Chapter 6
Iwoke to the smell of waffles and the sound of Gabriella laughing downstairs.
The bedroom was full of morning light, gold and thin and holding the last coolness of night in its corners.
I lay there for a moment, letting my body remember what it felt like to wake up somewhere safe.
This morning, my body took three full seconds to decide that waffles were not, in fact, a threat, and that was progress.
My shoulders ached. The skybird ride with Sabrina had left its mark on muscles that were still reacquainting themselves with the concept of leisure. I rolled out of bed, pulled on trousers and a clean shirt, and ran a hand through my hair.
Downstairs, I found Angelina standing at the stove, her wings half-folded, a wooden spatula in one hand and a dishcloth thrown over her shoulder. The waffle iron hissed on the stove, sending up curls of steam that caught the light and turned gold.
And Gabriella. Gabriella was everywhere at once. She’d set the table with what looked like every plate we owned, arranged a jar of wildflowers in the center that she must have picked at dawn, and was currently carrying a pitcher of fresh milk from the cool room.
“Good morning,” she said, spotting me in the doorway. Her smile was the kind that took over her whole face, bright and unchecked and completely unself-conscious. “I made waffles. Well, Angelina made waffles. I made the table look pretty. Division of labor.”
“You made the table look extremely pretty,” I said.
“Thank you. I have many talents. Table aesthetics is merely one of them.” She set the milk down and gestured to a chair like she was presenting a throne. “Sit. Eat. Be impressed. I’ve been up for two hours and I have plans.”
I sat. The waffle she slid onto my plate was golden and steaming, the edges crisp, drizzled with honey from our own hives and topped with sliced apples that still held their summer sharpness. I took a bite and made a sound that was embarrassingly close to a moan.
Gabriella beamed. “That’s the reaction I was hoping for. Angelina, he likes them. The war hero approves of your waffles. The farm may continue operating.”
Angelina shook her head, but she was smiling. “Eat. Both of you. The day won’t wait because you’re busy being charming.”
We ate. The waffles were perfect, which was Angelina’s default setting for anything that came out of her kitchen.
Gabriella talked through the entire meal without pausing for breath, telling me about this year’s accounts, the new chicken that had learned to open the feed bin, the sheep she’d been planning to buy for months, and a mathematical proof she’d been working on that apparently involved chicken feed distribution ratios and something called “optimized pecking patterns” which sounded made up but which she described with such conviction that I found myself nodding along anyway.
When the plates were cleared and the last of the honey had been scraped from the jar, Gabriella set her elbows on the table and fixed me with a look. “So,” she said. “Today. My day. I’ve been thinking.”
“I can tell. Your thinking face is very distinctive. Your eyebrows do this thing.”
“My eyebrows are expressive. It’s a gift.” She leaned forward. “I want to work. I want to fix things. The things that broke while you were gone. The things Angelina couldn’t fix by herself because there were three of us and a farm and not enough hands.”
Something warm settled in my chest. This was the request of a young woman who had spent six years watching things fall apart and was now, finally, being offered the chance to put them back together. “I’m in,” I said.
Gabriella was already on her feet, energy radiating off her in waves.
“We’ll need supplies. Lumber. Nails. Fencing wire.
The sheep, if we’re really doing the pasture.
” She turned to me, her eyes bright. “There’s a market on Cedar Isle.
They have everything. Good prices if you know how to bargain, which I do, because someone has to and Angelina is terrible at it and Sabrina just smiles until they give her whatever she wants, which works for her and only her. ”
I laughed. “Cedar Isle it is.”
“I’m coming with you,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“I wouldn’t dream of leaving you behind.”
She grinned, and the grin was the same one she’d had at thirteen, sudden and complete and capable of rearranging the light in a room.
Then she was moving, gathering things, talking about lists and measurements and the specific grade of lumber we’d need for the fence posts, her voice carrying through the kitchen with the momentum of someone who has been waiting for this day for a very long time.
I watched her, this wingless woman with her dark blonde hair coming loose from its knot and flour on her elbows and a mind that moved faster than most people’s mouths could keep up with, and I felt that warmth again, settling deeper, finding spaces I hadn’t known were empty.
