Chapter 5 #5
We landed in the farmyard as the evening light was turning the orchard trees to amber. The skybird touched down, and Sabrina slid from the saddle, her wings folding neatly behind her.
I dismounted, my legs remembering that they had spent several hours wrapped around a skybird and were now entitled to an opinion on the matter, and that opinion was largely negative compared to Valen.
And there she was. Gabriella. She was in the chicken yard, basket in hand, scattering grain. Her dark blonde hair was tied back, her blue dress dusty at the hem, and she looked up at the sound of our landing.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re back.”
Sabrina, God bless her, did not laugh. She beamed instead, crossing the yard and pulling Gabriella into a hug that involved significantly more wing than strictly necessary.
“We had the best day. The absolute best. I introduced him to everyone. The twins … they nearly fainted. I had to catch one of them.”
Gabriella hugged her back, her eyes finding mine over Sabrina’s shoulder. “That sounds … fun.”
“It was magnificent, and then, Gabriel, tell her about the race. Tell her how I completely destroyed you.”
“I have no memory of this alleged destruction,” I said. “I recall a series of tactical maneuvers that any cavalry instructor would classify as ‘cheating with enthusiasm.’”
Sabrina released Gabriella and turned to me, her hands on her hips. “Cheating implies rules. There were no rules. There was only victory, which was mine, and defeat, which was yours, wearing your face.”
Gabriella was watching us, her basket still in her hand, and I saw it, the flicker, quick and gone, the tightening around her eyes that had nothing to do with the evening light and everything to do with watching something she hadn’t been part of.
She masked it instantly, the way she masked everything, but I’d spent too many years reading the faces of young soldiers trying not to show fear to miss it now.
“We’ll do something tomorrow,” I said quietly, just to her. “You and me. Whatever you want.”
Her face changed all at once, like someone had lit a candle behind her eyes. The careful composure dissolved, and what emerged was pure delight.
“Really?”
“Really. Name it. Flying, fighting, numbers, whatever you’ve got. I’m yours.”
She smiled then. “I’ll come up with something, but now, Angelina needs help with dinner,” she said. “She’s doing something with the preserves from this morning, and she said I should go help her.”
“Let’s help her together,” I said.
She nodded, quick, eager, and then she was moving toward the house, her steps light, and I watched her go and felt the ache of wanting to fix something that had been broken for years and knowing that wanting wasn’t the same as being able to.
Sabrina was still beside me, her wings half-folded, her eyes on Gabriella’s retreating back.
When she turned to look at me, her expression had that Sabrina quality, knowing, gentle, with an edge of something that might have been resignation or might have been fondness or might have been both at once.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. The smile was enough.
And that was when it hit me, standing in the farmyard with the evening light gold on the orchard leaves and the smell of bread carrying from the kitchen windows and two girls moving in different directions, both of them carrying pieces of me I hadn’t known were missing until I came home to reclaim them.
For the first time since returning, I found myself wondering whether the girls I’d left behind still saw me as just their friend. Not just Gabriella. Sabrina too.
The realization settled into my chest like something with weight and temperature, and I stood there in the yard as the light failed and the farm creaked gently into its evening rhythms, and tried very hard not to examine the thing I’d just understood because examining it meant admitting it existed, and admitting it existed meant facing what came next, and what came next was territory I had no map for and no business exploring.
Not every homecoming ends when you reach home. You left, you fought, you came back, you picked up where you left off. The world waited, unchanged, and you slotted yourself back into the space that had been kept for you.
This wasn’t that. This was something messier, warmer, more complicated …
a family reassembling itself around a man who had left as a boy and returned as someone else entirely, and girls who had grown into women in his absence, and the dangerous current that ran beneath all of it, the thing nobody was saying because saying it would make it real.
I looked at the house. Lights burned in the kitchen windows.
I could hear Angelina’s voice, Gabriella answering, the domestic music of a family preparing a meal together.
Sabrina had already moved toward the porch, and as she reached the steps she glanced back at me one more time, that same knowing smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
Then I followed them inside, toward the light and the warmth and whatever came next.