Chapter 10
Iwoke up, got dressed and headed downstairs.
Angelina and the girls were already awake.
Angelina moved between the stove and table.
Sabrina sat with her mug between her palms, her light blonde hair loose around her shoulders, and when I walked in she looked at me with an expression that contained sixty percent “I’m fine” and forty percent “we are absolutely not fine, but I am handling it with dignity, so please don’t mention the dignity. ”
We ate. The conversation orbited the day’s work. Chickens, shearing the new ewes before the heat worsened, buying supplies, and repairing the old farm wagon.
“North pasture first,” Angelina said, pushing her chair back. “The new ewes are overdue for shearing. If we leave it much longer they’ll cook in this weather.”
The work was the kind of physical that left no room for thinking.
The new ewes had never been shorn before, which meant they regarded the entire process as a personal betrayal.
My job was to catch them and hold them steady while Angelina worked the heavy hand shears through the thick fleece.
Gabriella gathered each fleece into neat rolls while Sabrina tied them into sacks for market.
The first ewe tried to escape between my legs. The second attempted to headbutt me with surprising conviction. By the fourth I had accepted that sheep possessed a level of stubbornness usually reserved for politicians and exceptionally confident geese.
By mid-morning my forearms burned from wrestling woolly indignation, and sweat soaked through my shirt.
Angelina handed me the water jug without looking up from the sheep she was finishing, and I drank deeply before passing it back.
For a few minutes the world felt wonderfully ordinary, just family work beneath a summer sun, as though lakes and confessions and impossible love belonged to somebody else’s life.
A messenger arrived around noon. I heard the wingbeats first. She was a harpy who landed in the yard with the ease of a professional courier, her feathers gleaming in the midday light, her taloned feet settling into the packed earth without a sound.
“Message for Sabrina,” she called, reaching into the leather satchel at her hip. Her voice carried the clipped tone of someone who charged by the mile and had several more stops to make. “From SkyBeauty Trade Collective. Endorsement offer. They’ve been trying to reach her for weeks.”
I called for her, and Sabrina emerged from the house, wiping her hands on her apron, her wings half-extended in curiosity. The harpy handed her a sealed letter on heavy paper, the wax seal pressed with what looked like a merchant’s mark, something ornate involving wings and a scale.
“Luxury line,” the harpy explained. “Scarves, perfumes, that sort of thing. They want your face. Apparently you won some pageants.”
“Several,” Sabrina said, taking the letter. “With trophies.”
“The client was specific. Blonde angel, former pageant winner, local celebrity, et cetera. The usual vanity project.” The harpy shrugged, her feathers rustling. “They’re offering good money. Very good.”
Sabrina broke the seal. I watched her face as she read, the way her expression changed from curiosity to surprise to something that looked dangerously close to validation.
Her eyes moved down the page, her lips parting slightly, and when she looked up her smile had the brightness of someone who had just been handed exactly what they needed on a very difficult morning.
“They want me,” she said, and the way she said it carried more weight than two words should. “For their spring collection. The face of it. They’re offering…” She named a sum that made Angelina’s eyebrows lift two inches. “For two days’ work. Two days.”
Angelina wiped her hands on her apron. “That’s… substantial.”
“It’s obscene,” Sabrina said happily. She looked at the letter again, her fingers tracing the embossed letterhead. “They want to meet today. On an island that’s just… what, an hour by skybird? Less if the winds are with me.”
I set down the post I’d been holding. “Today? That’s…”
“Perfect,” Sabrina finished. She folded the letter, tucked it into her pocket.
The war veteran in me, the part that had spent six years learning to trust the itch between his shoulder blades, was making a sound that approximated a very quiet, very persistent alarm bell.
Something about the timing. Something about the specificity.
Something about the way the offer was a bit too good to be true.
“Maybe I should come with you,” I said.
Sabrina gave me a hug. “Don’t worry. I’ve done this before.”
Sabrina was already moving toward the stable where her skybird, Sora, was kept. “I’ll take notes,” she called over her shoulder. “For when they inevitably want you too. The Queen’s Falcon on a perfume bottle.”
