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 our 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.