He didn’t hesitate. He wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug, despite the crowd of onlookers, and held on for dear life. “Rosie,” he whispered. “Rosie, I’m so glad you’re here.” Her answering squeeze made it clear she was glad too. He released her, keeping hold of one hand. Such a small, neat hand. “Will you be staying for a while?” he asked. “Promise you won’t run back to Blanchette without telling me, like last time. I need to talk to you.”
DERKH SAT IN the little garden outside Gabrielle’s clinic, legs extended, head tipped back to the warm spring sun. He appeared relaxed, but his belly was tight with anxiety. As Derkh’s wound healed and his strength returned, worries for the future had begun to trouble him. What was he doing here? He was a Greffaire soldier. That Gabrielle had first healed and then befriended him did not change that fact. By rights, he should be a prisoner, not a guest.
A creak of hinges interrupted his brooding thoughts; craning his neck, he saw Gabrielle step through the clinic door behind him.
“Hi,” he said, the word feeling strange in his mouth. There was no real equivalent in Greffaire: either the greeting was more formal, addressed to a superior, or omitted altogether. “Come to check me again?”
Even in her plain mourning dress she looked radiant, and her quick smile washed over him like sunshine.
“I’ll take a look, yes, if I may. But unless you’ve had an unexpected setback, I’m thinking it’s time for you to stop being a patient. I’m having a room prepared for you upstairs, and you can take your meals with us from now on.”
Derkh’s face flushed dark. Here was something he had not expected. It had been shock enough to discover that Gabrielle was, in fact, of Verdeau’s royal family and to find himself in their very castle. Yet the DesChênes family, including the queen herself, had shown him nothing but kindness. Derkh’s family was of high enough rank in his own country, but even his father Col, who as high commander of the armed forces certainly attended tactical meetings with the emperor, would never have lodged in the palace nor spoken with the emperor’s family. Derkh was well aware that his fate would have been different indeed had the situation been reversed and he a Verdeau soldier captured in Greffier. At first he had been too full of dazed gratitude to feel anything else.
But this. To eat with them, and while they mourned for the king his own people had killed—it was unthinkable.
He didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t understand Verdeau protocol, the manners and conventions that lay behind his hosts’ easy manners. He only knew he must refuse.
“I think I should eat in the kitchen, with the servants,” he mumbled. That would be bad enough: all of them knowing where he came from, reminded of it every time he opened his mouth to speak, tolerating him only because of Gabrielle’s protection.
For a moment Gabrielle looked as though she had been slapped. Derkh hated himself for causing that look. Then she covered it with a warm concern he wished he could deflect. “If that’s what you want, Derkh, of course,” she said. Not happy, though hiding it. “But you are our guest, and more than welcome at our table. I wish you would join us.”
“I can’t,” he said. “Gabrielle, I can’t. Your mother. She should not have to...” Make polite talk with her dead husband’s enemy over breakfast, he thought, and could not find less vicious words to say.
Gabrielle’s calm voice rescued him. “It’s all right. I’ll tell the cook to make a place for you and to let you know when mealtimes are.” And then changing the subject: “Why don’t you take that bandage off and let the air at your skin? I’ll come back in an hour or so to redo it.”
She hesitated at the door to the clinic, turned back to face him.
“Derkh...I know it must be awkward for you here. But give it time. Things will work out.”
Will they? he wondered. How?
IN TRUTH, QUEEN Solange no more thought of Derkh as the enemy responsible for Jerome’s death than she would a Greffaire warhorse. She saw only an abandoned, sick boy, and her immediate instinct had been to gather him into the fold. She asked about him at dinner that night.
“I thought Derkh might join us tonight.”
“I offered,” Gabrielle said, still puzzled. “He seemed alarmed at the prospect. He asked to eat in the kitchen.”
“Maybe because we are in mourning,” Solange suggested. Jerome’s funeral rites were only a few days past, and his absence at the table still loomed large over their meals.
