Bonemender's Oath Read Free Page A

puzzled. “He seemed alarmed at the prospect. He asked to eat in the kitchen.”
    “Maybe because we are in mourning,” Solange suggested. Jerome’s funeral rites were only a few days past, and his absence at the table still loomed large over their meals.
    “Yeah, he’s what, maybe fifteen years old?” offered Tristan, his words emerging—barely—through a large mouthful of pheasant. Gabrielle didn’t necessarily want this view of his half-chewed dinner, but she was glad to see that her brother’s legendary appetite had returned. She’d been a bit worried about him. “When I was his age, I wouldn’t have wanted to sit with a bunch of strangers who just had a funeral. I’d have been afraid they’d be weeping all the time, and me not knowing what to do.”
    Tristan had, in fact, done his share of weeping over Jerome’s death, including at mealtime. But his sense of loss was changing now into something less sharp, something held more quietly in the heart.
    “Mama, Uncle Tristan is talking with his mouth full,” Madeleine pointed out. Tristan crossed his eyes at her and opened his mouth as wide as it would go, giving her such a cavernous view that Madeleine’s prim smirk dissolved into helpless giggling.
    “Yes, Madeleine, and it’s equally rude to point out other people’s mistakes,” replied Justine, doing her best to ignore Tristan’s antics.
    “You might try that little trick with Rosalie, Tris,” suggested Dominic. “It’s sure to impress her.”
    Gabrielle joined in the laughter, but her mind circled back to Derkh. She wished she could talk to Féolan about the boy’s growing unhappiness. Oddly enough, he seemed to have a closer rapport with Derkh than any of them.
    But Féolan was riding north, to his home in the Elvish settlement of Stonewater. “There will be a lament for our own fallen,” he had explained to Gabrielle. “I may already have missed it, but I must try. I do not even know who has been lost and who lives.”

CHAPTER THREE
    T RISTAN’S eyes followed the watercourse of the Avine River as far south as he could see. Somewhere beyond the limits of his vision lay Blanchette and the ocean.
    “It’s long since I’ve been to the coast,” he mused. “In my memory, the wind is always blowing. I remember feeling it would catch my clothes and lift me into the air like a kite.”
    Rosalie and Tristan had ridden south to a lookout terrace that jutted out over the river some miles from Chênier. They had picnicked and chatted and teased each other, and if Tristan did not speak soon he would find himself back in the castle and this carefully engineered opportunity wasted.
    Rosalie smiled. “You were smaller then, I expect. Though I still feel I might be carried off when the gale blows hard. But on calm days, the sun sparkles on the sea like a thousand diamonds. That makes up for the wind.”
    “That’s how I feel when I look at you,” said Tristan, “like I might be carried off.”
    He turned to her then, his blue eyes serious and searching. “Rosie, perhaps I should not speak of this in a time of mourning. But I know my father would take no offense, and I cannot wait longer. It has been in my heart for so long.”
    Tristan paused, disconcerted at how difficult he was finding this. It was like leaping over a cliff, not knowing whether deepwater or jutting rock lay at the bottom. Just say it, man. He steeled himself and tried again. “All the way home from the war I thought of you, of how badly I wanted to be with you,” he said, “
needed
to be with you. I was desperate with it. And at my father’s funeral, when I saw you there...it saved me. I love you, Rosie. I know your father is not... He thinks I’m irresponsible, not serious enough. But I’m not. I mean I am. I know what it means to be a family. And I—”
    A small hand covered his mouth, cutting off his words. Brown eyes that sparkled like the sun on the sea held his.
    “Yes. If what you’re trying to do is ask me