Chapter 7 #3
There was more. A lot more. Pages of it, dating back months, years probably, entries about missing me during the war, about watching Sabrina’s pageants and feeling invisible, about the ache of loving someone who was both everywhere and nowhere, present in every story the village told and absent from every room she walked into.
She’d written about the afternoon in the grass, about the way I’d looked at her back, about the feeling of my hands on her ribs when I’d tickled her and how she’d pretended to hate it while secretly cataloging every point of contact like a miser counting coins.
I love him. I’ve always loved him. Not the safe, simple kind of love that lives in storybooks and doesn’t keep you awake at night.
The other kind. The kind that makes your chest hurt when he smiles at someone else.
The kind that makes you notice the way his shoulders fill a doorway or the particular blue of his eyes when the light hits them a certain way.
The kind I spent years telling myself was hopeless and that exists anyway, stubborn and impossible and completely, utterly mine.
I closed the diary. My hands were not entirely steady.
The room felt several degrees warmer than it had a minute ago, and the weight sitting behind my sternum had become something more complicated, something that involved heat and hope and the distinct sensation of standing at the edge of something I had no map for.
A hand landed on my shoulder.
I flinched hard enough to send the pen rolling off the desk, my body reacting the way six years of combat had trained it to react, which is to say, badly. My elbow came up, my feet moved, and I was halfway through a defensive pivot before my brain registered the laughter behind me.
Sabrina. Of course it was Sabrina. She stood in the doorway, one wing extended for balance, her light blonde hair loose around her shoulders, wearing a dress that appeared to have been selected for maximum impact on a summer morning, and she was laughing at me with the delight of someone who had just witnessed something extremely embarrassing and was planning to remember it forever.
“Reading Gabriella’s diary,” she said, shaking her head. “Gabriel. Really. I expected better from the queen’s most decorated soldier. The standards are in freefall.”
“I wasn’t reading it. I was looking for her. The diary was open, and I glanced, and then my eyes betrayed me. It was a coup. I’m as much a victim as anyone.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re blushing. Your entire neck is the color of a rose.
Whatever you read, it was good.” She stepped into the room, her wings folding neatly behind her, and threw her arms around my neck with the easy physical confidence that was Sabrina’s native language.
Her body pressed against mine, warm and exactly the kind of thing my nervous system did not need to be processing while Gabriella’s handwriting was still burning holes in the back of my skull.
“I have a proposition,” she said, her mouth close to my ear, her breath warm against my neck.
“My friends. The twins. They’re at the eastern meadow today.
Nothing formal, just drinks and music and the brand of trouble that happens when you put three beautiful women in a field with a keg of cider and no supervision.
” She leaned back, her arms still around my neck, her eyes doing that Sabrina thing where teasing and something more genuine occupied the same space.
“Come with me. Be charming. Let them admire you. I promise it’ll be more fun than whatever brooding military exercise you had planned for today. ”
The offer was tempting in exactly the way Sabrina’s offers always were.
I could feel the heat of her through the thin fabric of her dress, the curve of her breasts against my chest, and my body, the traitorous thing, was already composing a list of reasons why finding a fairy healer could absolutely wait until tomorrow.
“I can’t,” I said. The words felt like they’d been extracted with pliers. “I’m … there’s something I need to do. For Gabriella.”
The teasing receded, replaced by a warmth.
“Of course there is.” She squeezed my shoulders and stepped back.
“The fairy. Angelina mentioned it. The emotional trauma specialist.” She shook her head, her smile softening.
“You really are something else, you know that? Six years of war, and the first thing you do when you come home is try to fix everyone.”
“Not everyone. Just her.”
“Just her,” Sabrina echoed, and the way she said it carried more weight than two words had any right to carry. She patted my cheek, her palm warm against my skin. “Go find your fairy, then. But the offer stands. Anytime. The twins ask about you constantly. It’s becoming a public health concern.”