“Yeah, he’s what, maybe fifteen years old?” offered Tristan, his words emerging—barely—through a large mouthful of pheasant. Gabrielle didn’t necessarily want this view of his half-chewed dinner, but she was glad to see that her brother’s legendary appetite had returned. She’d been a bit worried about him. “When I was his age, I wouldn’t have wanted to sit with a bunch of strangers who just had a funeral. I’d have been afraid they’d be weeping all the time, and me not knowing what to do.”
Tristan had, in fact, done his share of weeping over Jerome’s death, including at mealtime. But his sense of loss was changing now into something less sharp, something held more quietly in the heart.
“Mama, Uncle Tristan is talking with his mouth full,” Madeleine pointed out. Tristan crossed his eyes at her and opened his mouth as wide as it would go, giving her such a cavernous view that Madeleine’s prim smirk dissolved into helpless giggling.
“Yes, Madeleine, and it’s equally rude to point out other people’s mistakes,” replied Justine, doing her best to ignore Tristan’s antics.
“You might try that little trick with Rosalie, Tris,” suggested Dominic. “It’s sure to impress her.”
Gabrielle joined in the laughter, but her mind circled back to Derkh. She wished she could talk to Féolan about the boy’s growing unhappiness. Oddly enough, he seemed to have a closer rapport with Derkh than any of them.
But Féolan was riding north, to his home in the Elvish settlement of Stonewater. “There will be a lament for our own fallen,” he had explained to Gabrielle. “I may already have missed it, but I must try. I do not even know who has been lost and who lives.”
CHAPTER THREE
TRISTAN’S eyes followed the watercourse of the Avine River as far south as he could see. Somewhere beyond the limits of his vision lay Blanchette and the ocean.
“It’s long since I’ve been to the coast,” he mused. “In my memory, the wind is always blowing. I remember feeling it would catch my clothes and lift me into the air like a kite.”
Rosalie and Tristan had ridden south to a lookout terrace that jutted out over the river some miles from Chênier. They had picnicked and chatted and teased each other, and if Tristan did not speak soon he would find himself back in the castle and this carefully engineered opportunity wasted.
Rosalie smiled. “You were smaller then, I expect. Though I still feel I might be carried off when the gale blows hard. But on calm days, the sun sparkles on the sea like a thousand diamonds. That makes up for the wind.”
“That’s how I feel when I look at you,” said Tristan, “like I might be carried off.”
He turned to her then, his blue eyes serious and searching. “Rosie, perhaps I should not speak of this in a time of mourning. But I know my father would take no offense, and I cannot wait longer. It has been in my heart for so long.”
Tristan paused, disconcerted at how difficult he was finding this. It was like leaping over a cliff, not knowing whether deep water or jutting rock lay at the bottom. Just say it, man. He steeled himself and tried again. “All the way home from the war I thought of you, of how badly I wanted to be with you,” he said, “needed to be with you. I was desperate with it. And at my father’s funeral, when I saw you there...it saved me. I love you, Rosie. I know your father is not... He thinks I’m irresponsible, not serious enough. But I’m not. I mean I am. I know what it means to be a family. And I—”
A small hand covered his mouth, cutting off his words. Brown eyes that sparkled like the sun on the sea held his.
�
��Yes. If what you’re trying to do is ask me to marry you, then yes—though I could grow gray as my father waiting for you to spit it out!”
STOPPING BY THE kitchen to speak to the cook, Gabrielle was surprised to see Derkh in the scullery, scrubbing out cook pots. She raised her eyebrows questioningly at the cook.
“Oh, him. I thought he was terrible snooty at first, you know. He never spoke a word to the one of us. But after a few days, he come to me private and asked if I had work he could do. I reckon he’s just shy to speak with that horrid thick tongue of his. Not much wonder, either.”
“No,” said Gabrielle. “Not much wonder.” Poor Derkh, she thought. I’ve been a neglectful host. There had been little time for entertaining anyone, and in fairness Derkh had made himself scarce since his discharge from the little infirmary. Still she felt a stab of remorse to find him up to the elbows in dishwater. Yet...she was proud of him too. Honest work was healthier than idleness.
