Chapter 10 #3
I held her. One arm around her waist, my other hand on the back of her head, fingers in her hair, holding her against me while the worst of the shaking worked its way through her system.
Her wings, freed from the bonds, hung limp and damaged, the feathers crushed and disarrayed, and the sight of them sent a fresh wave of cold through my chest.
“I’ve got you,” I said, and it was the only thing that mattered. “I’ve got you. You’re safe. Breathe.”
She breathed. Ragged, uneven pulls that gradually settled into something resembling rhythm.
I checked her as best I could without letting go, the bruise on her cheek, the raw marks on her wrists from the cord, the tear in her dress, which revealed a scrape along her shoulder but nothing worse.
No broken bones that I could find. No blood except what had dried at the corner of her mouth where the gag had cut her lip.
“They wanted you,” she whispered against my chest. “That’s all they talked about. Your seed. They thought… they thought if they had me, you’d come, and then they could…” She shuddered, and I held her tighter.
“I know,” I said. “It’s over. They’re done.”
I helped her to her feet. Her legs were unsteady, and she leaned against me, her weight trusting and complete. We walked through the camp together, past the fallen, past the blood on the rock, and I felt her flinch each time we passed a body but she didn’t look away. Some lessons needed witnessing.
The leader was where I’d expected to find her: near the largest tent, trying to look like someone who had been an observer rather than a participant.
A harpy, older than the others, her feathers streaked with gray, her eyes doing the rapid calculation of someone reassessing their life choices with the urgency of a mathematician whose equation has just produced a negative result.
I showed her the camp. The bodies. The blood. The geometry of what happened when you picked a fight with the wrong man and lost.
“If you ever touch my family again,” I said, my voice quiet, measured, the way I’d spoken to officers before executions, “you will end up like them. The way that makes other people remember why it was a bad idea.”
She nodded. Fast, frantic nods, her feathers ruffling with the motion. “I’m sorry. We just wanted… you. The stories, they said… I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I swear it. On my wings, I swear.”
“You got me,” I said. “Congratulations. You succeeded beyond your wildest expectations. Now burn your ship and go home, and if I ever see your face within a day’s flight of Oakwind, I will remove it from your skull and mail it to your mother in a box labeled ‘Poor Life Choices.’”
I set fire to the skyboat myself. Dry canvas, pitch-sealed wood, it caught quickly, the flames climbing the mast with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting for an excuse.
The harpy watched it burn with the expression of a woman watching six months’ profit turn to ash, and then she was gone, wings beating hard, carrying her into the dark toward whatever island offered the least likelihood of running into me again.
I turned back to Sabrina, who stood watching the fire with an expression that had moved past shock into something harder to read, something that lived in the territory between relief and the specific exhaustion that follows trauma.
“Sora,” she said suddenly, her hand gripping my arm. “Gabriel, they took Sora. They said they’d… they’d kill her if I screamed.”
The cold in my chest, which had been receding, sharpened again. I scanned the camp’s perimeter, the rock face, and the scattered gear. “Where would they have kept her?”
Sabrina pulled away from me. She crossed the camp, past the burning skyboat, toward a low outcropping of rock where the canvas of one of the smaller tents had been draped over something that didn’t belong.
I followed, sword still in hand, and when she pulled the canvas aside I saw the skybird.
Sora, Sabrina’s mount, bound with the same brutal efficiency they’d used on her rider.
Rope wound around her legs, her wings pinioned against her body, a muzzle strapped across her beak.
The bird’s eyes were wide, rolling with fear, her white and pale-blue plumage matted and dirty where she’d thrashed against the restraints.
“God,” Sabrina breathed, and dropped to her knees beside the bird. “Sora. Oh, Sora, I’m here, I’m so sorry, I’m here—”
I cut the restraints. The knife made short work of the rope, and as each section fell away the bird’s body unwound from its forced stillness, her wings half-extending, her legs kicking free.
The muzzle came off last, and Sora made a sound I’d never heard from a skybird before, a low, keening cry that was closer to a sob than a vocalization.
Sabrina wrapped her arms around the bird’s neck and pressed her face into the feathers.
