Chapter 1 #2
Queen Aurelia arrived without fanfare, which surprised me.
No trumpets, no separate announcement. She simply walked out from the palace doors onto the raised platform at the head of the courtyard and the crowd responded immediately, a wave of sound that started at the back of the galleries and rolled forward.
She was tall, even from a distance, standing straight.
The crown she wore was smaller than the one in the official portraits, fine gold set with pale stones that caught the light without demanding it.
Her gown was white and gold, fitted through the waist and flowing from the hips, and her great dark blonde wings were half-extended behind her in a resting ceremonial spread that framed her like she had been placed there by a sculptor who had taken the assignment seriously.
When she began to speak, her voice carried.
She spoke about the war without flinching.
The years of it, the cost of it, the names of those who had not come back.
She named them not as statistics but as people, and the courtyard was quiet in a way that felt earned rather than imposed.
She spoke about what the kingdom owed them and what the living had a responsibility to build in their names.
I stood in the front row and kept my eyes forward and worked very hard at staying composed, which I managed, though it was closer than I would have liked.
Then my name was called. The royal herald had a voice built for exactly this kind of occasion, deep and carrying and pleased with itself.
He began reading from a scroll and did not appear to be in any rush.
Royal Pegasus Corps, Captain, youngest to achieve the rank in three generations.
Seven major engagements. Known throughout the Corps as the Queen’s Falcon after repeatedly carrying out missions thought impossible.
The crossing at Mirrath Sound, where my unit had held the bridge formation under fire for nine hours until reinforcements arrived.
The relief of Stonepoint Garrison. The final push in the northern campaign.
He mentioned a number of lives saved in terms that made it sound like I had done it on purpose and with great strategic elegance rather than out of desperation and stubbornness on mornings when nothing else was working.
I walked up the steps while he was still going and focused on the marble under my boots and kept my face neutral.
Queen Aurelia was waiting at the center of the platform.
She was more beautiful up close than any official portrait had done justice to.
Sapphire-blue eyes, clear and attentive.
There were fine lines at the corners that the portraits always smoothed away and that I found, unexpectedly, made her face more compelling rather than less.
She held the medal in both hands, a heavy thing on a white-and-gold ribbon, and when I stopped before her and lowered my head she leaned forward to settle it around my neck.
Her hands brushed my collar. Her perfume carried the scent of rare, sweet flowers, and it made me want to stay close to her and worship her.
“The kingdom is grateful for everything you gave,” she said quietly, in a register meant only for me. “And I am grateful you came back alive.”
I straightened and met her eyes. For a moment neither of us said anything. I had prepared something modest and appropriate to say in exactly this moment and it had disappeared entirely.
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” was what came out.
The corner of her mouth moved. She stepped back, and the crowd filled the silence with sound.
The herald raised his voice again. “By decree of Her Majesty Queen Aurelia, in recognition of distinguished service to the Crown, Captain Gabriel is awarded one hundred gold crowns and five hundred silver crowns.”
A palace servant approached carrying a richly embroidered leather pouch secured with a braided gold cord. It was not especially large, but I knew what that much coin weighed. I accepted it with another bow while the crowd applauded.
The money would help back home, and that should have made me happy.
Instead, I thought of Davan, Tam, and Renn. Men who had earned just as much and returned with nothing because they had not returned at all. Money could not be divided with ghosts.
I turned to face the galleries and caught a flash of gold in the royal party arranged to the left of the platform, a young woman standing slightly apart from the others.
It was Elara. The queen’s daughter. She was eighteen with her mother’s coloring and a directness in her gaze that had nothing polite about it.
She was watching me specifically, not the way people watch a ceremony but the way a person watches something they have decided they are interested in.
When she realized I had noticed, she didn’t look away.
She lifted her chin a fraction instead, and something in the set of her expression said she had been waiting to make that observation for some time.
I looked back to the crowd before I had time to think too much about it.
