Chapter 10 #2
Upstairs, in my room, I pulled the trunk from beneath the bed. Inside: my sword. Military issue, the blade well-kept, the edge still sharp. A hunting knife, smaller, balanced for throwing. My bow, recurve, the kind that could be carried on a pegasus without hindering flight. I took all three.
I belted the sword at my hip. Slid the knife into my boot.
Slung the bow across my back with a quiver of a dozen arrows, which was more than I expected to need.
The weight of the weapons settled against my body the way an old coat settles on shoulders that have grown into it, familiar and right and utterly unwelcome.
Downstairs, Gabriella stood in the kitchen doorway, her arms wrapped around herself, her eyes huge. She looked younger than nineteen, younger than I’d ever seen her, and the sight of her there, afraid, sent a fresh surge of cold through my chest.
“Gabriel,” she said.
“I’m bringing her home,” I said. “Wait here. Both of you. Lock the doors after I’m gone.”
I didn’t wait for their response. I walked across the yard to where Valen stood grazing, his white coat gone amber in the late light, his dark eyes lifting to meet mine with the attentiveness of a mount who had spent six years reading his rider’s body language and had just registered the shift from farmer to soldier.
I mounted, settled into the saddle, and gathered the reins. Valen braced beneath me, his wings half-extended in anticipation.
I looked back once. Angelina stood on the porch, one hand on the railing, her wings folded tight against her back, her face composed into the expression she wore when she was being brave for everyone else and falling apart privately.
Gabriella stood beside her, smaller and paler, her wingless back straight with a dignity that made my throat tight.
Then Valen was lifting, his powerful wings driving us upward, and the farm dropped away below, and the cold in my chest spread outward until there was nothing left but the problem, the variables, and the certain knowledge that whatever waited for me had just made the last mistake of its considerably shortened life.
* * *
Valen flew the way he flew when he knew the mission was urgent.
Each wingbeat drove us forward through air that had begun to cool with approaching evening, the sky above darkening from blue to the deep purple that precedes proper night.
I kept us low, beneath the cloud layer, using the islands as cover.
Old habit. The kind that keeps you alive when someone might be looking up.
The island emerged from the gloom like a broken tooth against the horizon.
A small floating island, mostly bare rock with a flat platform at its center where an old watchtower had once stood before the war rendered it obsolete.
Abandoned now. The perfect place for an ambush, or for men who wanted a meeting with no witnesses.
I circled wide, keeping to the island’s shadowed eastern edge where the rock face offered cover.
From three hundred feet I could see the camp laid out below with the clarity of a terrain map.
Rough canvas tents, three of them, arranged in a loose triangle around a central fire that had been allowed to burn low.
A covered skyboat, military-grade as the messenger had described, its hull patched in places, docked at the platform’s northern edge.
Lookouts: two harpies perched on the highest rocks, their feathered wings folded, scanning the approaches with the bored vigilance of sentries who had been told to expect one man on a pegasus and had been waiting long enough to develop opinions about their employer’s intelligence.
I counted bodies. Six, maybe seven. Mix of harpies and dwarves, the latter shorter, broader, moving with the rolling gait of men who spent more time underground than most. Two of the dwarves were mounted on small pegasi, compact, agile mounts bred for maneuverability rather than speed, the kind favored by raiders and mercenaries who valued surprise over endurance.
The tactical assessment wrote itself. Sentries first. Then the mounted dwarves, because pegasi changed the math. Then the rest, clean and quick, before they could organize or reach Sabrina.
I didn’t call out. I didn’t negotiate. Negotiation is for men who have time and leverage, and I had neither.
It was also what they expected. What I had was the element of surprise, six years of combat muscle memory, and a very specific understanding of what happened to people who took things that belonged to me.
Valen banked into a slow, silent descent, skimming lower with each pass until the highest rocks sat only a few body lengths beneath us. When we were close enough that I could see the sentries’ faces, I slipped from the saddle.
