beating steady, his mane streaming silver in the wind, and when he drew level his shoulder was close enough to touch.
He looked at Sora. Sora looked at him. The mutual assessment that passed between them was the kind of silent negotiation animals conduct when they’re deciding whether the other one is worth acknowledging.
Sora tilted her head. Valen snorted, a sound that carried the disdain of a military pegasus encountering something he considered decorative.
“He’s judging her,” Sabrina said.
“He’s judging both of us.”
I found my balance, and then I was moving.
One foot out of the stirrup, my body turning, my hands finding the saddle horn, and then I was pushing off, the air catching me for one suspended heartbeat before I dropped.
My body knew the distance. My body had crossed this gap ten thousand times, in training, in combat and in the desperate moments when transferring mounts mid-flight meant the difference between reaching a wounded rider and watching them fall.
My hands found Valen’s mane. My legs found his back.
I settled into the saddle, his saddle, the one that had been shaped by six years of my weight, and the feeling was like stepping into a room that remembered you.
The leather creaked. Valen gave a low rumble and settled his stance beneath me, adjusting to my weight.
“We’re racing,” I told him, gathering the reins. “The skybird thinks she’s faster.”
Valen’s ears flattened. I knew that expression. It was the expression he wore when someone had said something insulting about his speed, and he was already calculating exactly how much humiliation he intended to inflict in response.
Sabrina was already moving. I heard her laugh, and then Sora banked hard to the left and shot past us, Sabrina’s wings half-extended, her hair streaming behind her like pale silk, her body low against the saddle in a posture that was pure competitive instinct.
“That’s cheating!” I called after her.
“That’s strategy!” she called back, already pulling ahead. “You should know the difference, war hero!”
I leaned forward, and Valen responded the way he always responded when the word race entered the equation.
We cut through the air like a blade through water, the islands blurring below, the cloud formations whipping past on either side, and for a moment I forgot about everything and was simply a man on a pegasus, chasing the horizon because someone had told him he couldn’t catch it.
Sabrina was fast. I’ll give her that. Then Valen found his stride. I felt it in the tightening of his muscles, the deeper pull of his wings, the way the air began to move differently around us, and then we were gaining, eating the distance between us and the skybird in long, relentless increments.
“Not fast enough!” she shouted over the wind.
“We haven’t started yet!”
She laughed, and the sound carried back to me on the wind.
Then she banked, cutting across my path so close that her wingtip passed inches from Valen’s shoulder, the displaced air buffeting us sideways.
Valen snorted his displeasure and corrected without my input, his body compensating instinctively, and I heard Sabrina’s laughter again, closer this time, and then she was alongside us, Sora’s wing nearly brushing mine.
“Too slow,” she said, her voice carrying over the wind, her eyes bright with mischief. “The great war hero, outflown by a skybird and a girl who learned to ride three years ago. The queen will be devastated.”
“You cut across my line. That’s cheating.”
“That’s tactical advantage. You should know the difference, you’ve been to war.”
She steered Sora into Valen, bumping into him. She did it again on the next turn. And again on the one after that.
Then it happened. She banked hard left, pulling us through a tight arc around the spire of a small temple island, and the motion combined with the wind and the thin straps of her dress did what physics demanded they do: her right breast slipped free of its cup, the pale curve of it exposed to the open air, and Sabrina gasped and grabbed at the fabric with one hand while the other held the reins.
“Gabriel, a little help?”
Flying closer, I was already reaching, my hand finding the strap, my fingers brushing against the warm skin of her shoulder as I pulled the fabric back into place.
The contact lasted less than a second. The sensation lasted considerably longer.
Her skin was soft, warm, and the curve of her breast beneath the thin blue fabric was something my brain registered with the vivid clarity usually reserved for battlefield threats and other things you cannot afford to misperceive.
I’d seen breasts before. I’d seen beautiful women before. I had not, until this precise moment, seen Sabrina’s breast, and the combination of those facts produced a response in my body that was immediate, involuntary, and extremely inconvenient given our current seating arrangement.