The Bonemender (7 page)

“I will think on it, Féolan. Thank-you for inviting me.”

“Gabrielle.”

She felt Féolan’s intensity, glanced up and met his eyes. Luminous gray, like rain, like an ocean shot with sunshine. He held her gaze.

“I have my own reasons for asking you to return with me. My heart is strongly drawn to you. If it is not a fool’s hope that you share my feelings, I would love the chance to know you better.”

His fingers curled around her hand and lifted it. His lips brushed her knuckles.

She did not know that her whole body leaned toward that kiss. She only knew that she was suddenly in his arms, that to be held by him was like water in the desert. His hands were in her hair, his breath against her cheek. Then he kissed her, and she learned that the poets were right, after all.

It was a long time before he drew back. “I don’t know much about the love customs of Humans,” Féolan admitted, “but my diplomat’s training is warning me to slow down.”

Gabrielle nestled into the curve of his arm as they sat together. She was too full of her own happiness to notice the troubled undertone in Féolan’s mood. He rested his cheek against her hair, tightened his arms around her and sighed.

“Of all the dangers I thought to face in my travels among the Humans, falling in love was not one of them,” he confessed. It seemed a joke, but his voice was serious.

“Why danger?” Gabrielle asked. “Is it forbidden among your people?” Was there some anatomic difference that would cause difficulty? she wondered uneasily. Apart from the ears, she hadn’t noticed anything remarkable about Danaïs.

“No, not forbidden. Discouraged, rather. There are old stories and songs about love between Humans and Elves, of course. Mostly cautionary tales.”

“But why?” she asked again, turning her head to peer into his face.

“Well,” he said. He didn’t like to talk about it, that much was clear. “Because, you know, of the difference in life spans.”

“I don’t know, Féolan,” she flared. “I don’t know anything about your people. Tell me.”

He swallowed. “I’m sorry, Gabrielle. I thought you would know. I guess I forgot how long it’s been that Elves have kept apart from men.”

He spoke gently now. “You see, we live a lot longer than you do. So an Elf who falls in love with a Human is doomed to lose her.”

“How much longer?” she asked bluntly. “How long will you live?”

“Five, maybe six hundred years.”

Gabrielle’s face went blank. “Five ... ,” she whispered. A roaring in her head made it impossible to think. Then the horror of it rose in her as she saw the inevitable course of lives so hopelessly mismatched. She thought she might be sick. A kind of rage swept through her. She struggled to her feet.

“Five hundred years!” she shouted. “Are you mad? How can you speak to me of love? To touch me like that!” She turned and ran.

Blundering through thick brush, thinking only to be safely out of earshot, Gabrielle finally sank against a huge, gray, beech trunk. Only now, in her bitterness, did she know how deeply she had wanted this man.

She had been given a last chance at love, only to have it shrivel and die in her hand. Drawing up her knees, she buried her face in her arms and sobbed.

“G
ABRIELLE.
”

Feolan sat silently beside her, as though trying to gain the trust of a wounded animal. She had only gradually become aware of him, and she was too worn out to send him away. She just stayed there, curled into her own arms, pretending he wasn’t there. He hadn’t moved either, not until her tears had run dry.

Now he had spoken, and there was no more pretending. She lifted weary, red-rimmed eyes to his. “Féolan, please.”

“Gabi, I’m so sorry to have hurt you.” He had never called her that. No one but Tristan had ever called her that. “But I don’t understand. I know this is a shock, but is it so impossible?”

“Of course it’s impossible.”

“But why? I mean, why for you? We could still have a lifetime together—one of your lifetimes. How is that different from what you would have with another Human?”

Gabrielle stared at him. He didn’t see it. She had told him to spell things out for her. Now she would have to do the same.

“Féolan, think about it. I will not be like I am now until the day I die. I am twenty-seven years old. In thirty years I’ll be gray and stiff in the joints. For the last twenty years of my life I’ll be a wrinkled, bent, frail old woman, and you will be in the full flush of youth. You won’t be my lover—you’ll be my nursemaid.”

Féolan bowed his head. He sat in silence for a long while, and when he looked up, he did not hide the wetness on his cheeks.

“Yet would I walk with you to the end, if you would have me.” Mother goddess, help me, thought Gabrielle wildly. A fist clenched her heart.

