The Bonemender's Choice Read online

  “There must be some way to defend against them, Tris,” she declared. “They cannot be allowed to waltz in here and help themselves whenever they wish!”

  “My thoughts exactly, Rosie girl,” said Tristan.

  Three times a mother, she thought fondly, and he still calls me his “girl.”

  “We don’t have the troops to fortify the entire coastline,” he continued, “but there has to be some way...” His words were interrupted by the sound of small feet sprinting down the hallway, followed by a heavier tread and a reproving voice.

  “Papa! I knew I heard you come home!” A small towheaded boy burst into the room and hurled himself into Tristan’s lap as though for protection. He was followed by a breathless nurse with a curly-haired toddler on her hip.

  “Now, Romy, I told you to wait—I’m sorry m’Lord. He got away from me.”

  “He’s good at that, isn’t he?” Tristan agreed with a grin. He ruffled the boy’s hair, and five-year-old Jerome—named after his paternal grandfather, killed in that same war—smiled fetchingly at his nurse, certain now of his refuge.

  “That’s all right, Ginette. Leave the little monsters with us now.” Two-year-old Aurele had already squirmed and fidgeted half out of his nurse’s arms, and she set him down with relief.

  “You shouldn’t do that, Tris,” Rosalie said, when the nurse had closed the door behind her.

  “Do what?” Tristan raised innocent blue eyes to her, his leg never ceasing the violent mad-horse ride he was giving Romy, his voice pitched above the boy’s excited squeals.

  “Undermine poor Ginette like that. She has her hands full enough as it is, without you countermanding her orders every time the children manage to escape her.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  ALINE TOOK A TENTATIVE hold of a black crust of nightgown with the tweezers and tugged. The charred cloth did not come free. She had to work at it as Gabrielle had shown her; and as the bonemender had predicted, water did not soften away the worst of the adhesions. The first time she used the knife was the worst. Mira’s sudden cry of pain, the weak writhing of her legs as she squirmed to get away, brought the tears stinging to Aline’s eyes. How could that woman have left her to do such a heartless job, and she a trained bonemender?

  Her mother’s gnarly fingers grasped her arm. Blinking to clear her vision, Aline turned to her mother. Colette thrust her prominent chin toward Gabrielle. The beautiful young bonemender’s eyes were closed, her head bowed over the girls.

  “She’s an odd one, daughter, and no mistake. But she’s the only bonemender we have, and the only chance we have. We have to trust her.”

  “I know it. You don’t have to tell me.” Aline’s flare of anger brought her strength, and she made herself turn back to the grisly work. This time, she thought, the cutting brought a weaker reaction from her daughter, but whether because it pained her less or because her strength was on the wane she could not say.

  Bit by bit, the larger pieces of crusted skin, cinder and cloth were freed, leaving behind weepy raw flesh. The next step— cleaning away the smaller crusts—would be a little easier, and without any word spoken the two women sat back on their heels with a sigh.

  “I got the shakes,” Aline confessed, holding out a trembling hand. “I need a minute.” She got to her feet, dippered water from the iron kettle by the hearth, drank and splashed the remainder over her face.

  When she returned, her mother pointed her chin once more at Gabrielle.

  “Look at herself.”

  The bonemender was...panting, almost. As if she’d been running, or...Aline didn’t know what.

  “Is it a fit? What’s wrong with her?”

  Her mother shook her head, turning down the corners of her heavy lips in an expression of bemused doubt.

  “Blessed if I know. She’ll have to look after herself though. We need to finish up.”

  Aline turned back to the hateful task. Like peeling a burnt potato, she thought, and was nearly sick as the image collided with that of the girls as babies, chubby and smiley and with hair like twin puffs of milkweed.

  IT MUST BE because they were both outsiders, decided Derkh. That was why Yolenka had sought out his friendship.

  And that was, indeed, part of it. Derkh would have been astonished to learn that Yolenka also found him attractive—his pale skin, coal-black hair and broad chest almost as exotic to her as her sinewy golden grace was to him. Besides, Derkh intrigued her. There was more to him, she sensed, than a shy hardworking blacksmith. As there was more to her than a barmaid.

