Ruins of Camelot (14 page)

He lowered his arm slowly and seemed to watch her through the misty distance.  Finally, as the tips of the armies' pikes and the dull gleam of their helmets disappeared around the bend and over the hill, Darrick turned.  He urged his mount forwards.  A moment later, he was gone as well.

Gabriella stood under the awning and watched the empty thoroughfare.  Puddles made dull mirrors of the sky.  All around was the drab patter of rain dripping from the trees.  Eventually, Sigrid stepped forwards and peered up at the sky, squinting.

"You'll catch your death out here, Princess," she said stoically.  "Your guards will stand here with you all the day long, but I for one suggest we head back to the warmth of the castle.  I expect some hot tea is in order, would you not agree?"

Gabriella didn't move.  She stared at the distant place where the thoroughfare bent around a thick stand of trees.  It was hard to imagine that the Army had ever been there at all.

"
Come
, love," Sigrid said, putting an arm around Gabriella's waist.  "They are gone now, but they will return.  For now, your baby needs you to eat.  Come."

Gabriella drew a deep breath and nodded.  She turned away from the thoroughfare.

As she climbed into the waiting carriage with Sigrid right behind her, she unconsciously reached up and wrapped her hand around the falcon sigil where it hung beneath her cloak.  It was warm.

Please,
she prayed, silently and solemnly
, not even sure who she was praying to anymore
,
watch over him.  Let him be all right.

The carriage jerked as it began its return to the castle.  Gabriella stared unseeingly through the rain-streaked windows. 
Let him keep his promise to me,
she prayed fiercely, challengingly
.  Don't you dare… don't you
dare
… make him a liar.

The summer months crept past with infuriating slowness.  It was an unbearably hot year, reducing the valley brook to a mere muddy trickle and leaving the air still and dense even at midnight.  Gabriella busied herself as well as she could with learning the intricacies of imperial government as well as managing the constant business of being pregnant.  She found herself unaccountably weary by most afternoons, but retiring to her chambers was rarely any help.  The upper rooms of the castle were the hottest of all, with barely a breath of breeze to disturb the bed curtains.  Most days, she lay awake during these respites, stripped to her dressing gown and lying with one hand on the increasing swell of her belly, the other behind her head.  She would stare through the linens at the afternoon sunlight and think of Darrick.

Sometimes, she would pray for him.  Other times, she was afraid to, as if the very act of mentioning him might remind God of him with fearful results.  After all, awful things happened to people every day, apparently with divine permission.  According to the scriptures, God had seen fit to sacrifice His own perfect son for the good of fallen mankind, had He not?  What would one small soldier mean to Him for the sake of Camelot?  She knew her fear was not precisely pious—Bishop Tremaine would surely rebuke her for doubting God the Father's will—but this realisation did not change her fears.  Battle Master Barth had been as stout a believer as anyone, and he had still seen his wife and child taken from him, sacrificed to the plague some years earlier.  If anything or anyone could be blamed for the death of Rhyss, it might as well be the deadly plague that eventually led Barth to his traitorous enmity.  Or even the God that allowed such plagues to happen.

"Do not make him a liar," she would pray on those hot afternoons, muttering quietly on her bed.  It was as much a threat as a request.  "He's mine.  You gave him to me.  He promised he would return to me.  And I believed him… I believed…"

There was never any answer on those quiet, hot afternoons, but that was all right.  In the stillness of her own heart, she feared any answer that might come.  Silence was better.  She stroked the bulge of her belly, felt the baby growing there.  Darrick's baby.

"A boy, methinks," Sigrid said one evening in the castle rose gardens as Gabriella and she walked.  The roses were small and listless.  Drifts of wilted petals lined the path.  "You should choose a name from the royal lineage."

"I shall upon Darrick's returning."

"The baby will be born before the Army's scheduled return, Princess," Sigrid insisted mildly.  "Do you wish for the poor boy to go nameless during the intervening days?"

"I will not name him without Darrick," Gabriella repeated stubbornly.  "The baby may even wait until his father's return.  Sometimes, births are later than what the doctors say."

Sigrid nodded equably.  "It is possible, love.  If it were me, I would not count on such things."

"It is not you, Sigrid," Gabriella stated flatly.  "Your childbearing days are past you.  This one is mine, and I will choose to wait."

She instantly regretted her words.  She was worried and angry, tired and uncomfortable, but that did not give her permission to speak harshly to the woman who had
practically
raised her.

"I'm sorry, Sigrid," she said, stopping and turning to the older woman.  "That was callous of me.  Please forgive me."

Sigrid merely nodded.  After a moment, she smiled, and Gabriella thought that there was a hint of sadness in it.  Sigrid had no children of her own, after all.  They resumed their walk.

There were no more words on the subject that evening.

