Chapter 12 #2
I unsaddled both mounts. The routine was muscle memory: unbuckle, lift, set the saddle on dry ground, remove the bit, check the girth for any irritation.
Valen nosed my shoulder with the affection of a pegasus who had spent six years waiting for me to stop getting shot at long enough to scratch behind his ears properly, and Sora watched with the calm patience of a skybird who considered most human activities mildly entertaining but ultimately superfluous.
“They’ll stay close?” Gabriella asked, her hand resting on Valen’s flank.
“Valen won’t go far. Sora might explore, but she’ll come back. They know the drill.” I rubbed Valen’s forehead where the white coat met the darker skin around his eyes. “Besides, the grass is good. He’s not going anywhere that involves leaving behind free food.”
We left the saddles under the shade of an oak at the meadow’s edge and walked into the forest. The trees closed around us immediately, the canopy so thick that the light came through in dappled patches that moved across the forest floor as the branches swayed.
A river ran through the center, narrow and quick over smooth stones, the water clear enough to see the pale undersides of the rocks six inches down.
Sabrina walked ahead, her wings folded tight against her back. Every few steps she would bend to examine a flower, or a mushroom, or a stone, and the curiosity in her was so pure and unguarded that I found myself watching her more than the forest.
Gabriella walked beside me, her hand finding mine occasionally, her fingers interlacing with mine for a few steps before letting go to point at something: a bird with plumage the color of wet slate, a fallen log thick with pale green moss, the way the river bent around a boulder large enough to sit three people comfortably.
Without wings, she moved through the forest with the grounded surefootedness of someone who had spent a lifetime learning to navigate a world built for fliers, and there was a grace to it that made my chest tight in a way I hadn’t expected.
We picked flowers. Wild things that grew along the riverbank, white and yellow and a pale blue that matched the clear patches of sky visible through the canopy.
Sabrina gathered them with both hands until her arms were full, and when we reached a small clearing where the river widened into a pool shallow enough to see the sandy bottom, she dropped to her knees and began weaving them into crowns.
The picnic was the kind of meal that exists primarily in paintings commissioned by people who have never actually been hungry: bread still warm from being wrapped in cloth, apples cool and crisp, cheese that broke into satisfying chunks with a texture that demanded chewing and a flavor that made silence the appropriate response.
We sat on the blanket Angelina had packed, our legs touching, the river murmuring beside us, and Sabrina handed Gabriella the first flower crown with a formality that made both of them laugh.
“For the wingless wonder,” Sabrina said, settling it on her sister’s dark blonde hair. “Who somehow manages to be the most grounded person in a family of people who can literally fly.”
Gabriella’s smile reached her eyes in a way I hadn’t seen often enough.
She took the second crown from Sabrina’s hands and placed it on my head with a gravity that suggested she was bestowing a military honor rather than a wreath of forest weeds.
“For the man who carries heavy things and doesn’t complain about it. Much.”
I took the last crown and turned to Sabrina.
Her wings were half-extended in the relaxed posture of someone enjoying shade and good food, and when I set the flowers on her head I was careful to avoid the tender edges.
Her eyes held mine, and the look in them was warm and steady and entirely without the performative confidence she usually wore in public.
“You look ridiculous,” I told her.
“So do you,” she said, and reached across to brush a bread crumb from my shirt with fingers that lingered just long enough to make the point.
They touched me. Both of them, in the small, casual ways that accumulate into something larger than the sum of their parts.
Gabriella’s shoulder against mine when she reached for an apple.
Sabrina’s hand resting on my thigh while she told a story about a pageant judge who had been so distracted by her wings that he’d awarded first place to the wrong contestant.
Neither of them competed. Neither of them pulled back when the other’s hand was already there.
They found a rhythm, the three of us, that felt both new and like something we’d been practicing for years without knowing it.
The antelope appeared near the treeline as the afternoon light began to slant. A young buck, his coat the reddish-brown that blended with the forest floor until he moved, and then he was unmistakable: alert, tense, one foreleg raised as he tested the air for whatever had caught his attention.
I strung the bow quietly. The motion was so deeply ingrained that my body completed it before my brain had fully registered the decision, the string settling against my fingers with the familiar pressure that had preceded six years of killing.
I drew, held, released. The arrow took him through the heart, clean and quick, and he folded where he stood without a sound.
The sisters were quiet. I felt their eyes on me, and when I looked over Gabriella’s expression was complicated: admiration, and beneath that the quiet acknowledgment of what I had been during the years I was gone.
Sabrina’s was simpler. She looked at the bow, at the fallen animal, at me, and the appreciation in her eyes was the kind that women reserve for men who can provide in ways that predate currency.
“Still got it,” she said.
“Some things you don’t lose,” I replied.
I field-dressed the buck where he fell. The knife made short work of it, the same movements I’d used a hundred times during the war when fresh meat meant the difference between functioning and collapsing, and the sisters watched.
When I was done, we wrapped the usable portions in cloth and carried them higher, following the river upstream toward the sound of falling water.
The ledge appeared through the trees. A flat outcropping of pale stone wide enough for a campfire and three people lying side by side, and above it a waterfall that spilled from a low-hanging cloud in a white column that hit the lake below with a sound like constant, gentle thunder.
The view looked out over the forest we’d walked through, the trees rolling away in green waves until they met the sky, and beyond that the endless blue of the Great Sky stretching to a horizon so distant it might have been the edge of the world.
“We’re staying here,” I said, and neither girl argued.
We built the fire as the light began to go gold.
Gabriella gathered dry wood from beneath the trees while Sabrina cleared a circle of stones.
I built the fire the way I’d built a thousand campfires during the war: small, controlled, with enough air beneath to catch and enough fuel above to sustain.
The sisters picked vegetables from a patch of wild growth near the lake’s edge, wild onions, edible tubers and something green and leafy that Gabriella identified with the confidence of someone who had spent six years keeping a farm running, and we cooked the meat in the pot Angelina had put in the basket.
The stew was better than it had any right to be.
We ate from the same pot, passing it between us, our legs touching on the blanket spread across the stone, and as the sunset painted the floating islands in the distance gold and then pink and then a deep purple that made the clouds look like they were on fire, none of us spoke for a long time.
The fire burned lower. Sabrina spoke first, her voice quiet but steady, carrying none of the performative brightness she usually wrapped around difficult topics.
“When they bound my wings,” she said, staring into the flames, “I couldn’t move them.
At all. It was like… having your arms tied behind your back, but worse, because wings are…
they’re part of you in a way arms aren’t.
They’re connected to everything. Your balance, your sense of yourself, the way you orient in space.
” She picked up a twig and drew a line in the dirt beside the fire.
“I kept thinking: he’s not coming. He can’t possibly come.
Why would he? It’s a trap, they want him specifically, any sane person would send the authorities or just…
not come. And then I heard the fighting, and I knew it was you before I saw you.
The way you move. The sound of it. Even through canvas I could tell. ”
I poked at the fire with a stick of my own.
“The moment the messenger said your name, everything else disappeared. The farm, the war, whatever complicated thing was happening between us and Gabriella… it all just… went. I became the soldier again. The one who solves problems with violence because violence is what I am good at.” I looked at her across the flames.
“I would have burned that entire island if that was what it took. Without hesitation.”
Gabriella had been quiet, her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped around them, and when she spoke her voice was so soft I almost missed it beneath the waterfall’s constant murmur.