Chapter 12
The first thing I thought about after I woke up and got dressed was camping.
It was something I looked forward to, just a peaceful day with my lovers.
I walked onto the porch where they sat with their shoulders touching and morning light spilling across their hair.
They looked up at the same time, and whatever they saw on my face made Sabrina’s mouth curve and Gabriella’s eyes soften.
“Angelina thinks we should go camping,” I said.
Sabrina’s eyebrow went up two inches. Gabriella’s head tilted the way it did when she was assembling a puzzle she’d been handed sideways.
“Camping,” Sabrina repeated. “Just the three of us.”
“Somewhere quiet,” I added. “Forest, lake, no farm, no chores, no… audience.” I used Angelina’s phrasing, watching their faces.
“Oh,” Gabriella said. She looked at Sabrina, and something passed between them.
Sabrina stood. Her wings, still showing the faint marks where the ropes had bitten, extended slightly with what I recognized as genuine excitement. “When?”
“Now,” I said.
It took less than twenty minutes. Angelina helped us pack a basket.
Bread wrapped in cloth, apples from the orchard still cool from the morning air, a wheel of the sharp cheese and blankets.
I added my bow when neither girl was looking, a quiver of a dozen arrows, and the parchment and pen in case I wanted to write to Angelina.
The pen was military issue, the kind that wrote on anything, and the parchment was heavy enough to survive Valen’s teeth if necessary.
“Hunting,” I explained when Gabriella caught me sliding the bow across my back. “Fresh meat. Better than cheese and bread for two days.”
Sabrina packed a small bag of her own, things I couldn’t see but that produced a soft clinking sound when she moved, and Gabriella added a jar of the salve Angelina made for bruises and a hairbrush that looked like it had survived at least one childhood tantrum involving a wall and considerable velocity.
We reconvened on the porch. Angelina stood by the railing, arms folded, her honey-blonde hair loose around her shoulders in the way that happened when she’d been moving fast and dignity had been deemed expendable.
The expression on her face was the one she’d worn when teaching us to ride pegasi as children: calm, confident, and utterly without concern for whatever disasters lay ahead.
“You’ll be fine?” I asked, though the question was mostly habit. Angelina had kept a farm running through six years of war.
“The sheep and I have reached an understanding,” she said.
“They stay on their side of the fence, I pretend not to notice when they eat the vegetable seedlings.” She reached for Gabriella first, pulling her into a hug that lifted her slightly off the porch boards.
Then Sabrina, her hands gentle on the damaged wings, her mouth close to her daughter’s ear saying something I couldn’t catch but that made Sabrina’s eyes go soft.
Then me. Angelina’s arms went around my waist, her wings extending behind me in that enveloping gesture that had been my definition of safety for as long as I could remember, and her mouth was close to my ear when she spoke.
“Be good to them,” she said quietly. “Both of them. Equally. The way they deserve.”
I nodded against her shoulder.
She pulled back, her hands on my arms, and studied my face with the intensity of a woman confirming that her loved one, in fact, absorbed the lesson.
Then she smiled, that warm, private smile that had preceded every piece of advice she’d ever given me that I initially rejected and later discovered was exactly right, and added, “Enjoy yourselves. Properly.”
The wink was small, quick, and landed with the precision of a crossbow bolt between my ribs. I felt my ears burn. Behind me, Sabrina made a sound that was either a cough or the beginning of a laugh she’d decided to murder in its infancy.
We walked to the stable. Valen was waiting, his white coat gleaming in the morning light, his dark eyes finding mine.
Sora stood beside him, her pale-blue and white plumage ruffling in the breeze, her head turning toward Sabrina with the eagerness of a skybird who had been ground-bound for too long and was beginning to develop opinions about it.
I helped Gabriella up first. My hands at her waist, lifting her onto Valen’s back with ease.
She settled against the saddle, her back pressing into my chest when I mounted behind her, and the warmth of her through the thin fabric of her dress sent a jolt through my nervous system that my cock registered with considerably more enthusiasm than the situation warranted.