The formation came overhead all at once, a full squadron of Pegasus Corps riders in tight ceremonial spread, twelve pairs of wings moving in synchronized time, their shadow sweeping the courtyard in a long grey wave.
The bells followed, deep and resonant, rolling out from the capital’s towers one after another until the whole of Eden Isle was ringing with them, the sound carrying out over the bridges and the waterfalls and the flowering gardens into the open sky beyond.
Six years of war. Two words. It’s over.
The bells said it better than I could. I stood at the top of the steps with the medal heavy against my chest and the crowd calling out below me and the sky full of wings and noise, and let it be true for a moment, even if I wasn’t sure yet what to do with it.
* * *
Nobody warned me about private dinners with the Queen.
There was no protocol briefing, no veteran’s manual covering what to do when Her Majesty smiled at you like you were someone she actually wanted to know.
The ceremony was behind me, the applause and the medals and the speeches that made my skin itch, and I thought I was done.
I thought I’d shake a few hands, find a quiet corner, and survive the evening.
Then a palace attendant informed me that the Queen requested my company for dinner.
I followed him down corridors wide enough to land a pegasus in.
The room they brought me to was nothing like the throne hall.
It was small by palace standards, which still meant it could have swallowed my family’s entire farm, but the scale felt human.
A long table set for three, white candles burning low, the kind of windows that started at the floor and ended somewhere near heaven.
Beyond the glass, the clouds had gone amber with the dying light.
Then Queen Aurelia arrived, and I saw her once again.
She wore a gown the deep blue of evening sky, cut to follow the lines of her figure without apology, the neckline low enough that when she moved across the room I was very aware that I was a twenty-six-year-old man in a small candlelit room.
She was forty-one and looked like the word forty-one had never meant anything to anyone.
Her golden-blonde hair was loose tonight, falling past her shoulders in long waves, and her sapphire eyes caught the candlelight and held it.
Her wings were stunning, lustrous and golden, and when she reached out to take my hand in greeting, I noticed her grip was warm and unhurried.
“Gabriel … I’m glad you came.”
I managed something coherent. I think it involved the word honored. She smiled and let my hand go and moved to the far side of the table, and I watched the way the gown moved with her, the sway of her hips, and made a private decision to study the floor tiles.
Princess Elara arrived half a minute later and brought the room’s temperature up about ten degrees purely through energy.
At eighteen, she had inherited every physical gift her mother possessed and applied them with the unapologetic confidence of someone who had never once doubted she deserved to walk into a room.
Same golden hair, although a bit brighter, same sapphire eyes, though hers were brighter somehow, quicker to catch humor, quicker to land on you and stay there.
Her gown was pale gold, fitted at the waist, and she moved the way young women move when they know exactly how they look and have decided to enjoy it.
Her wings were also beautiful, thick and bright gold.
She stopped in front of me and stared for a moment with unguarded frankness.
“I expected someone… older.”
“I’m twenty-six.”
“I know.” She frowned. “Your reputation sounds older.”
“I’ll try to be less disappointing.”
“Oh, no.” She grinned. “This is much better. Legends are usually terrible company.”
We ate. The food was the kind of thing you forget about in wartime and remember the moment it’s in front of you again, roasted birds glazed with something sweet, bread still warm, wine the color of garnets.
Aurelia explained, between the bread and the birds, that she’d heard more about me than any single person had likely told me, dispatches, battlefield accounts, testimony from officers she trusted.
She said it without flattery. She said it the way you state a fact.
“The reports made you sound like a story someone invented.”
“Most of it was the pegasus,” I said with a wink.
Aurelia smiled. “The pegasus certainly helped. Though some of the officers had stopped using your rank altogether. They simply called you the Queen’s Falcon.”
Elara looked between us. “The Queen’s Falcon?”
“Apparently,” I said. “Nobody ever asked whether I liked it.”
“Did you?” Aurelia asked.
“Better than some of the other names I was called.”