Chapter 7 #2
Marian hovered nearby, clearly uncertain what to do with her unusual charge. Elodie was about to attempt a conversation when two boys of perhaps eight or nine came barrelling through the hall, nearly knocking over a serving girl in their haste.
“—said he took down three men at once!”
“That’s nothing. My brother says the Silent Reaper once killed ten bandits without making a sound.”
“He can’t make sounds, stupid. That’s the whole point.”
“I know that! I meant—oh, forget it. Come on, they’ll be starting soon!”
The boys disappeared through a door at the far end of the hall, still arguing.
The Silent Reaper. Lord Gareth.
Elodie was on her feet before she’d consciously decided to move.
“My lady?” Marian called after her. “Where are you—”
“I just want to see,” Elodie said over her shoulder, already weaving between the tables, stuffing the last bit of bread and cheese in her mouth. “You don’t have to come. I’ll find my way back. Probably. Eventually.”
She followed the boys through the door, down a short corridor, and out into the bright morning light of the courtyard.
The lists. Elodie had read about them, seen the lists at other castles, studied illuminated manuscripts depicting knights at practice. But nothing had prepared her for the real thing.
The training yard stretched before her, a rectangle of packed earth surrounded by low wooden fencing.
Morning mist still clung to the edges, giving the scene an otherworldly quality—like something from a dream, or a painting, or possibly a fever hallucination brought on by questionable ale.
But it wasn’t a dream. It was violently, viscerally real.
At the centre of the yard, surrounded by a loose ring of soldiers, stood Gareth. He was fighting three men at once.
Elodie’s mouth fell open. She tried to close it.
Failed. She’d expected brutality. Some gruesome medieval display of hacking and slashing, all grunting effort and brute force.
What she saw was something else entirely.
Grace was the word that came to her, yet it felt utterly inadequate for what she was witnessing.
Gareth moved through his opponents like water around stone—fluid, unhurried, inevitable.
His dark hair was pulled back from his face, exposing the hard line of his jaw and the brutal scar that ran from beneath his ear across his throat.
He wore a simple linen shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and leather bracers on his forearms. No armour.
No helm. Just muscle and steel and a focus so absolute it was impossible to look away.
One of the soldiers lunged. Gareth sidestepped without seeming to move at all, letting the blade slide past him like he’d known exactly where it would be before it got there.
His own sword came up—not a wild swing, but precise, economical movement—and caught the man’s weapon at the hilt.
With a flick of his wrist, the soldier was disarmed, his sword clattering to the packed earth.
“Wow,” Elodie whispered.
The second man came in fast and hard, clearly hoping to catch Gareth while he was engaged. A mistake. Gareth was already turning, using the first man’s momentum against him, and somehow—Elodie couldn’t quite follow how—the second soldier ended up sprawling face-first in the mud.
The third hesitated.
Smart man.
Gareth waited. Patient as death itself. His chest rose and fell with slow, measured breaths, and his eyes—those storm-grey eyes—didn’t miss a thing. He held his practice sword loosely, almost carelessly, like it was an extension of his arm rather than a weapon.
The watching soldiers had gone quiet. Even the boys who’d led her here stood frozen, their earlier bravado replaced by slack-jawed awe.
The third man finally committed. He feinted left, then drove right with a strike aimed at Gareth’s unprotected side.
It should have worked. Anyone watching could see it should have worked.
Gareth didn’t block. He moved—a half-step to the side, a slight rotation of his body—and suddenly the soldier’s blade was cutting empty air.
Before the man could recover, Gareth’s sword swept up in two devastating moves.
A block that rattled the weapon from the man’s grip, and a controlled strike that stopped a hairsbreadth from his throat.
Silence.
Then Gareth stepped back, inclined his head in acknowledgement of a bout well-fought, and—
And turned. And saw her.