“No, Féolan,” she finally managed. “It would turn to bitterness. Better to stop now.” It came to her that these might be their last private words, and she reached for the strength to speak her heart.

“But I would take back my angry words. When I am old and on my deathbed, I will remember that once a shining Elf-lord loved me, and that will bring me joy.”

Féolan hitched a deep breath, nodded, wiped his face with the back of his hand. He tried to smile. “The others will be wondering if we’ve been attacked by a boar.”

“Will you make some excuse for me? I need to be alone for a while. I’ll make my own way back.”

Féolan reached out and took a lock of her hair between his fingers. Sliding his hand down its length, he brought it to his lips and kissed it. Then he was gone.

G
ABRIELLE
spent the next two days as far away from Féolan as she could. The sight of him filled her with such longing, she simply did not know how to be in the same room. Gone from the castle by dawn, she spent long hours in the hut where she dried and prepared herbal remedies or working in the Chênier clinic with Marcus. Nights she lay awake, fighting her heart.

Now she stood at the castle gate with her family, ready to bid their guests farewell. She squared her shoulders, grasping at the shreds of her composure and knew it would fail her.

Danaïs had kissed Solange, thanked Jerome gravely and bear-hugged her brother. Now he came to Gabrielle, soft brown eyes filled with gentleness.

“You will be in our hearts always.”

Tears welled up and she could do nothing to stop them. Danaïs opened his cloak and enfolded her, pulling her close. An unlooked-for sense of strength and peace stole into her. A gift, from him to her. In her need, she did not wonder or question but simply accepted. In a while she stood and gave him a shaky smile.

“There, beautiful healer. One small thing can I do for thee.” Danaïs touched his breast and turned to his horse.

Féolan. He stood before her, eyes dark with sorrow. I cannot hold you, Gabrielle thought, willing him to understand. I cannot hold you, or I will never let you go. Féolan put his hand to his heart and then held out his palm. Her hand reached out to meet his and in that gesture were all the words neither one could say. Féolan reached into his pouch, pulled out a folded parchment and tucked it into her hand. “If you ever need me,” he whispered, and kissed her lightly on the brow.

Gabrielle stood watching the riders until they were out of sight. The tears flowed unheeded down her face as the urgent beat of her heart pleaded with her to follow, now, before it was too late. With a last brief appearance on the farthest rise in the road, the tiny figures vanished.

H
ARVEST
time came and went; the leaves changed color and began to fall—and the scouts did not return. Instead there came, on a brisk October day that promised night-frost, an envoy from La Maronne.

Jerome had bid his scouts stop first at Castle Drolet in Gaudette and deliver a message to the king, knowing that any invasion would surely advance through one of the passes in Maronnais territory. The reply the envoy bore was brief but encouraging:

Greetings Verdeau,
   Having received your news of impending Greffaire attack, we thank you for this warning. Though skeptical of your source, we sent scouts to join your own in seeking confirmation. Their continued absence is ominous, if not conclusive. La Maronne musters for defense.
   We seek a military alliance for the protection of the Krylian Basin and request a meeting to discuss these matters. Your town of Ratigouche would be convenient to both, also to Barilles and Gamier if they will come. Please confirm your agreement and name the date.

King Drolet II
La Maronne

Jerome’s measured voice hung in the air of the study as he read aloud from the parchment. Dispensing with formality for this impromptu meeting, the king opened discussion with a single word.

“Well?”

“Drolet is not stupid,” exclaimed Tristan. “He knows La Maronne will be hit first, and that if the Greffaires get through to our territory he will hardly be in a position to come to our aid. So his ‘military alliance’ amounts mainly to everyone helping him.”

“That’s true,” said General Fortin. “But it doesn’t matter. There will be no peace for Verdeau, or anyone else, if La Maronne is occupied by the Greffaires. Our own defense starts in the Maronnais passes.”

“They will still pay more than anyone, Tristan,” Gabrielle pointed out quietly. “They will pay in blood.”

G
ABRIELLE HAD NOT
allowed herself to play the lovelorn wretch. The ache in her heart was like a wound that crusts over but never really heals. Nights were the worst. A sudden memory as she hovered near sleep was enough to break the thin skin and start the wound bleeding again, and she awoke more than once with her pillow drenched in tears. But she could not float through life wan and tragic; she was a bonemender, and people needed her. Soon, they might need her even more. She threw herself into her work, dogging through long days that left her too tired to dream.