We finished clearing the table. Angelina handed me a list written in her careful hand, items checked and quantities noted.
Gabriella disappeared upstairs and returned wearing a different dress, the blue one, the one that made her eyes look like the sky over open water, and a pair of boots that had seen better days.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Ready,” I said.
We headed for the stable, Gabriella half a step ahead, already talking about lumber prices and the merits of cedar versus oak for fence posts, and I followed her through the morning light and tried very hard not to think about how the curve of her neck caught the sun or how the sound of her laugh was becoming something I looked forward to hearing more than I should.
Some thoughts were better left unexamined before breakfast had fully settled. This was one of them.
We reached Valen, who regarded Gabriella with the skepticism of a military pegasus encountering someone who smelled too feminine.
His dark eyes tracked her as she approached, his ears twitching, his posture doing that thing it did when he was deciding whether a human deserved his respect or merely his tolerance.
“He remembers you,” I said.
“He does not. He’s looking at me like I’m a stranger who might try to steal his apples.”
“He remembers everyone who’s ever given him apples. You gave him apples, frequently. Sometimes when you thought no one was watching.”
Gabriella’s cheeks went pink. “That was bribery. I wanted him to like me.”
“He liked you before the apples. The apples just confirmed what he already knew, which is that you have excellent judgment.”
She smiled, and the smile did something to the morning light that made it hard to look directly at her. I turned to the saddle instead, checking the straps, adjusting the stirrups. Valen stood patiently, which for Valen was the equivalent of enthusiastic consent.
“Ready?” I asked.
She nodded, and then we were mounting. I cupped my hands for her boot, felt her weight settle, and lifted. She was light, lighter than I remembered, all lean muscle and narrow frame. She swung her leg over the saddle and my hands lingered at her waist a beat longer than strictly necessary.
She settled into the saddle, adjusting her dress, her back straight.
“Comfortable?” I asked.
“Very. Now get up here before I decide to steal your pegasus and become a legendary aerial bandit.”
I mounted behind her, my body finding its place against the cantle, and then my arms were around her waist, my chest against her back, and the contact was immediate and warm and exactly the kind of thing my nervous system had no business cataloging.
Gabriella leaned back slightly, her body fitting against mine with the ease of something that had been designed to occupy that specific space.
Valen lifted. His wings caught the morning air, and then we were rising, the farm dropping away below us, the orchard trees shrinking to green coins against the pale earth.
Gabriella’s breath caught, and I felt it against my forearms where they crossed her stomach, the small expansion of her ribs, the way her body tightened for one suspended moment before relaxing into the climb.
“We’re flying,” she said quietly.
“We are.”
“It’s been so long.”
I knew what she meant. Not the flying, she’d been on Valen with me dozens of times as a child.
She meant this. The two of us, together, the world falling away beneath us, nothing between us but open sky and the trust that came from sharing a mount with someone who couldn’t catch herself if something went wrong.
I had always been her wings. For six years, she’d had neither.
“I missed this,” she said, her voice carrying back to me on the wind.
“Me too.”
We banked toward Cedar Isle, Valen’s wings beating steady, the islands passing below us in a slow parade of green and gold and the occasional cluster of buildings that marked a village or a trading post. Gabriella pointed out landmarks I half-remembered, her voice bright with the pleasure of being the expert for once, and I let her talk, let her fill the air between us with names and stories and the geography of a childhood she’d lived without me.
Cedar Isle appeared on the horizon, larger than Oakwind, its eastern edge crowded with docks and landing platforms where skybirds and the occasional small airship came to rest. The market sprawled across the central square, stalls and awnings in a dozen colors, the morning crowd already thick with angels and the occasional harpy merchant moving between stalls with the efficient grace of people who treated commerce as both art and combat.
We landed at the public platform, Valen touching down, and dismounted. Gabriella slid down before I could help her, landing lightly on the packed earth, already scanning the market.
“Lumber first,” she said. “Then nails. Then wire. Then we find someone selling sheep who isn’t going to try to pawn off their sickliest stock on the wingless girl and her friend.”