As the summer months unwound and began their descent into fall, the swell of Gabriella's belly became hard and pronounced.  The baby inside moved sometimes, both delighting and endearing himself to his mother.  She read stories to him when he was most active, stroked the shape of him beneath her skin when he was still.  She was not surprised that she had come to think of him as a boy based solely on Sigrid's assurance.  Sigrid was rarely wrong about such things.  Gabriella had long wondered if there was some faint witchiness hidden in the woman's blood.  Such things happened of course.  Witches and wizards were sometimes born spontaneously in the non-magical kingdoms.  Toph had said so himself.  Often, such people spent their whole lives ignorant of their abilities, experiencing only the vaguest magical expressions—an ability to divine the tea leaves, or to find water under barren land, or to predict sudden storms and spring floods.  It was exceedingly rare, of course, and even more mysteriously subjective, but if anyone had the hint of witchiness in her, it was Sigrid.

Thus, Gabriella believed her when she proclaimed the unborn baby a boy.  She had even, despite her stubborn refusal to do so, begun to consider names for him.  She was helpless not to.  There were plenty of royal names to choose from, and she systematically tried them on her baby, testing them to see how they might fit him.  None of them felt precisely right, not even in her mind, but she knew that she would find the perfect one when the time came.

Darrick would help her.

As autumn began to creep over the land and the time of the Army's scheduled return grew nearer, Gabriella tried to stay away from the academy cathedral.  It was difficult.  She allowed herself one visit per week, and she always pretended to herself that she was there on some unrelated errand—carrying a message to Professor Toph or inspecting the new students—but no one doubted her real reasons for visiting.

The candle gallery was eternally quiet, filled with the busy flicker of the thousands of tiny flames.  Her own candle burnt brightly, its fire leaping up nearly twice as high as those around it.  It was the baby inside her of course, adding his own heat to the flame of her candle.  Soon enough, he would be born, and his glow would separate from hers, awaiting the day when he would light his own candle.  It was a solemn thrill to see her own flame burning with that strange double light, but this was not the real reason she visited the candle gallery.  After observing her own flame and that of her family (including the cold, dark candle of her long dead mother), she would walk along the aisle until she came to Darrick's family vault.

His candle was there, flickering brightly every time, and each time she saw it, she exhaled a pent breath, flush with relief. 
Of course, Bree,
his voice would seem to say in her head, full of smiling confidence. 
Like I told you, this is where my heart is.  With you and with the baby in your womb…

A week before her baby was born, as the heat of summer finally broke over the land and leaves dropped from the trees, as if exhausted, Gabriella left the academy cathedral via the rear entrance and found herself drawn to the cemetery.

Rhyss's grave was bright with sunlight, carpeted with leaves so that the fresh dirt was gratefully hidden.  Her headstone was a simple obelisk, carved only with her name and a single short phrase: "aged eighteen years".

"I wish you were here, Rhyss," Gabriella said quietly.  The wind gusted, rattling the dead leaves and batting her words away.  She sighed.  "I'm lonely.  I rarely see Constance any more now that school is done and I've married.  Besides, it was always you who… who…"

She stopped, unsure how to finish the statement.  The words eluded her.  Rhyss would have known somehow, even without any explanation.  Perhaps that was what Gabriella missed the most, that bosom friendship that seemed to go beyond words and reason.  She remembered the night of Rhyss's death, remembered first thinking that it had been Constance who had arisen from her bedchamber and discovered the lurking Goethe.  Sometimes (though she hated herself for it), she wished she had been right.

"Rhyss," she said, looking up at the hard autumn sky.  "Rhyss, it all seems so empty without you, especially with Darrick away.  No matter what was happening, you were always so funny.  So amused.  It was almost as if you were immune to it all.  I need some of that now.  I hate that you had to go away.  I hate… I hate that they took you…"

Tears welled in her eyes, blurring the sky and the cemetery all around.  As always, Gabriella resented the tears.  She swiped at them and felt that familiar blend of misery and anger spreading inside her.  She glanced around the graveyard, her face settling into a hard frown, and spied something leaning against a nearby tree: a rusty spade, its wooden handle worn smooth with use.  She set off towards it, first at a stroll, shaking her head, and then falling into a resolute stride.  She snatched up the spade as she passed the tree and quickened her pace, heading towards the rear of the cemetery, the part beyond the hallowed earth of the cathedral.

"You bastard," she seethed through gritted teeth, tears still trembling in her eyes.  "Why?  How could you do such a thing?"

She reached the nearest of the apostate graves.  It was still fresh, partly covered with its own scatter of dead leaves.  There was no headstone, no way to know if it was the grave of Barth or Goethe.  It made no difference.  She hefted the spade over her head like an axe and brought it down as hard as she could, pounding the fresh dirt hard enough to make the handle vibrate painfully in her fists.

"You hideous
bastard
!" she shouted, giving vent to her rage.  Tears ran down her face, hot in the cooling breeze.  "You horrible, hateful blot of human rubbish!  I hate you!  Death is too good for you!  Come back so I can kill you all over again!  You took her from me!  She was a hundred times better than you, a thousand times more beautiful than any cur like you could ever know, and you took her
away
!  You murdered her, you beast! 
You murdered her!
"