Bonemender's Oath Read Free

won’t run back to Blanchette without telling me, like last time. I need to talk to you.”
    D ERKH 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 beenreversed 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?
    I N TRUTH , Q UEEN 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