Sora’s head came around, her beak finding Sabrina’s hair, and she made a series of soft, clicking sounds that I recognized as the skybird equivalent of comfort.
They stayed like that for a long moment, girl and bird, and I stood guard with my sword and tried very hard not to think about what would have happened if I’d been slower, if the messenger had been delayed, if any of the thousand variables that made up a rescue had fallen the wrong way.
Sabrina pulled back, wiping her face with the back of her hand, and looked at the bird with an expression that was pure, fierce love.
“She’s bruised. Her wing joints are swollen.
They tied her too tight.” Her hand moved to the bird’s left wing, tracing the edge where the feathers had been bent and broken.
“She can fly, but not with me on top. I’ll ride with you. ”
I nodded. I half-carried Sabrina to Valen and got her seated in front of me, her body leaning back against my chest, her wings folded awkwardly behind her, still damaged from the bonds.
Then we were lifting, Valen’s wings driving us upward, and I turned us toward Oakwind without looking back at the burning boat or the bodies or the island that had, for approximately twenty minutes, been the most dangerous place in the sky.
Sabrina’s hand found mine where it held the reins. Her fingers were cold, and they shook, but they held on, and that was enough.
* * *
The farmhouse windows glowed against the dark like something from a childhood story, the kind where the light means safety and the dark means everything else.
Valen landed in the yard with the careful gentleness of a mount who understood that his passenger had been through enough excitement for one evening, his hooves touching down on packed earth with a softness that felt deliberate.
Then Sora landed and headed for her stall.
I dismounted first, then lifted Sabrina down, her body light against my chest, her arms around my neck with the trust of someone who had decided that gravity was my problem now and she was done worrying about it.
Her dress was torn, her wings hung limp and damaged, and the bruise on her cheek had darkened to a purple that made my jaw tighten every time I looked at it.
The door opened before we reached it. Angelina stood in the frame, one hand on the latch, her face doing that thing where hope and fear occupied the same territory and neither was winning. Behind her, Gabriella, her eyes huge, one hand pressed to her mouth.
They saw Sabrina. The torn dress, the bruise, the way she leaned against me. Angelina made a sound. Small, wounded, the noise a mother makes when her child returns broken and the part of her that has spent years preparing for this moment discovers that preparation was worthless.
Then she was moving, her wings extending, and she crossed the yard and gathered Sabrina into her arms with a fierceness that lifted her slightly off the ground. Sabrina buried her face in Angelina’s shoulder, and the sound she made was the one she’d been holding back since the skyboat.
Gabriella joined them, wrapping her arms around Sabrin, her face pressed against Sabrina’s uninjured cheek, and the three of them stood in the yard holding each other while I stood beside them with blood on my boots and the hollow feeling of a man who had done what needed doing and was now discovering that the doing had cost something he couldn’t name.
* * *
Inside, by the hearth, with the door locked and the lamps lit and Angelina’s strongest tea steaming in everyone’s hands whether they wanted it or not, Sabrina told them what happened.
Her voice was steadier than it had any right to be.
She sat on the couch with a blanket around her shoulders, Angelina on one side, Gabriella on the other, and she laid it out the way you lay out something terrible that has been survived: fact by fact, without embellishment, because the truth was bad enough without decoration.
“The endorsement was fake. They knew Gabriel would come if they took me.” She took a sip of tea, her hand shaking slightly.
“They wanted him. His… seed. They’d heard the stories, about how few men survived the war, about how…
valuable certain bloodlines had become. They thought if they had me, he’d come alone, and then they could…
” She trailed off, glanced at me. “You saw the rest.”
I nodded. “They won’t be trying again.”
Angelina looked at me, her hazel eyes moving over the blood on my sleeves, the tear in my shirt where something had caught me, the set of my shoulders that she recognized from the years when letters arrived with military seals and news that required sitting down before reading.
Her eyes filled, and she didn’t try to hide it.
“I always knew,” she said. “I always knew you would protect them. No matter what it cost. No matter how far you had to go.” She reached across the couch, her hand finding mine, and squeezed. “I am so proud of you, Gabriel. So fiercely, completely proud.”