Chapter 2 #3
I looked at the dark windows of the upstairs rooms. My heart ached in a way that had nothing to do with physical injury and everything to do with the hollow feeling of wanting something so badly you’re afraid of what happens when you finally get it.
“Let them sleep,” I said. “Tomorrow’s soon enough.”
She nodded, understanding without my having to explain. That was Angelina. She’d always been able to read the things I didn’t say better than the things I did.
“The last time I saw them,” I said quietly, “Gabriella was thirteen. Standing on the edge of being something other than a child and not quite knowing what. Sabrina was sixteen and wearing a crown made of wildflowers and acting like it was solid gold.”
“Gabriella’s nineteen now,” Angelina said. “Still can’t fly. Still the strongest person in this house. Sabrina’s twenty-two and trouble in a dress, which is not new information.”
I smiled. “I figured … I have to see them, just for a minute.”
“Come on.” She took my hand. Her fingers were warm and callused.
They were exactly the right size to fit against mine the way they had when I was small and she was leading me somewhere she thought I should see.
“Quietly. The third step still creaks. Avoid it like your life depends on it, because if you wake Sabrina at this hour she will make sure you regret every life choice that led to this moment.”
The farmhouse interior smelled the way it always had.
Bread and beeswax and the faint mustiness of old stone that no amount of cleaning ever quite conquered.
The furniture was the same. The rug in the hallway was thinner.
The painting of the northern islands that had hung by the stairs since before I was born had a new crack in the frame, small changes.
The kind that happens when you live in a place long enough to stop noticing it’s changing around you.
Angelina led me up the stairs carefully, knowing exactly which boards would betray us. We avoided the third step. The hallway at the top was dark except for the thin slice of moonlight coming through the window at the far end.
Sabrina’s door was slightly ajar. Angelina pushed it open another inch with one finger and nodded for me to go in.
She was asleep on her side, one arm curled under the pillow, her light blonde hair spread across the white linen in a way that would have made painters reconsider their life’s work.
The sheet had slipped low enough to reveal the curve of her shoulder and the beginning of what I could tell, even in the dim light, was the kind of figure that had probably rewritten the local definition of trouble sometime in the last six years.
Her wings were folded loosely against her back, the feathers thick, light blonde and silky.
Her face was peaceful in a way I rarely remembered seeing when she was awake.
Sabrina had always been moving, always talking, always in motion.
Asleep, she looked like someone had pressed pause on a force of nature.
I bent down and kissed her forehead. Her skin was warm. She stirred slightly, murmured something unintelligible, and settled again without waking.
I backed out of the room feeling like I’d stolen something precious and necessary.
Gabriella’s room was across the hall. Her door was closed. Angelina opened it carefully, and we stepped inside together.
She was smaller than Sabrina, curled tight under her blanket like she was conserving heat even in summer.
Her shoulder-length dark blonde hair was messy against the pillow, and one hand was fisted in the sheet the way she’d always slept, even as a child, like she was afraid something might try to take the blanket if she didn’t hold on.
The most striking thing, the thing that hit me harder than I was prepared for, was the smooth unbroken line of her back where her wings should have been.
In the moonlight it looked almost deliberate, like a sculptor had decided that perfection sometimes meant knowing what to leave out.
I bent down and kissed her forehead. She didn’t stir. She slept the way a young woman slept, completely, trustingly, as if the world had never given her a reason to do otherwise.
We closed her door behind us. Angelina was watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite read in the dark hallway.
“They’re here,” she said quietly. “They’re safe. They’re whole. Everything else is details.”
I nodded. She was right. She usually was.
We stood in the hallway for a moment longer, listening to the quiet breathing of the house, and I thought: this is what I fought for. Not the medals, not the queen’s gratitude, but this specific quiet. This specific peace. It was enough. It was more than enough.
* * *
The porch had always been the place where the real conversations happened.
The kitchen was for logistics. The living room was for company.
But the porch, with its weathered boards and its view of the orchard and the way the night air carried the smell of apple blossoms from the eastern field, was where Angelina had always taken me when the subject required more honesty than daylight usually allowed.
She brought two cups of the cider she’d mentioned, the stuff she made every summer.
We sat on the rocking chairs, shoulder to shoulder, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her through the thin fabric of her robe.
The night was perfect in the way only summer nights at altitude can be, the air just cool enough to justify the cider, the stars sharp and close above the orchard trees.
“Tell me,” I said.
So she told me. The war years on the farm had been what you’d expect if you were pessimistic and twice what you’d expect if you were optimistic, which was Angelina’s way of saying they’d been brutal but survivable.
The first year was the hardest. Supply chains fractured.
Prices for everything doubled then tripled.
“We lost the south field,” she said, staring out at the dark where the field in question would be.
“Couldn’t keep it irrigated with just the three of us.
Gabriella was too small to lift the buckets.
Sabrina tried, God love her, but she’s built for charming people into compliance, not for hauling water uphill in summer heat.
” She took a sip of cider. “So we let it go fallow. Focused on the orchard and the kitchen garden and the herb plots. Those kept us fed. The orchard kept us in cider and preserves to trade. We managed.”
She made it sound simple. I knew better.
Managing meant sixteen-hour days. Managing meant learning to repair tools she’d never touched before because there was no one else to do it.
Managing meant standing in the village square once a month when the casualty lists were posted and reading every name twice, slowly, making absolutely certain mine wasn’t among them, and then going home and making dinner like nothing had happened.
“Gabriella surprised everyone,” she said, and I heard the pride in her voice, the warm note that emerged whenever she talked about her daughters exceeding expectations.
“By fifteen she was running the accounts better than I could. Numbers make sense to her in a way they never did to me. She has this … this quiet talent. She’ll sit with the ledgers for hours, and when she’s done, things balance that had no business balancing.
” She paused. “The village stopped seeing the wings thing around the time she turned seventeen. Or they stopped letting her see them see it, which is almost as good. And Sabrina put her foot down. She’d had enough of the comments and made sure people knew it. ”
I smiled into my cider. That sounded like Gabriella. Find the thing you’re good at. Master it so completely that people forget to look for the thing you’re missing.
“Sabrina,” Angelina continued, “decided that if the men were all off getting themselves killed, someone needed to keep the village from collapsing into collective despair, and apparently that someone was her.” She shook her head.
“She organized festivals. Pageants. Harvest celebrations. Found reasons for people to gather and remember that joy was still a thing that existed.”
“That’s our Sabrina.”
“Twenty-two years old and running this island’s social calendar like she’s been doing it since birth, which she practically has.
” Angelina sighed, but it was the sigh of someone who was secretly enormously proud.
“She helped keep us solvent, too. Found markets for the preserves I was making. Convinced the merchant captain who stops here monthly that our cider was worth twice what he’d been paying.
The man agreed because disagreeing with Sabrina feels like kicking a puppy, if the puppy could destroy your reputation with a single well-placed comment at the next port. ”
I laughed. The sound felt strange in my throat, like a muscle I hadn’t used in years.
“Your turn,” she said quietly, giving me the same space I’d given her.
So I told her the things I could say. I told her about the northern campaign, the cold, the way pegasi handle ice wind better than any mount has a right to.
I told her about the supply runs, the long hours in the saddle, the exhaustion that comes from flying so long your body forgets it’s supposed to be tired and just keeps going on momentum.
I told her about the bond with Valen, how it deepened in ways I hadn’t known were possible, how there were moments when I wasn’t sure where I ended and he began.
I told her about carrying thoughts of home, the specific image of this porch, this step, this view of the orchard, and how that image had gotten me through nights when nothing else would have.