Chapter 2 #5
Then I set it on the nightstand and began to undress. My fingers were clumsy with the buttons of my shirt. Exhaustion made fine motor skills an optimistic proposition. I had the top three undone when Angelina’s voice came from the doorway.
“Are you in bed?”
I paused, shirt half-open, and considered the question honestly.
The scars across my back and chest were not the kind of thing you showed a woman if you could avoid it.
They were battlefield souvenirs, the permanent record of moments when something sharp had found me before I could move fast enough, and while Angelina had seen me shirtless approximately ten thousand times before I turned twenty, the version of me that had come home was carrying evidence I’d rather she didn’t have to look at tonight.
“Give me a minute,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”
“Of course.” She didn’t ask why. She didn’t need to. “I’ll come back to say goodnight.”
I finished undressing in the dark, moving by habit and muscle memory, hanging the shirt over the chair, folding the trousers.
The scars were worse than I’d let myself remember.
A long diagonal across my upper back from a rebel archer who’d gotten lucky at Mirrath.
A puckered knot just below my ribs on the right side from something that had gone through the gap in my armor at Stonepoint and came out the other side without hitting anything vital, which was the kind of luck that makes you believe in divine intervention whether you started out that way or not.
Smaller ones. Dozens of them. A map of six years written in tissue that would never quite heal right.
I pulled a clean shirt from the drawer, one of the old ones that barely reached my wrists and strained across the shoulders, and climbed into bed.
The mattress was softer than anything I’d slept on since leaving home.
Softer than military cots. Softer than palace guest beds, which had been luxurious by comparison but still carried the stiffness of furniture designed for people who were passing through rather than staying.
This mattress knew me. It had my shape pressed into it from years of teenage sleep, and it welcomed me back with the yielding comfort of something that had been waiting.
I was half-asleep when the door opened again. Angelina moved quietly across the room, a shadow against the deeper dark, and sat on the edge of the bed the way she had when I was small and feverish or afraid of thunderstorms or just needed the reassurance that came from knowing she was there.
She leaned down and kissed my forehead. Her lips were warm. Her breath smelled like cider and the faint sweetness that was just her, the scent I’d carried in my head for six years without being able to name it properly until this moment.
“Sleep well, Gabriel,” she whispered. “You’re home. Nothing else matters tonight.”
She smoothed the hair back from my forehead gently, and left as quietly as she’d come.
I lay in the dark and listened to the house breathe around me. The creak of old timber settling. The distant soft sound of Valen moving in his stall, comfortable and safe. The deeper quiet beneath it all, the absence of the things that had defined the last six years of my life.
No watch to stand. No battles to prepare for.
No orders waiting in the morning, no dispatches, no casualty reports, no briefings where officers stood around maps and decided which young men would fly into which patch of sky and which of them wouldn’t be coming back.
Tomorrow there would be apples to harvest and girls to surprise, and the simplicity of that fact settled over me like something physical, warm and heavy and almost too much to hold.
I thought about Gabriella, waking to find me home after six years of letters and silence and the ache of absence that doesn’t fade no matter how accustomed to it you become.
I thought about Sabrina, probably throwing something at my head the moment she saw me, because that was her dialect of affection and she’d been fluent in it since birth.
I thought about breakfast, about the kitchen table, about the sound of three women talking over each other the way they always had, and how I would sit at that table and drink coffee and listen to the ordinary noise of a family reassembling itself, and how that noise was the thing I’d been fighting for without fully understanding what it meant until now.
My soldier’s life was over. The realization should have frightened me. It didn’t. It felt like putting down a weight I’d been carrying so long I’d forgotten what my shoulders were supposed to feel like without it.
Outside the window, the stars turned slowly over the orchard.
Somewhere in the distance, an owl called once, twice, and fell silent.
The house creaked gently, settling into the particular deep quiet of a summer night on a floating island where nothing bad had happened today and nothing bad was expected tomorrow.
I closed my eyes and let the quiet take me. For the first time in six years, I slept without dreaming of war.