CHAPTER 14

FÉOLAN sat outside his barracks, polishing his armor. He loathed it. It made him feel trapped, not protected, and the thought of doing battle in such a lumbering getup filled him with panic. Every strength and skill he relied on when fighting—speed, agility, precision, his keen eyesight and hearing—was hampered by the awkward weight of the metal casing.

Well. He wouldn’t be enduring it much longer.

Féolan reviewed in his mind all he had learned. He was relieved that the information he had gathered from the Stonewater Elves who had fought the Gref Orisé in the last war and passed on to the Verdeau Council was accurate. As far as he could tell, there were still no archers among the Gref Orisé. Their armor seemed little changed from the descriptions he had heard, and from his work at the smithy he guessed that, as before, it could be pierced by arrows but only from a heavy bow at close range. And the armor plates were still, for the most part, attached by leather, which could, potentially, be broken with a skilled or lucky thrust.

He knew more now. He knew there would be relatively few horsemen due to the difficulties of traversing the mountain passes. Nor would the Gref Orisé travel in armor, unless they anticipated attack. (And now he knew why!) When they came over the mountains, the conscripts would be carrying the heavy armor, saving the regular soldiers’ strength for fighting.

The business of the conscripts was new too, and Féolan wondered what use could be made of this information. The defending army, ideally, should concentrate its efforts on the trained soldiers who came in the second wave. But how could the front ranks safely be ignored or avoided? He felt pity for these men, who had been pouring into the camp over the last week and were kept in a guarded compound. Their fate was to be a Human shield, killed brutally for a cause that availed them nothing.

And he had learned, finally, what he had come here to discover. He’d been working at the forge when Commander Col himself strode past. One of his officers was having a breastplate made, and seeing him there Col stopped. “Oh, Ryvent. Be at my tent at four bells, strategy meeting. The last troops are arriving next week.”

“The other passes will still keep sentry forces as we discussed, though, Sir?” asked the unfortunate Ryvent.

He was rewarded with a fierce glare. “We discuss these matters in my tent because they are not for general broadcast, Ryvent. Control your mouth.”

Féolan had already guessed by the sheer size of the garrison that there would be a single, focused thrust through the mountains. Now he was certain.

It was time to go. He hadn’t learned anything of great import, but if he could get across the mountains in time he could, perhaps, tell the Humans where to gather their armies. And he had something to tell his own people too. If the Gref Orisé conquered the Basin, Elvish life would be forever changed. They might hide in the forest for a long time, but they would never again roam free and unhindered.

GABRIELLE LOOKED OUT over the battlements, shivering in her cloak. It was a still clear night, piercingly cold. Moonlight flooded silver over the snow. Another full moon. It was nearly two months since Sylvain’s birth. Despite the cold, winter’s grip on Verdeau was weakening. The days were longer and milder now, and on sunny days the icicles dripped, and the roads became treacherous with slush and mud. Soon snowmelt would begin in earnest, and the Verdeau armies would be on the move.

She thought back to that afternoon’s War Council. The troops, she had been told, would start to muster in a fortnight and begin the trek to the Krylian foothills by month’s end. They would take up their position before the mountains were passable.

“But where?” she had asked.

“That’s the question which has occupied us through this long winter,” said General Fortin. “We do not know where the Greffaires will cross over: at one of the three passes, or perhaps all. We must be prepared at each pass, yet dividing our forces increases the chance that they will break through and advance into Verdeau.

“The western pass, on our side at least, is narrow and treacherous. It would be most difficult to move a sizeable army through it. The Maronnais are posting a small sentry force there, with a standing request to Barilles to send reinforcements. The middle and eastern passes both seem possible. We will guard the Skyway Pass, the Maronnais the Eastern Gateway—again with a request to Gamier for additional troops. We also need to leave a sizeable force within Verdeau, in case we fail to stop them in the foothills.”

“What if they don’t come, after all this?” It was Poutin. “What if all this fuss and expense is for nothing?”

“Then we will have erred on the side of caution, and we will hope the people will forgive us,” said Jerome impatiently. “They will not forgive us, on the other hand, if we allow them to be slaughtered through carelessness.”

