Chapter 9 #2
Afraid, she repeated, showing him again. Her hands trembled slightly near her chest, fingers spread, moving in quick, nervous patterns.
He copied the motion perfectly, then signed. You were afraid. In the clearing.
Elodie’s breath caught. They’d spoken of that night—she’d babbled her way through those first terrifying hours, and he’d remained silent, watching her with those silver eyes as she spun half-truths and desperate explanations. But they’d never spoken of it like this. Directly. Honestly.
Yes, she admitted. Very afraid.
Not now?
She considered the question carefully. Outside, the wind was picking up, carrying the scent of rain from the moors. Inside the solar, the fire crackled in the hearth, casting dancing shadows across the stone walls. The castle that had seemed so menacing a fortnight ago now felt almost... safe.
Less afraid, she signed finally. This place feels... safer.
Something shifted in Gareth’s expression. Not a smile—she’d never seen him truly smile—but a softening of the severe lines around his mouth. He signed back, Good.
They continued the lesson. She taught him tired, hungry, cold, warm. He absorbed each one without complaint, his large hands surprisingly graceful as they shaped the unfamiliar movements. When she introduced grateful, he paused.
Show me again, he signed.
Elodie demonstrated. One hand moving from her chin outward, palm up, like offering thanks.
Gareth copied the gesture. Then, deliberately, signed it again while meeting her eyes. Grateful. For this. He gestured between them—the space where they stood, the invisible bridge they were building word by word.
Elodie’s throat tightened. “You’re welcome,” she said aloud, her voice gone rough. Then, remembering, she signed it. You are welcome.
The afternoon passed quickly. Marian joined them after her kitchen duties were complete—and, as usual, she learned fastest of all. Within days of starting lessons, her small hands had begun flying through signs with an ease that put the others to shame.
“My grandmother was deaf,” Marian had explained when Elodie first praised her speed. “We had our own way of talking, but nothing so... complete as this.” Her gap-toothed grin had widened. “Gran would have loved it.”
Now she’d become Elodie’s shadow—appearing at her elbow to practice, asking questions about signs for increasingly specific things. Bread. Butter. Burned bread. Lord Gareth is angry because Thomas burned the bread again.
“You’re making sentences,” Elodie said, delighted.
Marian grinned, hair escaping her cap as usual. “I’ve got a lot to say, my lady. Always have. Now I’ve just got more ways to say it.”
They moved from the solar to the hall so others could join them as well. Old Bertram appeared as well, his arthritic hands moving slowly but determinedly through the basic alphabet.
“Bless my soul,” the steward muttered when he finally managed to spell his own name without error. “Never thought these old bones would learn new tricks.”
“The thing about communication,” Elodie said, settling onto a bench as more students gathered, then stopped herself before she could mention telephones, texting, video calls.
Or the read receipts she’d ignored from colleagues who didn’t really care, anyway.
“The thing is... speaking isn’t the only way to connect. ”
“What other ways are there?” Marian asked, settling beside her with the eager attention she brought to everything.
Elodie thought of emails sent into the void, voicemails never returned, the endless scroll of messages that somehow left her feeling more alone than silence ever had.
“Writing,” she said finally. “Art. Touch. Being present with someone.” She smiled ruefully.
“Sometimes the best conversations happen in silence.”
Marian considered this with unexpected gravity. “My gran used to say that listening with your eyes was harder than listening with your ears. But it meant more, because you had to choose to pay attention.”
“Your grandmother sounds like she was very wise.”
“She was.” Marian’s bright brown eyes softened. “She’d have liked you, my lady. She always said the ones who talk most are the ones who’ve been heard the least.”
The observation landed somewhere tender. Elodie blinked rapidly and changed the subject. “Right. Let’s practice please and thank you. Essential for polite society in any century.”
By late afternoon, a small cluster had formed around them in the great hall. Marian, Bertram, two of the younger guardsmen, and Thomas from the stables, his freckled face scrunched in concentration as he struggled to remember the sign for horse.
Gareth watched it all from the edge of the group, his expression unreadable. But when Thomas finally managed the sign correctly—both hands mimicking the movement of ears—Elodie caught Gareth’s hands moving in response. Good. Again.
The boy beamed as if he’d been knighted on the spot.
“Do it again,” Marian urged Thomas. “And then I’ll show you, stupid horse, for when they won’t stand still for the farrier.”
“Is that a real sign?” Thomas asked, eyes wide.
Marian shot Elodie a conspiratorial look. “It is now.”
Later, as the evening light began to fade, and the students dispersed to their duties, Elodie found herself alone with Gareth once again in his solar. He’d led her here without explanation, closing the door behind them with a quiet click.
The solar was the lord’s private chamber, and it showed the same austere efficiency as the rest of Greywatch—a writing desk, two chairs by the small hearth. No decorations. No softness. Just the bare necessities of life.
Gareth crossed to the desk and retrieved something from a drawer. When he turned back to her, his hand was closed around a small object.
For you, he signed one-handed, then opened his palm.
It was a ring. Small, delicate, set with a fire opal that caught the light from the window and burned with inner flame. Orange and red and gold, shifting as she watched. It looked just like the necklace that had vanished when she’d fallen through time.
Elodie stared at it, her heart stumbling in her chest. “It’s beautiful,” she breathed. “But I don’t understand. Why—”
Gareth’s hands moved slowly, carefully choosing each sign. The fire in the stone. It reminds me of you.
She looked up, startled. “Of me?”
