Chapter 2 #4
I did not tell her about the crossing at Mirrath.
I did not tell her about Stonepoint, about the nine hours on that bridge formation, about the sounds men make when they’re dying and trying not to let anyone hear it.
I did not tell her about the northern push, about the frozen bodies we pulled from the snow, about the hollow feeling of surviving an engagement that killed half the riders who went into it.
I didn’t tell her about the fighting, how many men I’d slain with my sword, and how many I’d shot with my bow.
Those stories stayed where they belonged, in the locked room inside me where I put things that had no business coming out on a summer night on Angelina’s porch.
She listened the way she always had, completely, without interruption, her eyes on my face and her hands quiet in her lap. When I finished, she was silent for a long moment, studying the cider in her cup like it might have answers written on the surface.
Then she reached out and touched my forearm, just above the wrist, where a thin white scar ran from elbow to wrist in a line that medical training had closed neatly but time had turned into something permanent.
Her fingers were warm. She traced the scar gently, following its path with her thumb, not asking how I got it.
She didn’t need to. The story was written there in the tissue.
“There are more,” she said.
I nodded.
She moved her hand to my shoulder, where the fabric of my shirt had slipped enough to reveal the edge of what I knew was visible there, the mottled pattern of old scar tissue that aerial combat leaves on a rider’s back. Her fingers brushed the edge of it, light, questioning.
“I won’t ask,” she said quietly. “Not tonight. Not until you’re ready. But when you are …” She paused, choosing the words with care. “When you are, that door opens both ways. You understand?”
I understood. She was offering what she’d always offered: a place to put the things that were too heavy to carry alone.
“Thank you,” I said.
She squeezed my hand once, briefly, and let go.
We sat in comfortable silence for a while after that, finishing our cider, watching the stars wheel slowly over the orchard.
The conversation turned to easier ground.
The farm’s prospects. The apple yield this season, which sounded promising.
The particular creak in the third step that everyone in the house had learned to avoid except visitors, who inevitably found it with their full weight at three in the morning and woke the entire household.
Normal things. The kind of problems that don’t keep you awake because the solution, however tedious, exists within reach.
“I’ve kept your room,” she said eventually.
“Cleaned it weekly. Changed the sheets. Hung your old clothes in the wardrobe even though they probably don’t fit you anymore.
It seemed …” She hesitated. “It seemed important that it be ready. That you have somewhere to come back to that still felt like yours.”
The thickness in my throat surprised me. I swallowed around it. “It does,” I said. “It still does.”
She smiled, and in the starlight she looked younger than her years, the lines at the corners of her eyes softening into something that might have been twenty-five if you squinted. “Good. That’s what I was aiming for.”
We finished our cider. The night deepened around us, the orchard trees settling into their nighttime stillness, the insects quieting as the temperature dropped another degree. Somewhere in the distance, an owl called, its voice carrying across the open fields.
For the first time in six years, I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Angelina leaned against my shoulder, her head resting lightly against my arm, and neither of us felt the need to comment on it. Some gestures didn’t require translation. This was one of them.
Then the exhaustion hit me like a wall that had been leaning against my back for six years and finally decided to fall.
One moment I was fine, or fine enough, listening to Angelina talk enthusiastically about apple yields.
The next moment my body remembered that I hadn’t slept properly in approximately seventy-two hours, that military cots don’t count as rest by any civilian standard, and that the brand of tired that comes from flying a pegasus across half the kingdom doesn’t negotiate. It conquers.
I rubbed at my eyes with the heel of my hand and tried to look more alert than I felt, which was a performance I’d been giving for approximately six years and had gotten very good at despite its fundamental dishonesty.
Angelina saw through it immediately. Older women develop a specific immunity to men’s attempts at appearing functional when they’re clearly not.
“You’re done,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re vertical through sheer force of habit and military discipline, which is impressive but not sustainable.
” She set her empty cup on the porch step and stood, extending a hand down to me the way she had when I was small and needed help up from places I’d sat too long.
“Bed. Now. The war can wait until morning. So can I. So can everything else.”
I took her hand and let her pull me up. My knees complained. My back did something complicated that involved at least three separate muscle groups reminding me they existed and were unhappy about recent developments.
“Tomorrow,” she said, brushing a strand of hair from my forehead with her thumb, “will be considerably happier than today, if only because those two will finally know you’re here and the screaming will be proportional to the occasion.
” Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “I recommend ear protection. Sabrina’s vocal range has expanded since you left.
The neighbors have filed formal complaints. ”
I smiled. “I’ll risk it.”
She kissed me then, once on each cheek, quick warm presses of her lips against skin that hadn’t been kissed by anyone in longer than I wanted to think about.
Then she hugged me again, properly, her arms and wings around my waist, her face against my chest, and I held her and felt the way she fit against me, the top of her head just below my chin, her body warm and solid and exactly the right size to make me feel both protective and protected at once.
“Go,” she murmured into my shirt. “Before I decide this is actually a dream and wake up disappointed.”
I went. The stairs were easier the second time, my body remembering the pattern of which boards could be trusted and which couldn’t.
The hallway was dark and quiet, the breathing from behind the closed doors steady and undisturbed.
I paused outside Gabriella’s room for a moment, listening to the rhythm of her sleep, then moved on to the door at the end of the hall.
My room. Angelina hadn’t been exaggerating.
She’d kept it exactly as I’d left it, or as close to exactly as made no difference.
The bed was made with sheets that smelled like lavender and sunlight, the quilt Angelina had made folded neatly at the foot.
The desk under the window held the same books I’d been reading six years ago, their spines cracked in the same places, arranged in the same haphazard order that had made sense to no one but me.
The wardrobe stood open slightly, and inside I could see my old clothes hanging in patient rows, shirts and trousers that would fit a twenty-year-old boy and had no business attempting to contain the shoulders of the man who’d come back in their place.
The sword went on the desk. The bow leaned against the wall beside it.
The boomerang in its leather case went against the wall beside it.
The pouch containing the queen’s coin and the medals I’d been given at the ceremony went into the drawer where I’d once kept childhood treasures, arrowheads and smooth stones and the things boys decide are important before they learn what important actually means.
The disc the queen had given me, the one that said Faithful, I kept in my hand for a moment longer, feeling its weight, its warmth and the smoothness of metal that had been carried by hands that mattered before it reached mine.