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“You get around so well now that I sometimes forget, and I shouldn’t.” She swung their clasped hands. “It hasn’t really been that long.”

“No, it has not.” He had a great deal to be thankful for in his healing, recovery, and re-learning to walk.

Outside the hangar, one of the two-seaters was parked at the edge of the airfield, ready for takeoff.

Adry grinned and motioned to it. “We aren’t taking your aeroplane?”

Merrik shook his head. “While Fieran crammed himself and Pip in a single seat for a flight…”

“Pip is a foot shorter than me and tiny,” Adry finished for him, her grin widening.

“Exactly.” Merrik bumped into her with a shoulder. “We have done the whole cram into a single seat thing. I know just how uncomfortable and difficult to fly the aeroplane it was. I did not think either of us wanted a repeat of that experience.”

“No, definitely not.” Adry gave an exaggerated shudder. “There’s romantic cuddling and then there’s uncomfortably squished.”

“Besides…” Merrik dragged out the word to build suspense as they neared the aeroplane. “This particular aeroplane is a training flyer, rigged to be flown by either seat.”

“You mean, I’ll get to fly?” Adry bounced on her toes, her grin wide, her eyes sparkling.

“Yes.” He halted in the shadow of the aeroplane and tugged her closer. “Just don’t tell Fieran. Or the army.”

“Pfft. I’m a Laesornysh. The army lets me get away with pretty much anything.” Adry let go of his hand to wrap her arms around his neck. “And there are a number things I don’t plan to tell Fieran. Including this.”

With that, she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him. As he had been expecting just that, he had been already leaning toward her. He pressed one hand against her back, cradled her face with the other, and kissed her in return.

He would have deepened the kiss, but Adry stepped away before the kiss lingered. She was already climbing onto the aeroplane by the time he blinked his eyes open and gathered himself to remember where he was and what he was supposed to be doing.

She shot a saucy grin over her shoulder at him, her hair tossing about in the breeze. “Aren’t you coming?”

“Yes.” He put his left foot in the toe step and pulled himself up, placing himself close to her where she stood on the structurally sound point where the wing met the fuselage. “You should not distract your pilot right before he takes you flying.”

She just grinned before she started to climb into the second seat of the aeroplane.

“Not that one.” When she looked at him, he pointed at the front seat. “You sit in front.”

“But…” Adry trailed off, her forehead scrunching. She was likely thinking about how Pip, Fieran, her dacha, and her uncle had climbed into the second seats of the two-seaters for that secret mission.

“The two-seaters you have seen before were rigged for fighting so the passenger is in the back seat, often with a rear machine gun.” Merrik gestured to the front seat. “But this is a training flyer, so the main pilot sits in the back where he can keep an eye on his trainee.”

“Ah.” Adry shuffled past him and climbed into the front seat of the biplane.

There he’d made sure a flight jacket, cap, and goggles were waiting for her. He leaned over the side to show her how to plug the radio line from the cap into the connection built into the side of the fuselage and ensure that she tied back her hair and tucked it beneath both the cap and jacket.

Once she was settled and buckled in, Merrik climbed into the rear seat and wiggled into his own flight jacket—a replacement for the one that had been burned on the last day of the war. He tugged on his own cap and goggles, plugged in the radio wire, and buckled the lap belt. Then he flipped the switch that turned on the power from the magical power cell. “Ready?”

“Yes!” The word rang through the radio. While he could only see the back of her head, he could hear the way she must be grinning ear to ear.

He switched on the aeroplane’s engine, feeling the comfortable hum of the magically-powered rotary engine as it spun up the propeller.

Once the propeller whirled satisfactorily, he motioned to the one man of the ground crew lingering on duty. The man hurried forward, grabbed the wheel chocks, and dashed out of the way even as the aeroplane began rolling forward.

Merrik eased the aeroplane to the end of the airfield before he gave the engine even more power. The aeroplane rumbled forward, jouncing and shuddering as if the ground was determined to shake the warbird apart.

Then the air firmed beneath the wings. The biplane grew light around them, jounced off the ground one last time, and Merrik tilted the nose toward the sky. The shaking ceased, replaced by the feel of the air lifting them from the ground.

Adry whooped and laughed.

Merrik grinned, his heart soaring along with his aeroplane, his future as bright and open as the sky before them.