Chapter 1 #4
Aurelia opened the door herself. She was dressed simply, a fitted robe in deep grey, loosely belted, her golden hair down and slightly unfinished, like she’d been up for an hour already but hadn’t yet decided to be the Queen.
She looked younger this way, and somehow more herself.
The room behind her was a private sitting room, small, firelit, with none of the scale that the rest of the palace used to keep you aware of your own smallness. She stood back and let me in.
“You found it,” she said.
“Your servant was efficient.”
She almost smiled. “Sit. I won’t keep you long.”
She didn’t sit herself. She crossed to a small table near the fire where something rested on a folded cloth, and she picked it up carefully.
When she turned and held it out, I saw it was a small flat disc of pale metal, worn smooth at the edges, hung on a simple cord.
Not a medal. Not a crown insignia. It was engraved on one side with what looked like a compass rose, and on the other with a single word I had to turn it toward the firelight to read. Faithful.
“That was my father’s,” she said. “He carried it through every military campaign he rode in before the crown became too heavy for him to ride at all. He gave it to me the year he died.” She paused.
“I’ve carried it every day since the war began.
I’ve held it in my hand during more decisions than I can count. ”
I looked at it. The metal was warm from where she’d been holding it.
“I’m not giving you a kingdom honor,” she said.
“You have enough of those and they don’t mean what they should mean.
This means that someone who has watched you from a distance for six years is grateful beyond what formal language can carry, and that she wanted you to have something true before you go. ”
I didn’t trust my voice for a moment. I closed my fingers around it. “Thank you,” I said.
She nodded, once, the way she had at the dinner, like that settled it. Then she crossed the room toward me, unhurried, and before I understood what she was doing, she reached up and placed both hands gently along the sides of my face. Her palms were warm. I held very still.
She pressed her lips to my forehead.
It wasn’t like anything I had a word for.
Not the way I’d imagined a queen touched a decorated soldier.
It lasted long enough to be deliberate. Long enough that I felt it move down through the back of my neck and into my chest and settle there.
Her breath was warm. The scent of her, heavenly and rosy, was close enough to pull at something underneath my ribs.
She stepped back and looked at me steadily. “Treasure it,” she said. “Not the disc. The knowing. You will always have a place in this palace and in my heart, Gabriel. That is not a court courtesy. It’s a fact.”
I nodded.
She looked at me for another moment, and I watched something move behind her eyes, something she considered and then set aside. Then she said, “I have one thing to ask you.”
“Ask it.”
“If I ever send for you,” she said, “I don’t know when. I don’t know why, I may not know myself yet. But if a message comes from me, no matter how many years have passed, I want you to come back.” She paused. “Will you do that?”
There wasn’t a version of me that said no to that.
“Yes,” I said.
She exhaled, like something had released in her. “Good,” she said. “Then go. Your pegasus is in the east stable and the sunrise will be worth seeing from the air.”
I left before I found a reason to stay.
* * *
When I came through the stable door, Valen turned his head and pressed his nose against my chest with affection. I stood there a moment with my forehead against his jaw and let the last hour settle.
Then I checked the girth, checked the wings for any overnight stiffness, and mounted.
We lifted off from the east terrace into air that tasted like cold water and open sky.
Below, Eden Isle spread out the way it always looked from above, white and golden and elegant, and I turned Valen in a slow arc and looked at it once.
The palace caught the first light. The gardens I’d walked through the night before.
The windows of a sitting room I’d been in an hour ago.
Then I turned us west, toward the outer islands, toward the thinner air and the quieter sky.
The wind at altitude was steady and cold and I didn’t fight it.
Valen knew the general direction the way he always knew things, before I did, through some combination of instinct and the bond that six years of shared survival builds between a man and an animal who’ve had no one else.
I settled into the saddle and let myself breathe properly for what felt like the first time in a week.
The disc was in my breast pocket. I could feel it against my chest through the cloth.
I thought about Angelina and her two daughters, last I’d seen either one they’d been teens and now they were young adults, which felt impossible, which felt like something the war had stolen without asking.
I thought about the farm. I thought about the sound of the place in early morning, the smell of bread and the particular creak of the third step.
The journey home had finally begun. I was twenty-six years old and the war was done and everyone I loved was still alive, which was more than most men my age could say. I didn’t have a medal for that. I didn’t need one.