The Bonemender's Choice (2 page)

“What are your daughters’ names?” she asked gently. If she needed to call to a fading soul, a name might make all the difference.

It was the grandmother who answered. “This one here is Mira, the other Marie.”

Gabrielle had to smile. “All right then, we’ll start with...”

She looked at the two small faces, alike as two chicks. How could she choose? While I help one, the other could slip away, she thought, and that was beyond bearing. She slipped her fingers around each girl’s skinny wrist, counting first one heartbeat, then the other. The same.

In fact...She checked again. Yes, their heart rates were almost perfectly synchronized. She watched the girls’ backs rise
and fall, matching each other breath for breath. She caught her own breath in sudden excitement.

They were twins. As close to one body as you could get in two people. She would work on them both as one. If they were going to live, they would live together.

Gabrielle sat herself by the girls’ heads and laid a hand on each neck.

“Give me time to strengthen them before you start—say a quarter-bell,” she told her helpers. “Then get started.” And she closed her eyes, summoned the light and allowed her mind to flow into two twin sisters named Mira and Marie.

E
ARS RINGING WITH
the clash of his own hammer, sweat pouring down his bare chest from the fierce heat, Derkh was in a world to himself. He loved it when he got to make something that took real craftsmanship—something beyond the stirrups and horseshoes, plowshares and hoe ends that filled his days.

He had been working on this set of fine hunting knives—a short, back-curved skinning blade with a built-in gut hook and a long straight blade for killing and disjointing—for days now. Commissioned by a well-to-do sheep rancher for his son’s fourteenth birthday, it was a job that, done right, could bring in more. Derkh meant to do it right.

He plunged the skinning knife, still red with heat, into the bucket. Water hissed and steam billowed. It was a little drama he had reenacted countless times, one he always enjoyed.

Only when he pulled the blade out and squinted along its length did he notice the woman.

Not that she was easy to miss. He remembered her instantly— she had served him ale at a local inn, and he had marked how she held herself like a queen despite her load of mugs and the foam dribbling down her arms.

She stood now in the entranceway to the smithy, watching him coolly. Bronze hair, tawny skin, amber eyes—if a gold statue
came to life, Derkh thought, it would have her coloring. Then she walked—no,
prowled
—across the yard toward him, and any resemblance to a statue vanished. She was like a great tawny cat, lithe and beautiful and dangerous.

“Help you?” Derkh armed sweat from his forehead and tried to look self-assured.

She smiled, showing perfect white teeth. “You are young one. Is good.”

“I’m sorry?” Her words were heavily accented, much stronger than his own telltale Greffaire overtones.

“Mistress say, deal with young one. Old smith is not much worth.”

Derkh winced. It was true his master’s work was becoming sloppy. His eyesight was not what it had been, nor his steadiness of hand. These days Derkh tried to steer Theo toward “minding the shop,” but he wasn’t always successful.

“What can I do for you?”

Again the smile. Gods, it was blinding.

“You can fix?” She held up a bridle, or rather a former bridle. Derkh took a look. Been left outside, by the looks of it. Half the bit and its hardware were rusted—that would have to be replaced. Couple of bridle rings too. The other side was fine though, and the leather just needed a good cleaning and oiling.

“Yes, of course,” he replied. “It won’t be that much cheaper than getting a whole new bridle though—I’ll need to replace about half the fittings.”

She shrugged. “They want to fix. Is not my say-so.”

“All right. I can have it done tomorrow afternoon.”

Business concluded, his self-consciousness returned. He felt
naked, truth to tell, standing in front of this glory of a woman. It didn’t help that he
was
half-naked, stripped to the waist but for the leather apron and forearm cuffs that provided some protection from the sparks that showered from his hammer.

He risked a glance. She hadn’t moved.

“Is there something else?”

Those strange eyes pinned him. He had never seen eyes that color in all his life. They reminded him now of an eagle’s, fierce and golden. He felt, fleetingly, like a raptor’s prey before the strike.

“Your name.”

“What?”

“Your name,” she repeated impatiently. “What is name?”

“Oh, sorry. Derkh,” he mumbled. Eternal night, you sound like a half-wit, he scolded himself. Speak up.

“My name is Derkh,” he shouted. I
am
a half-wit, he despaired and gave up.

“I am Yolenka.” Yolenka flashed him another brilliant smile, a smile to bless the entire earth and send a flash of heat right down to his toes. “I am happy to be meeting you.”

Y
OLENKA RETURNED THE
next afternoon to pick up the bridle, and later that week with a couple of saucepans needing new handles and again to pick them up. Each time she managed to arrive when Derkh was alone in the smithy, and each time she stayed longer than the time before. He began to get over his natural shyness and look forward to her visits. But it never occurred to him that she was actually interested in him until the night he found her waiting in front of the shop at the end of the day.

“You are finished with working?” she demanded.

“Yes,” he agreed, wishing he’d washed up more thoroughly. He always rinsed off and stuck his head under Theo’s pump before heading home, but only a proper bath could really wash away a day at the forge.

“I have night free also,” she announced, with a delighted flash of teeth. “You eat with me!”

“H
ELLO, MY BEAUTY
.” Tristan’s extravagant kisses—one for Rosalie, one for the gentle swell of belly where their third baby was growing—would have fooled almost anyone. They didn’t fool her. His mind was somewhere else.

“What is it, Tris?”

Tristan, still wrapped about her middle, gave her a startled look and straightened. “Gods above, Rosie. I pray I never have some evil secret to keep from you. You are like a truth-sniffer from the old tales!”

Rosalie grinned, triumphant. “Well?”

“Well, I think I’d like to greet my wife and get all the way into my house before plunging into the news.”

He got a little way in—as far as the first salon—before the interrogation continued. This time he didn’t hide his concern.

“It’s these raiders, Rosie. There’s been another strike down the coast—that’s three in a month, after such a long time with next to none. And it wasn’t just a quick hit on the richest houses—they stripped Côte Noire village of every tool, coin and head of livestock to be found. I have a feeling we’re heading into another spate of trouble, like Dominic had a few years before the war.”

Tristan had fought in that brief war when Greffier, the
country north of the Krylian Mountains, had invaded the Krylian Basin seven years before. That event had forever separated his life into “before the war” and “after the war.” Rosalie, though, had spent that year safely on the coast with her father. The war barely seemed real to her. Tarzine pirate raids, however, had been part of the backdrop of her childhood. Though the raiders had never been bold enough to raid the merchant warehouses at Blanchette, preferring the less rich but defenseless villages and towns nestled along the Verdeau coast, the threat of a pirate attack had been a favorite subject of conversation among the wealthy citizens who often sat at her father’s table.

At the time, her father’s assurances that the pirates would not harm
her
had been enough. Now Rosalie’s heart went out to the villagers who had endured the terror of the attack and who might have lost loved ones as well as their means of livelihood.

“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.”

A
LINE 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.

I
T 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.”