“Can you tell Derkh?” she asked the cook. “Not now—after I’ve gone.” She didn’t know if it would shame him to be seen playing the pot-boy, and she wasn’t about to find out. “Just say I was looking for him and would like to speak with him. Tell him I’ll be in the clinic for the next while.”
DERKH EDGED INTO the little clinic and stood just inside the door. He felt ill at ease everywhere in Chênier, even with Gabrielle. She treated him just as she always had, like an equal. But for Derkh, her rank—and his—had opened a chasm between them so wide it was a struggle to speak across it.
“Did you want to see me, Gabrielle?”
“Hi, Derkh.” Gabrielle bent over the bottles she was filling and labeling. “I’ve hardly caught sight of you lately. You know, things have been so busy around here I’m afraid I’ve left you to fend for yourself.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Well, I wanted to ask you for a favor. I’m riding up into the hills tomorrow to gather herbs. Would you come and help? Mother worries when I go into the woods alone, and I don’t want to ask Tristan. I know he’s hoping to see Rosalie.”
Derkh hesitated, but the prospect of a ride and an afternoon away from the complexities of life in Chênier was too much to resist. “Sure. I’d like to.”
“Great. Meet me at the stables right after lunch. All right?”
Derkh nodded, then frowned. What if he arrived before Gabrielle and was questioned? Would they believe he had business with royalty? Would they even understand his speech? Just picturing it made his teeth clench. “Uh, can you tell someone at the stable I am coming?” he asked. “So I don’t have to explain why I am there?”
“Of course.” She looked down at her work once again, but Derkh had the uneasy feeling she was really looking inside of him. Her question, though, was casual. “Are they feeding you all right?”
“Sure,” he said. “The food is good. That cook, she looks mean, but she’s all right.”
Gabrielle smiled. “She used to make a great show of scolding Tristan when he was little and then slip him sweets and treats under the table. It was a little game—anything he wanted, as long as he didn’t ruin her reputation for an evil temper.”
Derkh laughed, and things became easy between them for a bit. “Our cook was something like that too,” he said. “Maybe it runs in their blood.”
THEY HAD WORKED for a good hour before Gabrielle broached any serious talk.
“Derkh, how is it for you here?” she asked. Her eyes, the green of a forest pool, rested on him.
His gaze slid away to scan the horizon. “I’m very grateful for everything,” he said. “People have been very kind.”
She waved a grubby hand impatiently. “I’m not fishing for gratitude. Look, you and I have been through too much together to resort to polite lies now.” This time his eyes met hers. He had been in agonizing pain from a sword to the gut, and Gabrielle on the verge of collapse, when his father had thrust her into Derkh’s tent in the Greffaire camp. Commander Col had offered his prisoner a bargain: her life in exchange for his son’s. The bargain had meant nothing to Gabrielle, but the suffering of a boy too young to have taken such a wound called to her healer’s heart. In the grueling effort to pull him back from the brink of death, an unlikely friendship had been born.
Gabrielle pondered the coincidence or fate that had brought them together a second time. Derkh, abandoned by the retreating Greffaires, had been found by the Elvish army, his wound infected, his life once more in danger. They had called on Féolan to translate, and Féolan, putting two and two together, had taken Derkh straight to Gabrielle’s healing tent. She had not thought twice about caring for him—and bringing him home—alongside Verdeau’s wounded.
“I’m asking as a friend,” said Gabrielle. “I can see you are troubled. Will you not speak your mind to me?”
Derkh groped for words. “It’s just...what happens next? I know I am lucky just to be alive, but what am I to do now? I don’t see it.”
“You will always be welcome with us, Derkh.”
“But I cannot always be the pet Greffaire, lounging around the royal castle of Verdeau.” The words sounded harsh in his Greffaire dialect.
Gabrielle rocked back on her heels and considered him. She had thought of Derkh as a boy, she realized, when in Greffier he had already taken on the role of a man. And his life had been ordered, defined. Now he had no place. “In strange seas without a compass,” she murmured and smiled at the memory.