I watched her go. Sabrina was right: she was an adult, she had been navigating the world without me for six years, and the fact that I had confessed to sleeping with her sister yesterday did not suddenly make me responsible for her safety in a way I hadn’t been before.
It didn’t matter. The stone stayed.
Sabrina emerged from the stable on her skybird, the mount’s wings beating steady.
She adjusted her position in the saddle, checked the straps and looked down at us with a smile that was equal parts excitement and something harder to read.
Then she was lifting, her skybird’s wings driving them upward, and I watched her climb into the blue until she was a pale speck against the vastness, and then she was gone, heading northeast toward whatever waited for her there.
I went back to the sheep. The stone in my chest stayed where it was, small and cold and entirely unwelcome, and for the rest of the afternoon I worked beside Angelina.
* * *
The rest of the afternoon disappeared into repairing the farm wagon.
One wheel had been wobbling for weeks, and Angelina refused to trust it with another trip to market.
I lifted the axle while she knocked the old wheel free with a mallet, then together we fitted the repaired one and drove the iron pin back through the hub.
By the time the wagon stood level again my shoulders ached and my shirt clung to my back with sweat.
Angelina wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, her wings drooping slightly with fatigue. “She’ll be fine,” she said again. “Sabrina can talk her way through anything. It’s her primary talent. Right after looking beautiful while doing absolutely nothing useful.”
I was about to agree, or pretend to agree, which amounted to the same thing at this point, when I heard the wingbeats, wrong rhythm, too fast, too frantic, the syncopated hammer of a rider pushing a mount past its comfortable pace.
I turned toward the sound before my brain had fully processed it, the veteran’s instinct activating on muscle memory, and saw the skybird coming in low over the eastern tree line, its wings beating hard, its rider bent low over its neck in the posture of someone who had been flying flat-out for longer than the bird wanted to tolerate.
He landed in the yard the way messengers land when the news can’t wait for dignity.
The bird’s hooves skidded on packed earth, its chest heaving, foam flecking its muzzle.
The rider was young, local, someone I vaguely recognized from a distant village.
His face was the color of fresh parchment, and he was breathing like he’d raced.
“Gabriel,” he said. “It’s Sabrina. They took her.”
The yard went very quiet.
“Who took her?”
“Harpies. Merchant group, or that’s what they claimed.
It was a trap.” The messenger swallowed, his throat working.
“They overpowered her, bound her wings. Tied her wrists. They let one of the traders go. Told her to carry the message back. She flew to the village and found me. They want you… just you. Come alone, if you want her back unharmed. They said if anyone else comes, or if you bring authorities, they’ll… ” He trailed off.
“They’ll what.”
“Hurt her,” he said.
They’d used her as bait.
Behind me, I heard Angelina’s breath catch.
I didn’t turn. I didn’t need to. I could feel the color draining from her face, could picture the exact shade of white it would be, the way her hands would have gone still at her sides, the stillness of a mother whose child has just been named in a sentence containing the word “trap.”
Gabriella stepped out of the house. She must have heard the wingbeats, the raised voices.
She stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and the expression on her face was the one I’d seen on the faces of civilians during the war, the moment they realized the fighting had reached their doorstep and the rules had changed.
“How many,” I said.
“Six, maybe seven. Mix of harpies and… others. The trader mentioned dwarves, armed, axes, short blades. They had a covered skyboat. Looked military-grade, retrofitted for cargo.”
I had to hurry, not giving them enough time to get comfortable. Not enough time for them to do anything irreversible, if their target was really me and Sabrina was just the bait.
My mind did what it always did when the situation went from complicated to simple.
It cooled. The farm, the sheep, the wagon, the careful dance of loving two women who had been part of my life since childhood, all of it receded, replaced by the clean, cold architecture of a problem that could be solved with violence. He gave me the exact location.
I turned toward the house. Angelina’s hand caught my arm, her fingers digging in with a strength that surprised me.
“Bring her home,” she said. Her voice was low, fierce, wet at the edges. “Whatever it takes. Bring my daughter home.”
I nodded. That was all the conversation the moment required.