General Fortin had agreed that the bonemenders should be mobilized along with the military; and so, after all, Gabrielle had become involved in Verdeau’s war plans. Before harvest-time she
had helped her father draft a decree directing all bonemenders to prepare and store extra quantities of healing herbs, bandaging and other supplies, and to provide a portion of these to their local garrison. Each garrison had been asked to select a corps of men to be trained in the basics of wound treatment—”so at least they don’t bleed to death being carried off the field,” as Marcus grimly put it—and Marcus had helped Gabrielle to reach bonemenders throughout the country to provide this training.

Just before winter set in, Dominic came up from Blanchette, while her father and General Fortin traveled to Ratigouche to meet with the Maronnais. Gabrielle sat down with her brother to decide how many bonemenders should travel with the defending armies and where they should be deployed.

“It’s sheer guesswork,” she sighed, waving at their careful lists. “Only your men, Dominic, have ever even been in a battle and those were only pirate raids. None of us has any idea what to expect.”

“We know enough to expect it to be bad,” said Dominic heavily. “If there is war, Gabrielle, I fear we could empty the country of bonemenders, and it would not be enough. Yet some must stay. It’s not only soldiers who suffer in wartime.”

But not me, she vowed silently. She didn’t know how she would overcome her family’s certain opposition, and she felt nothing but dread at witnessing the carnage of a battlefield. Yet she knew in her heart that she must go. Three times now the nightmare had come, breaking through fatigue and heartache to jolt her awake in horror. It was terrible, what she saw in the black of the night, but she felt it as a summons. Gabrielle’s gift, unique among the bonemenders, would be needed. There was someone she was going to have to save.

T
HE SNOW FELL
, and autumn’s feverish preparations cooled into a long uneasy wait.

“It doesn’t seem real anymore,” Gabrielle confessed to her mother a few days after Winter Solstice. “We sit here by the fire drinking tea, and I wonder sometimes if I imagined the whole thing. Or if this is a dream, this dark, brooding winter.”

It was no dream, though, that Tristan had become a soldier. He trained, and stayed, with the Chênier garrison now and was home only for tactical meetings and relief days.

“He’ll be an officer by spring,” Fortin had reported to Jerome and Solange. “Not for his birth, but for his own merit. I feared he might be a little flighty, you know, but he is serious when he needs to be, and he’s not afraid of hard work. He’ll be the kind of leader men follow out of love, not fear.”

With Tristan away and the bonemenders sorted as well as might be, Gabrielle found time heavy on her hands. She tried to keep busy with her patients and continued to help her mother manage the castle affairs, but the long quiet evenings crawled by. She was lonely. The pursuits that had always brought her comfort and contentment—music, wandering the hills with Cloud—now brought memories that made her lonelier still.

Relief came in the form of a messenger from Blanchette: Dominic’s wife Justine was expecting another baby in about a month and insisted that Gabrielle midwife the birth. The whole family would be arriving in a few days and staying until snowmelt. Gabrielle was delighted.

Solange was glad too. She had observed the unfolding romance between Gabrielle and Féolan almost before they were aware of it themselves and had felt in her heart that this one, strange though he was to her, was right for her daughter.
She didn’t know, still, quite what had gone wrong. The night the Elves had left she had held her daughter while she wept, but Gabrielle had said only that they were “too different.” And perhaps they were. What did Solange know of Elves? She hadn’t thought they still existed. She did know that Gabrielle was hiding a sadness that seemed to have sunk into her bones. A baby to birth and children to brighten up the house would do her good.

The two women set to work, ordering extra food, overseeing the preparation of two guest rooms, bringing Tristan’s old cradle down from storage and having a new down ticking made for it. Solange went into town to buy special wool for baby clothes—it came from sheep raised in the Gamier foothills. The straight silky fleece was triple-washed and carded until it was soft as a cloud. New babies always set her to knitting like a fiend. Gabrielle wasn’t much good with needlecrafts—at the age she should have been perfecting her skill, she had been apprenticing with Marcus instead. But she stocked in the practical things they would need for the birth and combed the shops for little toys and treats for the two older children. Her baby gift would wait until she had met the newborn babe.