Chapter 3
Iwoke to singing, which sliced through the last of my dreams like a blade through silk.
I lay there for a moment with my eyes closed, letting the sound settle.
A woman’s voice, clear and light, moving through a melody I half-remembered from childhood.
No words, just notes strung together the way morning dew strings itself along a spider’s web, delicate and perfect and not trying to be anything other than exactly what it was.
The voice floated up from somewhere below my window, accompanied by the percussion of chicken feed hitting packed earth and the occasional indignant squawk.
The bedroom was full of early light, gold and pale and still holding the coolness of night at its edges.
My body felt strange, the heaviness of a body that has slept properly for the first time in years and isn’t sure how to proceed with that information.
Military sleep was thin and alert, a layer of consciousness always held in reserve, but this was surrender.
I rolled out of bed and crossed to the window.
The shutters were latched from the inside, an old habit from a time when I’d believed the dark held monsters worth barricading against. I undid the latch and pulled them open carefully, letting the morning spill across the floorboards in a long warm rectangle.
And there she was. Gabriella stood in the chicken yard with her back to the house, a woven basket tucked against her hip, one hand scattering grain in a wide arc that sent the flock into their morning frenzy.
Her dark blonde hair was tied back in a loose knot that had already started coming undone, strands of it catching the light and turning gold at the tips.
She wore a simple blue dress that had been patched at the elbows, and her bare feet were pale against the dark earth.
She was singing, still, not for an audience, not even aware she had one, just for herself.
I should have called out. I should have made some sound, some gesture to let her know I was there.
Instead I stood at the window with my palms flat against the sill and watched her feed chickens and thought: this is what peace looks like.
This specific thing. This woman who cannot fly, pouring grain from a basket while the sun climbs over the orchard trees and her voice carries across a yard that hasn’t seen violence in six years.
She’d grown. The thirteen-year-old girl I’d left behind had stretched into something lean and pretty, her shoulders straight, her neck long, the way she moved suggesting confidence rather than the careful self-awareness I remembered.
She turned slightly, reaching into the basket for another handful of grain, and I caught the clean unbroken line of her back where wings should have been.
The sight of it still hit me the way it always had, a small sharp ache behind the ribs, not because it made her less but because the world had decided it should.
She didn’t seem to care. That was the miracle.
She moved through the chicken yard like a woman who’d made peace with the body she inhabited and had better things to worry about than its missing parts.
The chickens swarmed around her ankles, pecking at the scattered grain.
Gabriella laughed at something, a sound that carried up to the window and settled in my chest.
Six years. Six years of letters that never quite captured the texture of her voice.
Six years of imagining her growing up in fragments, in the spaces between battles, in the quiet moments before sleep when the mind turns toward home whether you ask it to or not.
I’d carried an image of her that was frozen at thirteen, solemn and watchful and carrying the weight of being different in a village that hadn’t yet learned to look past differences.
The woman in the chicken yard had outgrown that image entirely.
She turned then, pivoting on one heel to reach for something behind her, and her eyes found the window … and then me.
The singing stopped mid-note. The basket slipped from her fingers and hit the ground with a soft thud, grain spilling across the dirt in a pale fan.
She didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. She stood perfectly still in the morning light with one hand still extended toward whatever she’d been reaching for and her eyes wide and fixed on my face like she’d seen a ghost and wasn’t sure whether to run toward it or away.
I raised a hand, smiled and said her name. “Gabriella.”
Something broke in her expression. A crack, then a collapse, the careful composure of a young woman who’d spent six years learning to hold herself together coming undone all at once. She made a sound, not quite a word, something between a gasp and my name, and then she was moving … away from me.
She turned and ran toward the stables, her bare feet kicking up little clouds of dust, her arms pumping at her sides, the blue dress whipping around her legs. Toward the stable, like the stable was the only place she could think to go when the world suddenly rearranged itself.
I stood at the window for half a second longer than I should have, confusion settling into understanding.
She was crying. She was running because she didn’t want me to see her cry, because nineteen-year-old women who’ve spent their lives proving they’re strong don’t want to be caught falling apart in a chicken yard at seven in the morning, even in front of someone they’ve known almost their whole life.
I was dressed and down the stairs in seconds, avoiding the third step by instinct, crossing the kitchen with its smell of bread and beeswax and yesterday’s cider, pushing through the screen door onto the porch where the rocking chairs still held the shape of last night’s conversation.
The morning air hit me clean and cool. The chicken yard was empty except for the spilled grain and the basket lying on its side.
Beyond it, the stable door stood half-open, swinging gently on its hinge.
I crossed the yard at a jog, my boots leaving prints in the soft earth, and pushed the stable door wider.
The interior was dim after the brightness outside, hay-dust floating in the narrow bars of light that fell through the gaps in the wallboards. Valen lifted his head from his stall and regarded me.
Gabriella stood with her back to the door, one hand braced against the far wall, her shoulders shaking.
I could hear her trying to breathe through it, the ragged controlled inhales of someone working very hard at not making noise.
She hadn’t heard me come in. Or she had and was pretending she hadn’t, buying herself another three seconds of composure before she had to turn around and be a person again.
“Hey,” I said quietly.
She went still, then her shoulders dropped, all the fight going out of them at once, and she turned.
She’d managed to wipe most of the tears from her cheeks.
Her eyes were red and her mouth was doing something complicated that was trying very hard to be a smile and not quite making it.
She looked at me across the stable floor with the expression of someone who has prepared a speech for this moment for six years and has now discovered that speeches are useless when the moment actually arrives.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice cracked on the single syllable.
Then she was across the floor and in my arms, her face pressed against my chest, her hands fisting in the fabric of my shirt like she was afraid I might dissolve if she didn’t hold on tight enough.
She was crying in earnest now, the kind of crying that comes from somewhere deep and old and patient, the accumulated grief of six years of missing someone condensed into a single minute of finally, finally having them back.
I held her. Her body was slight against mine, all sharp angles and thin shoulders, and she smelled like chicken feed and morning air and the clean scent of her hair.
Her tears soaked through my shirt. Her fingers dug into my back where the scars were, and she didn’t flinch from them, didn’t pull away, just held on tighter like she was mapping the damage with her hands and finding it acceptable.
“You’re here,” she said into my shirt, like a fact she was testing, making sure it held weight. “You’re actually here.”
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She pulled back slightly, her hands still gripping my arms, and looked up at me with wet eyes and a smile that was finally, completely real.
“You’d better not,” she said. “Because if you leave again I will personally track you down and drag you back by your hair, and I don’t care if you’re the Queen’s Falcon, I will find you and I will win. ”
I laughed. “Noted.”
She wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand, smearing dust across her cheek in the process, and didn’t seem to care. “Angelina told you not to wake us … right?”
“Right,” I said. “I came home last night.”
“Typical. She gets you all to herself for a whole night and we have to find out by accident.”
“I was going to wake you,” I said. “You just beat me to it with the singing.”
“Was I singing? I don’t even remember starting.” She shook her head, embarrassed and pleased at once. “God, you must think I’m completely insane. Running away from you. Hiding in the stable to cry. Very dignified.”
“I think you’re exactly what I expected,” I said. “Which is worse, probably.”
She punched me in the arm, not gently. “Welcome home, you absolute ass.”