He nodded, something almost like uncertainty crossing his features. Your spirit. Your... brightness. His hands faltered, and he made a frustrated gesture—the sign for words failing. Then he tried again. You came here afraid. Lost. But you did not break. You burned.
Elodie’s eyes stung with sudden tears. She’d spent the past fortnight feeling like a fraud—an academic playing at survival, a modern woman stumbling through a world she’d only ever studied from the safety of libraries and lecture halls. She hadn’t felt bright. She’d felt terrified.
But he’d seen something else. Something she hadn’t even known was there.
“I don’t know what to say,” she whispered.
Then say nothing. His mouth quirked—almost a smile. I have learned the value of silence.
She laughed despite herself, the sound watery and rough. “Touché.”
She took the ring carefully, turning it in the light.
The opal blazed like a tiny sun, fire dancing within its depths.
It was nothing compared to the necklace—simpler, smaller, less precious by any objective measure—but the fact that he’d thought of it, that he’d noticed her spirit when she herself had felt nothing but fear. ..
He was a good man. Nothing like the brutal medieval lord she might have expected. Nothing like the silent, scarred monster the servants had whispered about when she first arrived.
But she couldn’t stay. Could she?
She needed her own time. Her own life. The necklace might be gone, but surely there was a way back. Surely she couldn’t just... remain here. In 1192. With him.
Could she?
“Thank you,” she said, her voice thick. Then, remembering, she signed as well. Beautiful. Thank you.
He nodded once, sharply, and looked away as if embarrassed by the whole exchange. A faint flush crept up the back of his neck—the fearsome Silent Reaper, brought low by a simple act of kindness.
Elodie slipped the ring onto her finger. It fit perfectly, the warm weight of it settled against her skin like an anchor. She stared at it for a long moment, watching the fire dance within the stone.
You are sad, Gareth signed. Sometimes. When you think no one sees.
The observation landed like a blade between her ribs. She’d thought she was hiding it well—the grief, the homesickness, the constant low-level terror of being stranded more than eight hundred years from everything she knew.
Yes, she admitted. I am far from home. I do not know if I can return.
Gareth’s hands remained still for a long moment. I understand. Exile.
Of course, he did. She’d heard the servants whisper about him—the betrayal, the silence, the years of isolation. He knew what it meant to be cut off from everything that had once been familiar.
Do you miss it? she asked. Your old life?
He considered the question with his typical gravity. Some things. Not others. His hands moved slowly, carefully choosing each sign. The man I was died. The man I am now... he survives.
There was a world of pain in those simple gestures. Elodie wanted to reach for him, to offer some comfort, but she didn’t know if he’d accept it. So she simply signed. The man you are now is worth knowing.
Something passed across Gareth’s face—surprise, perhaps, or something deeper. His eyes widened for a moment, then narrowed, as if fathoming her for the first time. His hands lifted to respond, then stilled.
Instead, he moved to the window, his back to her, his shoulders a rigid line against the fading light.
The silence stretched between them—not uncomfortable, exactly, but heavy with things unsaid. Elodie watched his reflection in the thick glass, saw the way his fingers pressed against the stone of the windowsill.
Finally, without turning, he raised one hand and signed. Tomorrow. More words.
It wasn’t a dismissal, she realized. It was a promise.
She found the ring still on her finger when she woke, the fire opal warm against her skin. In the early light, it seemed to glow with its own inner warmth, pulsing like a heartbeat.
Marian arrived with her usual cheerful efficiency, already chattering about the day ahead.
“Cook’s in a right state—someone let the cat into the larder again, and there’s Thomas to blame, though he swears on his mother’s grave it wasn’t him.
Also, old Wynne is asking after you. Says she has herbs that might help with the sleeping troubles. ”
“How did she—” Elodie began, then stopped. Of course, the healer knew. Everyone in this castle seemed to know everything about everyone else. “Tell her I’ll come by after the morning lesson.”
“Aye, my lady.” Marian’s nimble fingers made quick work of the laces. “And my lady? Thomas is already in the hall, practicing his signs. He’s been at it since dawn. Fair drove the cook to distraction with his hand-waving.”
“What was he signing?”
Marian’s grin turned mischievous. “Stupid horse. Stupid horse. Stupid horse. Over and over. I may have created a monster.”
Elodie laughed despite herself. “Then we’d best give him a better vocabulary before he expands to stupid cook.”
When she reached the great hall, she caught Gareth watching her hand from across the room—watching the ring, the fire opal catching the morning light. He looked away quickly, but not before she saw his expression shift—just slightly, just enough to notice.
There was always a battle to be fought. An enemy to vanquish. This day, she supposed, the battle was simply surviving—learning to live in a world that wasn’t her own, with a man who spoke in silence and looked at her like she was something precious. Something worth protecting.
Would she leave him? Return to her own time?
She didn’t know. Couldn’t know. The necklace was gone, and with it, perhaps, any hope of finding her way back.
But standing here, in this great hall that smelled of smoke and bread, watching the most incredible man she’d ever met sign good morning to a freckled stable boy—she found she wasn’t quite ready to find out.
Good morning, Gareth signed as she approached. Ready?
Always, she signed back.
His mouth quirked—not quite a smile, but close. Closer than she’d seen before.
“We have more students today,” she said aloud, nodding toward the small cluster beginning to gather. Two more guardsmen. A serving woman. The blacksmith’s apprentice, looking terrified but determined.
Gareth surveyed the growing crowd. Something flickered in his expression—not displeasure, exactly. More like wonder.
Good, he signed. We will need more benches.
Elodie laughed, and the lesson began.