  Derkh had long ago given up feeling he needed to hide his Greffaire past, but he was not a big talker and once the bare bones of his story were told—how he was injured nearly to death during the invasion battle, how Gabrielle saved him and brought him home with her—Yolenka had to probe for every additional detail. One fact impressed her more than anything.

  “You know Elves!” she all but accused. “In all my traveling, I never see these people. I must meet!”

  She had none of the Maronnais caution about new people and experiences, Derkh noted. Nor did she suffer from his own tongue-tied awkwardness. Her story tumbled out in a long stream of talk, helped along by several glasses of a fiery liquid she called stitza.

  “I am dancer,” she began. “Tarzine dancer from”—a grand wave, vaguely southward—”over the sea. I dance with great troupe, famous in my land. We come here, go to every country, kings’ courts and biggest market cities. Is good here. They never see such dancing. The gold and silver comes in, is easy travel, no warlords. Riko is very happy.”

  “Riko?” Derkh ventured. Her man, he guessed gloomily.

  “He is boss of our troupe. He run everything, say what we do.”

  “What do you mean, warlords?”

  Golden eyes glared at him. “Is my story. I tell it. After will be time for warlords.”

  “Sorry.”

  Yolenka continued. “Tour is big success. Then in city called Gaudette, king say, ‘You go up to mountains where soldier camp is. Poor soldiers is bored, need a change’.” She sniffed, offended still. “Like we are no more than a game of reneñas. Was insult. Still, Riko say we go—he wants king kept happy.”

  She meant the sentry force at the mouth of the Skyway Pass, Derkh assumed. There was a permanent camp there now, maintained ever since the Greffaire invasion. But with each passing year, a new attack seemed less likely and the size of the force dwindled. He could well believe the men posted there in the empty lands bordering the mountains at the northern edge of La Maronne were bored.

  “So. Off to soldier camp, and we dance on bare ground not even combed smooth. I am waiting by side for my last”—she paused, searching for the Krylaise words—”well, there is big jump at the end, and as I am leaving a soldier reaches out for my sleeve and I am off my middle.”

  Balance, Derkh guessed she meant, but did not interrupt.

  “And Gervil, my partner, is showing off to the woman he wants to take to his bed, and so when I am not just where I should be he is not noticing this, and he fails the catch and I fall.”

  Golden eyes rested on Derkh’s face, eyes that knew bitterness but held not a shred of self-pity. Yolenka shrugged, a gesture that reminded Derkh of the flexing of great wings. A dancer. No wonder she was so...like she was.

  “I know when I land I will not dance again,” she said simply. “My knee was...fftt.” The plosive wordless sound said it all. “I come here, to Loutre, to be mended. The troupe goes home to Tarzine lands. I stay.”

  Derkh looked at Yolenka, confused. He had been drinking the stitza as slowly as he could, but the stuff went straight to his head, and he wondered if he had missed something. The story seemed to be suddenly finished, but he didn’t understand.

  “But why did you stay? Why not go back home with your people? Your knee seems all right now.” He remembered the first time she walked into the yard, the lithe power in her stride.

  The shoulders flexed again. “You have not seen o
ur dance. Is not just—” She rippled her body, a movement both languid and derisive. “Is full of leaps and”—she rotated a finger to show a spin or twirl—”at full run. I cannot do. So what then? Riko owns my work. What use is to him, a dancer with no jumps? And I do not want to be washing costumes and cookpots for troupe. Me—I was first of dancers! So. If I cannot dance, I am better living here. I look at my gold, offer Riko half to be free from him. He is happy to take it.”

  In the days that followed, Derkh and Yolenka learned more of each other’s homelands. Both were harsher lands than the Krylian Basin countries, but the resemblance ended there. To Derkh, raised under the absolute, strictly ordered rule of an all-powerful emperor, Yolenka’s portrait of a land where the king’s authority was secure only in a few densely populated and prosperous pockets, where lawless warlords fought over the outlying territories, was baffling.