The first sentry never saw me coming. My boot connected with his spine, driving him forward into the rock face, and before his body had finished collapsing I was moving, the sword already in motion, finding the gap between the second sentry’s wing joints.
The camp reacted the way ambushed camps always react: too slow, too loud and too late.
A harpy shouted. A dwarf reached for an axe.
I was already among them, the sword moving in the tight, economical arcs that close-quarters combat demands, each strike calibrated to disable or kill because in situations like this the difference between the two is academic and stopping to worry about it gets you killed.
A harpy came at me from the left, talons extended, moving with the quick, darting aggression that made harpies dangerous in the air and marginally less so on the ground where I could reach them. My blade took her through the chest. She folded. I was already turning.
The first mounted dwarf came in low, his small pegasus banking hard, an axe swinging in an arc meant for my neck.
I dropped beneath it, felt the wind of the blade pass overhead, and came up with the sword driving into the dwarf’s thigh.
He roared, the axe falling from his grip, and I used his momentum to pull him from the saddle.
The pegasus veered away, riderless, and I put the dwarf on the ground with the pommel of my sword against his temple hard enough to ensure he wouldn’t be getting up to complain about it.
The second mounted dwarf was smarter. He came in higher, circling, trying to get above me where his mount’s agility would count for more.
I whistled, two sharp tones that cut through the chaos, and Valen dropped from above like something that had been waiting for the signal.
I caught his saddle as he passed, swung up, and we were airborne, the dwarf’s pegasus banking hard to avoid the collision.
Aerial combat on a pegasus is its own geometry.
Valen knew the drill. He banked, rolled, presented my sword arm to the target while keeping his body between me and the dwarf’s axe.
I didn’t bother with the bow. At this range, with mounts this close, the sword was faster.
The blade caught the dwarf across the chest as we passed, and he made a sound that started as a shout and ended as something wetter, and then he was falling, his mount peeling away in panic.
The rest broke. They always break, when the numbers stop favoring them and the man on the white pegasus stops being a target and starts being the thing the stories warned you about.
Two harpies leaped from the island’s edge rather than face me, their wings snapping open, carrying them into the darkening sky toward whatever island lay beyond the horizon.
A dwarf ran for the skyboat, and I put an arrow through his shoulder before he reached the gangplank, not to kill him but to make sure he remembered the lesson.
Then it was quiet. The kind of quiet that follows violence, heavy with the scent of blood and fear and the distant, fading cries of the ones who got away.
They’d expected to bargain. Nobody had expected the negotiation to begin with bodies.
I dismounted, sword still in hand, and moved toward the covered skyboat.
The canvas covering had been tied down from the outside. I cut it free with the knife, pulling the fabric aside, and the smell that hit me was sweat and fear and the acrid scent of someone who had been bound long enough for their body to protest.
Sabrina lay in the boat’s hull, curled on her side, her wings bound behind her with cord so tight the feathers were crushed, her wrists tied at her back.
They’d gagged her with a strip of cloth that had come partially loose, probably from her struggling, and the bruise on her left cheek was the color of a fresh apple, darkening at the edges.
Her dress was torn at the shoulder, the fabric ripped from what looked like someone grabbing and her pulling away.
Her eyes found mine in the near-dark. They were wide, glassy with shock, and for one terrible second I thought she might not recognize me, that whatever they’d done to her had pushed her past the point where familiar faces registered.
Then she made a sound. The noise of someone who has been holding themselves together through sheer will and has just been handed permission to stop. I cut the bonds on her wings first, then her wrists, my hands moving carefully.
The moment her arms were free, she collapsed against me.
She fell into my chest like someone whose legs had given out, her body shaking so hard I could feel her teeth chattering against my collarbone, and her hands fisted in my shirt with a strength that suggested she was afraid I might evaporate if she loosened her grip.
“You came,” she said, or tried to say. The words came out mangled, half-sob, half-disbelief. “You actually… you found me. You came for me.”