Chapter 2
Flying home with Valen felt like unwinding something that had been wound too tight for too long.
Every mile put distance between the palace and me, between the medals and the speeches and the things I’d promised a queen I’d carry for the rest of my life.
The sky opened. The air thinned. I stopped thinking about what had been and started letting myself imagine what was waiting, which was a luxury I hadn’t earned in six years.
Valen knew the way. I didn’t have to direct him.
We’d spent six years learning each other’s habits to the point where direction was more conversation than command, and the conversation today was simple.
Home … keep going until the familiar things start appearing below us.
Three days of steady flight if the winds held.
Two if they favored us. I let him set the pace and settled into the saddle the way you settle into an old chair that remembers the shape of you.
By midday we were passing the first of the major agricultural islands, the golden wheat rustling in the wind, windmills turning slow in the high-altitude breeze.
I’d crossed this stretch a dozen times during the war on supply runs, but it looked different without military urgency driving every decision.
The disc Aurelia had given me rested in my breast pocket, heavier than something so small had any right to be. Every now and then I found myself touching it through the fabric of my tunic without thinking, as if reassuring myself none of it had been some elaborate dream.
I thought about the dearest woman in my life, Angelina.
Forty-five now, which felt strange. My own father had been a soldier, killed when I was young enough that I could barely remember his face, and my mother had died a few years later in a pegasus accident.
After that, Oakwind had raised me in the way small places sometimes raised children who had no one left.
I slept under different roofs, ate at different tables, and made myself useful wherever I could.
But Angelina had always been the sweetest to me.
A meal at her table became two, then nights spent there, then whole stretches when I barely seemed to leave.
As I got older, I started earning my place by helping her and her daughters around the farm.
There was always something that needed doing, and before long her farm had become the closest thing I had to a home.
When I’d left, Angelina had been thirty-nine and already carrying the farm largely on her own.
I remembered her at dawn in the kitchen, her hair tied back, her hands working dough while she hummed a melody.
I remembered how she looked when she was angry, which was rare, and how she looked when she was proud, which she tried to hide but never quite managed.
I remembered the set of her shoulders at the end of a day when the accounts weren’t adding up and the roof needed patching and someone had to decide which problem got solved first.
Six years of war with no man to help shoulder any of it. Six years of watching other farms fail and knowing hers couldn’t afford to. I wondered what that had cost her.
She’d written letters. I’d written back when I could, which wasn’t often enough.
Hers had been cheerful, deliberate things full of farm news and village gossip and the careful absence of anything that might make a soldier worry more than he already was.
I’d read between those lines. I’d been trained to.
And what I read between them was a woman holding the world together with both hands and pretending it wasn’t heavy.
Then there was her daughter Gabriella. She’d be nineteen now.
Nineteen, and still the only wingless angel in a village where women flew before they walked.
I remembered the day she was born, the midwife’s face when she turned the baby and saw the smooth unbroken skin of her back.
Not a feather, not a bud, no nothing. A birth so rare most people had only heard about it in stories their grandmothers told.
The village had been kind … at first. They’d brought food.
They’d offered prayers. They’d looked at her with the mixture of pity and fascination that people reserve for things they don’t understand and are secretly grateful aren’t happening to them.
The children had been less kind. I’d broken a boy’s nose when I was fourteen because he’d told Gabriella she was a mistake, that the angels had forgotten to give her wings because they’d forgotten she existed at all.
I’d started taking Gabriella flying on Valen when she was old enough to sit in front of me without falling.
She would grip the saddle horn with both hands and lean into the wind and laugh in a way I’d never heard her laugh on the ground.
For an hour or two she wasn’t the wingless angel.
She was just a child in the sky, and the sky didn’t care what your back looked like.
Those rides became our thing. Every few weeks when the weather was good and the chores were done, I’d lift her onto Valen and we’d go find a cloud to circle or a sunset to chase.
She never asked to go higher than was safe.
She never complained when we landed. She just sat very still for a moment afterward, as if she was trying to keep the feeling inside her a little longer.
I hoped the village had grown up while I was away. I hoped they’d learned to see past her back to the person living behind it. I hoped a lot of things I had no business hoping for after six years of absence.
And then there was Angelina’s oldest daughter, Sabrina.
She’d been sixteen when I left. Sixteen and already turning heads in a way that made the local boys forget how to form complete sentences.
She’d won a beauty pageant that spring, which was not a small thing in a place where the pageant was the closest thing we had to a royal spectacle.
I remembered the crown they’d made her, wildflowers and woven grass, and how she’d worn it to dinner for a week afterward because she thought it was funny to watch her mother try not to laugh.
I remembered how she’d tease me, how she’d wait until I was trying to concentrate on something and then say the one thing guaranteed to make me lose my train of thought entirely.
She’d had that gift. She’d probably still have it.
She’d be twenty-two now. Twenty-two, and if sixteen-year-old Sabrina had been trouble for the local boys, twenty-two-year-old Sabrina was probably the reason the local magistrate needed extra court days for broken hearts.
The thought made me smile despite myself.
She’d take one look at the scars across my back and find something clever to say about them.
She’d make it sound like an insult and mean it as affection, which was her particular dialect.
I’d missed six years of that. Six years of watching her grow into whatever magnificent angel she’d become.
Six years of ordinary life happening without me there to witness it.
That was the thing about war they don’t tell you in the recruitment speeches.
It doesn’t just take the years you give it.
It takes the years happening everywhere else, the birthdays and harvests and small stupid arguments that resolve themselves over breakfast, and it keeps those things for itself.
You get them back as stories. You never get them back as lived experience.
We passed another island, larger this time, a market hub with a proper landing field and a cluster of skybirds resting in the afternoon sun.
Three angels on skybirds detached from the field and rose to meet us, their wings beating in smooth unison, their mounts’ colorful plumage flashing white and blue in the sunlight.
They recognized the pegasus first, then me, and the recognition carried that charge it always did when it came from civilians rather than soldiers.
They flew alongside us for a while, close enough to talk without shouting, asking questions about the war, about Eden Isle, about the queen.
One of them, a woman with silver-streaked dark hair and the weathered skin of someone who’d spent her life in open sky, tossed me a small bundle of wildflowers she’d apparently been carrying for exactly this purpose.
“From my daughter,” she called over the wind. “She says thank you.”
I caught the flowers. They were already wilting slightly from the altitude. I tucked them into my saddlebag and thanked her, and she nodded like I’d done her a personal favor by surviving.
That was when I started noticing it. Not in Eden Isle, where ceremony and protocol had kept everything orderly and distant.
Here, in the outer islands, the absence was visible in a way that made my stomach turn.
The landing field below held maybe thirty skybirds.
The riders dismounting and tending to them were all women: angels, harpies, fairies and so on.
I couldn’t find a single man. I scanned the market square visible from our altitude.
Harpies bargaining at stalls. Angels loading carts and carrying children or baskets or tools.
The occasional older man, gray-haired and moving slowly.
Almost no one my age. Almost no one between twenty and forty.
The war had done that. I’d known it in the abstract.
I’d sat in briefings where the casualty numbers were read aloud and nobody made eye contact afterward.
But knowing it and seeing it were different things.
Seeing it meant understanding that the empty chairs at dinner tables weren’t just empty.
They were never going to be filled again.