  But her description of the warlords reminded Derkh where he had heard the word “Tarzine” before.

  “I thought the Tarzines were pirates,” he ventured. “At least I’ve heard of pirate raids on the coast here.”

  Yolenka’s reaction was immediate and ferocious. “I know them. Turga’s men.” She spat, and not delicately. “Turga’s land is small—he is squeezed between two strong warlords. So he claim the sea as his territory. Is pirate of Tarzine lands as much as yours.”

  GABRIELLE WAS BREATHING with the girls. Breath for breath, she matched their rhythm as her heart beat faster than any resting adult’s should. She had never done this before, but she knew it was working. She could not give them her air, but she could boost their faltering efforts with her own strength and steadiness.

  She wished she could take on the pain for them too, give them even a brief respite. She felt the echoes of their anguish as she worked and sent what strength she could spare to help them endure the sharp tearing as the dead crusts were cut away. But she was already spread so thin, working on two at once. Keeping them alive was her first task, and after that only healing would bring true relief from pain.

  She knew when the worst of the cleaning was over, as she knew when the honey oozed over the girls’ ravaged legs. She knew because she felt the changes in sensation as they gusted past her, but the knowledge registered in some deep part of her mind beyond words or thought. Her awareness was intent on keeping the tiny engines of the twins’ bodies running.

  One bell, then two, passed. The small hearts beat more strongly, and Gabrielle eased away from them, letting her own heart and breath return to normal. She gulped deep delicious lungfuls of air, relieved to see the girls holding steady on their own. Now she could send all her energy into healing their wounds. Four small legs filled with healing light as her mind coaxed the healthy flesh bordering their wounds to grow faster than it ever had before.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD MATTHIEU DesChênes sprinted along the narrow walkway that led from the mews to the scullery entrance of the castle and heaved open the oak door. Matthieu would have happily spent all day with the falconer had his tutor allowed it—there was a merlin in early moult, and a fierce new gyrfalcon being trained. But he had been given just a meagre dollop of free time at the end of the afternoon, and now he was late for dinner again and would be later still once he had cleaned up. Sneaking in the back way was only putting off the inevitable.

  “Stars above, Master Matthieu, you look like something to be plucked and eaten, not a young lord heading to table.”

  Too much to hope he might escape Corinne’s eye. He offered the head cook a sheepish grin, made a halfhearted effort to brush away some of the feathers and straw clinging to his jacket and dodged past her broad floury bulk through the scullery and into the servants’ hallway. From there it was a quick dash up the back stairs and through the hallway to his chamber.

  Matthieu pitied his sister Madeleine, who had turned thirteen last fall. She was “a young lady now,” his mother said and had to eat with the adults at the royal table every evening. Matthieu was glad he still got to eat in the small dining room with his little brother Sylvain and their nurse. Even after his birthday, just a few weeks away, he’d have a whole year of freedom from formal dinners.

  At least most nights he would. At every moon-change—new, half and full—the family dined together. It was “good training,” his mother said, and for those dinners he had to have clean clothes and proper manners.

  Matthieu threw a fresh jacket over his questionable tunic—if it doesn’t show, it doesn’t count, he decided—and scrubbed his face and hands over the basin. A hasty rake-down of his brown hair and he was ready.

  There were no guests, thank the gods. With a mumbled apology, Matthieu slipped into his seat, avoiding his mother’s disapproving stare. Grandma Solange had been speaking when he arrived—that meant his parents would have to let her continue instead of giving him a lecture. Another piece of good luck.

  Solange smiled at Matthieu, giving no sign of irritation. “I’m glad you’re here, Matthieu. There is some news you will want to hear.”

  Now her smile encompassed the entire family—her oldest son, Dominic, his wife Justine and their three children. “I have had a letter from Tristan and Rosalie. You know I have a rather big birthday coming up—my sixtieth—and while I am not so inclined to count birthdays anymore, Tristan insists it must be celebrated in style. They have invited us all to the coast for a visit and a birthday party. Gabrielle and Féolan too, if they can manage it.”