She turned to leave, her wings brushing the doorframe as she passed, and paused at the threshold. “Oh, and Gabriel? Next time you want to know what my sister is thinking, maybe try asking her. Radical concept, I know. Communication. The veterans are still catching up.”
She disappeared down the hallway, her laughter trailing behind her, and I stood in Gabriella’s empty room with the diary open on the desk and the morning light warming the pages and the distinct feeling that I had just stepped into something deeper and warmer and more complicated than any battlefield I’d ever faced.
* * *
I found Gabriella in the stable, exactly where I should have looked first. Valen stood in his stall, his great white head lowered, his dark eyes half closed with the bliss of a military pegasus receiving the kind of attention usually reserved for ceremonial mounts, and Gabriella was beside him with a brush in one hand and a cloth in the other, working the silver of his mane.
Morning light fell through the high windows in dusty columns, catching the floating motes of hay and turning them gold, and the stable smelled the way it always smelled, of leather and bird and the clean musk of a pegasus who had decided, for once, to behave himself.
She heard me before she saw me. Her shoulders tensed, just slightly, the way they did when someone entered a space she’d been occupying alone, and then she turned, the brush still in her hand, and her eyes found mine across the stall.
For a heartbeat, neither of us spoke. The diary sat between us like a third presence in the room, its contents vibrating in the air with the energy of things that have been read and cannot be unread.
Gabriella’s cheeks were pink, and I couldn’t tell whether it was from the work or from something else, and the fact that I was even wondering meant I’d crossed some line I hadn’t known existed until this morning.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” She set the brush down on the rail. “You’re up.”
“I’ve been up. You left without saying goodbye.”
“You looked like you wanted some time to yourself. I didn’t want to disturb you.” She ran the cloth along Valen’s neck. “And I had chickens to feed. The world’s most demanding alarm clock.”
Valen snorted, as if to confirm that his grooming session took precedence over whatever human awkwardness was unfolding beside his stall.
I reached over the rail and scratched the spot behind his ears that made his eyelids droop, and he leaned into my hand with the gratitude of an animal who had been thoroughly spoiled and was not apologizing for it.
“Thank you,” I said. “For this. He looks … actually presentable. That’s new.”
She smiled, and the smile reached her eyes completely, and for a moment the diary and the dream and everything that had happened in the dark receded, and she was just Gabriella again, standing in a stable with hay in her hair and a brush in her hand, doing something kind because kindness was her default setting.
“He deserved it. He’s been very patient with all of us. Especially you.”
I smiled and decided to tell her where I was going. “I’m going out for a bit,” I said. “With Angelina. There’s someone in the village I’d like to meet. About … the nightmares. Someone who might know a healer who could help.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.”
She held my gaze for a beat longer than the conversation required, and then nodded, and went back to brushing Valen’s mane. “Be safe,” she said quietly. “Both of you.”
I left her there with Valen and the morning light and the peace of the stable, and found Angelina waiting on the porch with her wings folded and a basket on her arm. She smiled when she saw me, and fell into step beside me as we took the path toward the village center.
The walk took us through the heart of Oakwind, past the square, past the playground, past the skybird nest, past the tavern where the same older man nodded to me from the porch and this time raised his cup in a gesture that might have been respect or might have been simple morning cheerfulness.
Everywhere we went, heads turned and voices called out.
The Queen’s Falcon. The war hero. The man who shot an arrow through a rebel officer’s eye at three hundred yards, which was still not true but had apparently cemented itself so firmly in local mythology that correcting it would have been like trying to unring a bell.
I nodded. I smiled where smiling seemed required.
I accepted handshakes and shoulder clasps and the weighted silence of older men who looked at me and saw the sons they’d lost, and through it all Angelina walked beside me with her basket on her arm and her wings folded neatly behind her and a pride in her eyes that she made no attempt to hide.
“They’re proud of you,” she said as we passed the square. “All of them. Not just for fighting. For coming back. For being the one who made it.”
“I didn’t make it because I was better than anyone else.”