Their eyes met across the training yard, and something passed between them that Elodie couldn’t name. The air seemed to thicken. The sounds of the castle—men talking, horses stamping, a dog barking somewhere—faded to a distant hum.
He looked at her the way he’d looked at his opponents. Assessing, weighing, calculating. But there was something else under the scrutiny. Something that made her breath catch and her pulse do something distinctly embarrassing in her throat.
Stop it, she told herself firmly. He’s a medieval warlord with a reputation for killing people. You’re a time-displaced archaeologist with impulse control issues. This is not a romance novel.
But her feet were already moving, carrying her toward the edge of the yard before her brain had fully signed off on the decision. The soldiers parted for her, some crossing themselves, others simply gaping as she approached their terrifying lord.
A large man with a red beard and a face like a map of old battles moved to intercept her.
Miles, she remembered—she’d seen him briefly last night.
The captain of the guard. His hand hovered near the sword at his hip, and his expression suggested he was having serious reservations about letting the strange faerie woman anywhere near his lord.
Gareth held up a hand.
Miles stopped, though his eyes didn’t leave Elodie’s face. Neither she noticed, did anyone else’s.
“Right,” she muttered under her breath. “Not at all intimidating. Absolutely no pressure. Just a medieval courtyard full of armed men staring at me like I’ve grown a second head and looking for m wings.”
She stopped a few feet from Gareth and looked up.
Up close, he was even more imposing—taller than she’d realised, his shoulders broader.
The scar at his throat was an ugly thing, raised and silvery-white against his tanned skin, and she found herself wondering what kind of blade had made it.
What kind of violence? What kind of pain?
He watched her, waiting. Not hostile, exactly, but not welcoming either. Wary, she decided. Like a wolf encountering something it couldn’t quite classify as threat or prey.
Say something intelligent, Elodie instructed herself. Something calm and measured that will establish you as a rational person deserving of basic hospitality.
“That was...” She gestured vaguely at the training yard, at the soldiers still picking themselves up from the mud.
“I’ve read about medieval combat techniques.
Manuscript illustrations, archaeological reconstructions, the occasional very poorly researched documentary.
” She was babbling. She couldn’t stop. “But I’ve never seen anyone actually move like that.
It was like—like watching mathematics, if mathematics could kill people.
The angles, the economy of movement, the way you seemed to know where they’d be before they—”
She clamped her mouth shut. Took a breath.
“Sorry. I’m doing it again. The talking thing.” She pressed her hand to her forehead. “I promise I’m not usually this bad. Well. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I talk quite a lot. But usually people just ignore me until I stop.”
Gareth’s expression didn’t change. But something flickered behind his eyes—surprise, maybe, or curiosity, or possibly just profound confusion at the strange woman who’d wandered into his training yard to ramble about mathematics.
“I’m Elodie,” she tried again, slower this time. “Elodie Hart. We met last night in the forest. You didn’t kill me, which I appreciated. Very much.” She winced. “That sounded better in my head.”
Around them, the soldiers had begun to drift back to their training, though she noticed most of them kept one eye on the bizarre conversation happening at the edge of the yard.
An idea struck her.
“You don’t speak,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
Bertram had told her as much last night—the lord who had been silent for three years, whose voice was stolen or cursed or sworn away depending on who told the tale.
“But that doesn’t mean you can’t communicate, does it?
You gave orders just now, with your hands. Your men understood.”
Gareth’s eyes narrowed. Then widened, just slightly, as she lifted her own hands and began to move them.
Hello, she signed, in the American Sign Language Jennifer had taught her years ago at university.
It wouldn’t be the same—centuries of evolution, cultural differences, the basic fact that this language didn’t properly exist yet—but the concept was universal.
Gestures to bridge the gap where words couldn’t reach.
My name is E-L-O-D-I-E. She fingerspelled slowly, pointing to herself after each letter.
Gareth went very still.
The yard had gone quiet again. Miles took a step forward, his hand definitely on his sword now, but Gareth stopped him with a sharp gesture.