  “Oh, they must come!” blurted out Madeleine, dropping all pretence of worldliness and jiggling in her seat with excitement along with her brothers. “Everybody must come!”

  Queen Solange’s birthday was after FirstHarvest, Matthieu remembered. They would spend the best days of summer on the coast and have the biggest party ever. Well, except for Tristan’s wedding and his aunt Gabrielle’s. The double wedding party had become something of a family legend, but Matthieu had only been six at the time and had fallen asleep before it was over. This time, he vowed, he wouldn’t miss a single moment.

  GABRIELLE WORKED THROUGH that first night until a faint gray light crept through the tiny window of the cabin. Only then, when she was sure that the girls would survive for a few hours without her, did she allow herself to return to the world. She felt blurry and disoriented, as always when she first came away from a long trance. Gazing around the dark room, she could just make out Aline, slumped under a blanket in a nearby chair. Sleep had claimed her, though she had sat awake as long as she could.

  It was cold in the cabin. Gabrielle shivered as she stretched out her aching neck and tried to coax some blood into her feet, numb from the long hours of immobility. Then she stood and picked her way to the hearth, where the last embers still glowed red. As quietly as she could, she added wood to the fire and blew on the coals until a small tongue of flame licked up at the fuel. Soon warmth bloomed out into the room. Faintly, she heard the first birdcalls announcing the dawn—it always cheered her, the way birds began their morning songs in the dark, so certain of the coming sunrise. She wondered how Simon was faring, back in Stonewater.

  Gabrielle had been nearly six years in La Maronne, living in the Elvish settlement of Stonewater. It had not taken her long to realize that the small Human communities and scattered sheep-ranching homesteads of the Maronnais highlands had more need for her healing skills than the Elves. She began visiting the neighboring villages, traveling as she had sometimes done in Verdeau with her teacher Marcus, to offer her services. The people had been cautious at first, and shy of the Elvish scouts who traveled with her. But word soon got out of the marvelously skilled bonemender who lived among those queer Elf folk but had the Human touch. These days a steady trickle of Maronnais messengers arrived at Stonewater requesting her help.

  It was the girls’ father who had come to her this time. Simon’s rasping cough had preceded him into the healer’s lodge. One look at him—a man in obvious pain, hands swathed in loose bandages and soot-smeared from head to toe—had galv
anized Gabrielle and Towàs, the young Elvish healer she worked with, into action. Simon had waved them off—”it’s my children I’ve come for”—but in the end, Gabrielle had persuaded him to stay behind with Towàs. A laboring man’s hands were his living, and left untreated they could end up little more than useless scarred claws. She didn’t have to spell out what that would mean to his family.

  Simon had had the sense to let his neighbor Jacques come along with him. “He wouldn’t stay behind, though,” said Jacques. “Couldn’t stand watching his girls suffer, and nothing to be done for them.”

  Jacques had told her the story as they traveled to the village. It was an all-too common tale of fire unleashed.

  “Must ha’ been a spark from the hearth,” he said. “You know it’s mostly spruce wood in these parts, and it stays sappy in the knots. Makes for a crackly fire.”

  Did they not have a screen, wondered Gabrielle, and then chided herself. People around here made do without many things a princess of Verdeau took for granted. There was no need to assume it was carelessness that put sleeping children by an unscreened hearth.

  By the time the family had awakened, the cottage was already lost.

  “The parents were sleeping with the baby at the front of the house and were able to get him out safe,” said Jacques, “but the flames jumped up between them and the two little girls who slept together beside the fire.” Jacques, a burly man whose deep voice rumbled from behind a bush of black beard, raised a big red paw to his face. “When I think of them two...” The booming voice trembled and faded.

  Unable to get through the burning half-wall that separated them, the father had grabbed his axe from the wood pile and hacked his way through the outside wall to his shrieking children. “Simon were afraid of hitting ‘em with his axe by mistake, but I’m thinking the real danger was that the fire would catch the draft and rush through the opening he made. Course most of the village was there by then, and we had a line of buckets throwing water against the hole, for all the good it did. We all heard the crash when the roof rafter fell.”