“Comfortable?” I asked, my mouth close to her ear.
She leaned back, her head coming to rest against my shoulder. “Very.”
Sabrina mounted Sora. She adjusted her position, checked the straps, and looked over at us with an expression that contained sixty percent excitement and forty percent mischief of the variety that had historically preceded property damage.
“Race you,” she called.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “Your wings are still healing, and Sora has all the grace of an overfed goose, and she’s very proud of it.”
Sora snorted, apparently offended, and Sabrina laughed, the sound carrying across the yard to where Angelina stood on the porch with one hand shading her eyes and a smile that suggested she was enjoying this considerably more than she had any right to.
We lifted together. Valen’s wings drove us upward with the powerful, steady beat that had carried me through six years of war, and Sora rose beside us, her wingstrokes shorter and quicker, keeping pace with the coordination of a skybird who had spent enough time around Valen to understand that showing off was pointless when your travel companion could outpace you without changing expression.
The farm dropped away below. The white stone house, the oak tree, the chicken coop, the vegetable garden where Gabriella had been kneeling in the dirt that morning, working through her hurt one weed at a time.
We flew northeast. The morning was clear, the kind of summer day that exists primarily in childhood memories and poorly funded tourism brochures, and the air against my face carried the green scent of distant forests and the mineral clarity of open sky.
Gabriella’s body was warm against mine, her dark blonde hair whipping back to occasionally brush my chin, and every few minutes she would point at something below: a dense stand of oak, a lake, the distant shape of another island, and her voice carrying back to me on the wind with the unguarded delight of someone who had spent too many years grounded and was rediscovering the joy of height.
Beside us, Sabrina flew Sora with the loose, confident posture of someone who had been born for open air.
Her light blonde hair streamed behind her, her damaged wings folded tight against her back where the wind couldn’t catch the tender edges, and every so often she would glance over at us, her eyes meeting mine across the gap between mounts, and the smile she gave me was the one I remembered from before the war: bright, teasing, and entirely without the weight it had carried yesterday in a skyboat with ropes around her wrists.
They called to each other over the wind.
Fragments of conversation that arrived in pieces, laughter that carried, the easy back-and-forth of sisters who had fought and forgiven and emerged on the other side of something neither of them had chosen.
I kept my arm around Gabriella’s waist, my hand resting on the flat of her stomach where the thin fabric of her dress had ridden up enough that my palm met warm skin, and she pressed back against me with a trust that made my throat tight.
The island emerged from the haze ahead like something from a storybook none of us had been read as children.
Dense forest covering its eastern half, the trees so thick they formed a canopy that turned the ground beneath to shadow.
A lake visible near its center, catching the light in a flat, mirror-bright disc.
Rivers winding through the trees in silver threads, and along the western edge, a wide meadow of grass tall enough to brush a pegasus’s fetlocks when it landed.
“God, it’s beautiful,” Gabriella said, her voice soft with something that sounded dangerously close to reverence.
I tightened my arm around her waist and felt her hand find mine where it rested against her stomach, her fingers interlacing with mine in a grip that suggested she was holding on to more than just the saddle.
Sabrina banked Sora closer, until the distance between our mounts was narrow enough that I could have reached out and touched her wing if I’d wanted to.
She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. The look she gave me, warm and steady and entirely without the jealousy that had lived there yesterday morning when a door swung open and a girl walked away, said everything her mouth was too busy grinning to articulate.
We descended together. Valen’s hooves touched grass first, then Sora’s a heartbeat later, and the meadow received us with the green silence of a place that had been waiting.
The meadow smelled the way meadows are supposed to smell and almost never do: green and sweet and slightly wild, with the scent of grass that hasn’t been cut or grazed in long enough to develop opinions.
Valen’s hooves sank into it up to the fetlock, and when he lowered his head to graze the grass came up to his knees.
I slid from the saddle and reached up for Gabriella. Her hands found my shoulders, and I lifted her down, and when her feet touched grass she stayed close, her body against mine for one beat longer than the dismount required. Sabrina landed Sora beside us and dismounted.