“My father used to say that,” she explained, and was sorry to see him wince. “Derkh, you did not kill my father,” she said firmly. “You cannot take my every fond reminiscence as an accusation of guilt.”
“Sorry,” he muttered. “He was right, though. That is how I feel.”
“Do you have any training? In a trade or skill, I mean?”
“My father was the commander of the armed forces. I was trained for war,” he said bleakly. “I can hardly go join your army.”
“No. And I can hardly promise you a rank to match your father’s. But I thought that with a trade you could at least be your own master and not under the thumb of an evil-tempered cook.”
He looked startled. “You know about that?”
“Yes. And it was well done, to offer your labor.”
They worked in silence for a while. Then Derkh, with a visible effort, spoke up again.
“You will marry Féolan and live with him, won’t you? In Stonewater.”
Gabrielle blinked. “Yes,” she said. “We will not wed, probably, until next summer, about a year from now. But this year I will spend the late summer and autumn there, and the winter here with my mother.”
“I was just wondering. I don’t want to be any bother. But...well, I wondered if I might come along. It’s not right for me to be in the castle, now I’m not sick or anything, but with the way I talk I can’t really...,” he trailed off, red-faced. Gabrielle could see how much it had cost him to make the request.
“Derkh, if it was only up to me I would say ‘yes’ without even thinking about it,” she began.
“That’s all right,” he said hastily. “I understand.”
“No, you don’t. You had better let me finish. Féolan would welcome you too, I am sure. But Stonewater is an isolated community. They keep their presence almost secret, and I do not know them well enough to know if there are rules about bringing visitors. I only hesitate because we might have to get permission first.”
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t realize. We walked all through La Maronne and half of Verdeau without a single checkpoint, so I thought...”
“You thought right. We have free access in and out of our towns. But the Elves keep themselves separate from us. Until the Greffaire invasion, most people didn’t even know they existed.”
Now he was openly confused. “What did you call them?”
Gabrielle realized her oversight. Of course he doesn’t understand, she thought. He was feverish and ill through the invasion and long afterward.
She started again. �
��Derkh, Féolan is not Human. He and his people are Elves. I am half-Elf myself, as it turns out. My parents adopted me as a foundling, and they never suspected I was...” Her voice trailed away. Gabrielle still could not think of herself as “not Human.”
“Elves... Aelvich?” He laughed. “What, the unseen people of children’s tales who steal things and fly away on the mist?”
“They may have become that in the lore of your people,” said Gabrielle. “In real life they are like Féolan. It was an Elvish army that came upon your forces from the rear.”
Derkh’s expression changed to wonder. “The tall, silent warriors. And the men who found me in the cart,” he said. “I can picture them now. They did look different.”
Gabrielle nodded. “You don’t notice it so much when there is only one. If you go to Stonewater, you will see... But Derkh, here is the thing: They don’t speak Krylaise, not even a variation. Their language is entirely different. If it is permitted, you can come and stay with us as long as you like. It is a good place to heal and think. But I do not think you will find a real home there.”
CHAPTER FOUR
A single, haunting voice soared over the dark waters of the lake, sending the opening bars of the Lament for the Dead to meet the rising moon. Amplified by the water and the stillness of the night, the sound seemed to rise out of the silver light of the moonbeam itself.
Two thousand and more Elves stood strung along the shoreline, yet the silence was unbroken but for that clear, sorrowful voice. Féolan let the music wash through him. It sank into them all, linking soul to soul so that when at last the lament swelled with the voices of the full choir it was as though the pain and the beauty were pouring forth from every person there. Long they sang. The moon rode high in a sky full of stars before the haunting music died away, leaving behind one liquid line of melody that floated out over the water and faded into the night.
Though many faces shone with tears and some among the bereaved sobbed openly, the silence held. The naming of the fallen, the paying of respects, had all been seen to earlier. But it was the lament that most truly spoke their sorrow and most deeply comforted. Now, as they made their way back along the shadowy pathways of Moonwash settlement, none wished to break the spell it had woven.
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