“They will come.” Gabrielle surprised herself by voicing what she had only meant to think.

“What makes you so sure?” snapped Poutin.

How she wished she had said nothing. “I have dreamed it,” she confessed, bracing herself for Poutin’s scorn. But the memory of the dream that had stalked her sleep through the long winter must have been reflected in her face because Poutin on the verge of ridicule, fell silent.

In her dream, Gabrielle struggled to join together a rising tide of dismembered bodies. They were everywhere, awash with blood—legs, arms, trunks and the worst, the heads, crying out and imploring her—and the more she tried to match them up and piece them together, the more they piled up around her. In the backdrop of her dream, the battle raged, unseen but terrifying, unquestionably real. She was sure now. The Greffaires were coming.

“Dominic stays with the reserve army, at the crossroads north of Chênier,” continued Jerome. “He is charged with the defense of Verdeau proper and the royal seat. Tristan and I will travel to La Maronne to meet the enemy. Gabrielle, it is time to call in the bonemenders who will serve our forces and decide who stays with the home force and who travels to the central pass.”

Gabrielle had nodded agreement. She had not revealed her intention to undertake the journey herself.

She would go, though. The only question was how.

NOW GABRIELLE LEANED over the north wall of the tower and found the silvery gleam of the Avine River. Pulling her cloak tight around her shoulders, she stared at the northern horizon, just a guessed-at shape of denser black against the night sky. Would Elf eyes see the contours of the land clearly, she wondered, even in the dark? Danaïs and Féolan had once pointed out a goshawk that was no more than a black speck in the sky. Gabrielle had thought they were pretending, teasing her, until they had proved their skill. Standing against the far wall of her clinic, each had read aloud from a heavy, leather-bound herbal that she held open against her chest. At that distance, all she could see was a meaningless blur on the page.

Gabrielle imagined the journey upriver, through the farthest reaches of La Maronne to the edge of the Krylians. She thought of the Greffaires, preparing for war, unseen behind the curtain of the mountains. And she thought of Féolan and his people, hidden away in the forests and valleys of the Maronnais highlands. Did they too prepare for war?

IN THE WARMTH of her chamber, Gabrielle lit a fire in the tiny stove, wrapped a blanket over her nightgown and sat herself on the thick patterned rug before the fire. There was no point in trying to sleep yet, not with her mind so full of questions.

A sudden wail from Sylvain drifted down the hall, followed by the muffled voices of his parents. Having Dominic’s family here had saved her, she thought. Justine and her baby, the two children, had provided the best possible distraction from her own disquiet. Madeleine and Matthieu blew through the castle like a couple of charming whirlwinds, full of life and laughter and endless demands. And Justine had always been a good friend.

But oh, she missed Tristan. He alone of her family, unimpressed by her grave demeanor and strange power, brought out her playfulness and sense of humor. She missed his teasing as much as she missed his warm heart. He had stayed to dinner tonight, shoveling in an astonishing amount of food. “Don’t they feed you at the barracks?” she had demanded.

“They feed us lots, but they don’t feed us well. Not like this,” he had explained. “I need to dig deep while I can.”

“Careful you don’t throw up like I did,” cautioned Matthieu.

“Never you fear, my lad. I can hold my grub with the best of them,” boasted Tristan, grinning through a mouthful of pheasant. He reached past his older brother and tickled Matthieu in the ribs, then had to tickle Madeleine under the table just to be fair. The two children squirmed and giggled. It would be a long time, perhaps, before they would share such a light-hearted family meal again.

And she missed Féolan, still. His memory was sharp as a shard of glass. Gabrielle went to the carved box and pulled out the tiny necklace her mother had given her. “You were wearing it when I found you,” Solange had explained. “I tried to save the shawl too, but the mice got into the trunk where it was stored.”

The necklace was silver, the finest work she had ever seen. Tiny oval links led to a polished green stone, small as a droplet, embedded in a delicate silver setting. Gabrielle held it now in the palm of her hand. It made her feel strange to feel it on her skin, to think it had once circled her own neck. Sometimes when she held it she imagined things—snatches of song, voices, a woman’s eyes—and would then put it away hurriedly, ashamed of the weakness that made her draw memories out of her own wishful thinking.