His eyes never left Elodie’s hands.
You, she signed, pointing at him with a questioning look. Name?
For a long moment, he didn’t respond. The silence stretched between them like a held breath. Then, slowly—so slowly it was almost painful to watch—he raised his own hands.
He placed a fist against his chest. Met her eyes with something that might have been hope, or fear, or something she couldn’t fathom at all.
It wasn’t a word. Not exactly. But it was communication. And something in his expression shifted—a crack in the ice, a fissure in the wall he’d built around himself.
More, he signed. The gesture was rough, unpractised, but recognisable. Show me more.
Elodie felt her own face doing something embarrassing—smiling, probably. Beaming like an absolute fool in front of a dangerous medieval lord and his equally dangerous soldiers.
“Yes,” she said, forgetting to sign, too overwhelmed by the sudden bright spark of connection.
“Yes, I can show you more. I can teach you if you like. A whole language, made for hands and faces and the spaces between sounds. My friend Jennifer—she’s deaf, she’s been deaf since she was small—she taught me when we were at university together.
Years and years of practice, all stored up here—” she tapped her temple “—waiting for someone who might actually want it.”
She caught herself. Took a breath.
“Sorry. Rambling again. But—yes. If you want to learn, I can teach you.”
Gareth stared at her for another long moment. The men had stopped even pretending to train, watching their exchange with expressions that ranged from confusion to fascination to something almost like hope.
Then Gareth nodded. Once. Definitive.
He gestured for her to follow him toward a stone bench at the edge of the yard, away from the mud and the watching eyes. His movements were deliberate, unhurried—giving her time to refuse, to change her mind, to remember that he was the Silent Reaper and she should probably be afraid.
Elodie wasn’t afraid. She’d spent her whole life talking to people who didn’t really listen, explaining things to colleagues who’d already decided she wasn’t worth hearing. She’d learned to fill the silence with words because silence felt like erasure, like disappearing, like being nothing at all.
But this silence was different. This was a man who’d chosen to stop speaking or couldn’t speak, who communicated in gestures and glances and the careful economy of his body. Who’d just watched her babble for five solid minutes and somehow, impossibly, wanted more.
He’s listening, she realised with a jolt. He’s actually listening.
She followed him to the bench and began the first lesson.
Yes, she signed, showing him the simple motion.
No.
Thank you.
Please.
He copied each gesture with the focused intensity he’d brought to the sword work, his large hands surprisingly nimble as they shaped the unfamiliar movements. When he made a mistake, he didn’t grow frustrated—just paused, watched her demonstrate again, and tried once more until he got it right.
Behind them, Miles snarled something at the gawping soldiers, and training resumed with a clatter of practice swords and muttered oaths. But Elodie noticed several of the men glancing over, their faces caught between suspicion and something that looked almost like wonder.
Their lord was talking. Not with his voice—but talking, nonetheless.
She taught him friend and enemy. Safe and danger. Hungry and tired and water.
And when she signed help, showing him the simple motion of one hand lifting the other, Gareth went very still.
He copied the gesture. Then signed it again, slower, while meeting her eyes.
Help, his hands said. And something in his expression asked a question his silence wouldn’t let him voice.
Yes, Elodie signed back. I’ll help. As long as I’m here.
She didn’t add what they were both thinking, that “here” was a castle in 1192, that she had no idea how she’d arrived or whether she could ever leave, that the necklace she’d come to suspect had something to do with bringing her here, was gone and the life she’d known was centuries out of reach.
But for now—for this strange morning in a medieval training yard—that didn’t seem to matter.
She’d found someone who listened with his eyes instead of his ears. Someone who understood that words weren’t the only way to be heard.
And when Gareth signed thank you with his battle-scarred hands, something warm and terrifying bloomed in Elodie’s chest.
Oh, this was going to be a problem. And for one moment, she didn’t care she’d fallen more than eight hundred years through time.