Chapter 16
Elodie reached the courtyard as the first refugees stumbled through the gates.
They came in a ragged stream—women clutching bundles of belongings, old men leaning heavily on walking sticks, children with hollow eyes and smoke-blackened faces.
A young mother carried a toddler on her hip, both of them trembling.
Behind them, a boy of perhaps twelve led a limping goat, his jaw set with the grim determination of someone who’d lost everything else and refused to lose this too.
The smell hit Elodie like a wall. Sweat. Fear. And underneath it, the acrid bite of smoke clinging to wool and hair and skin.
“Blessed saints,” Bertram breathed beside her. “There must be forty of them.”
More like fifty, Elodie thought, her mind already clicking through logistics.
She’d worked during a couple of summers volunteering with the Red Cross, knew how to organize people.
Fifty people meant food, water, shelter.
Medical attention for the wounded. A woman collapsed near the well, and Elodie moved without thinking.
“You there—fetch water,” she called to a gaping stable boy. “And you, find Marian. Tell her we need every blanket in the castle. Now.”
The boy’s eyes went wide. The faerie woman was giving orders.
But something in her tone must have cut through his fear, because he ran.
Elodie knelt beside the fallen woman, checking her pulse, scanning for injuries.
Exhaustion, mostly. Dehydration. A nasty gash on her forearm that had been bound with a strip of what looked like a torn petticoat.
“You’re safe now,” Elodie said, keeping her voice steady. “Can you tell me your name?”
The woman’s lips moved, but no sound came out. Her eyes were fixed on something far away—flames, perhaps, or the faces of people who hadn’t made it.
Elodie had seen that look before. Not in medieval refugees, obviously, but in her grandmother after the Blitz stories, in the documentary footage she’d watched for her research on displacement patterns. Shock didn’t care what century you lived in.
“Right,” she murmured, mostly to herself. “Water first. Questions later.”
The next hour blurred into organised chaos.
Elodie commandeered the great hall, directing servants to arrange pallets along the walls while others hauled in cauldrons of pottage from the kitchens.
Old Wynne appeared with her basket of herbs and salves, her sharp eyes assessing the wounded with practiced efficiency.
“’Tis worse than the northern raids of ’87,” the healer muttered, binding a child’s burned hand with gentle fingers. “These folk have walked nigh on two days without rest.”
“The raiders,” Elodie said, helping a young woman settle onto a pallet. “Did anyone see their colours? Any banners?”
The woman shook her head, her voice coming out as a ragged whisper.
“No colours, my lady. They looked like bandits, but...” She trailed off, her hands twisting in her lap.
“Bandits take things. These men burned everything. The grain stores. The livestock we couldn’t carry.
’Twas as if they wanted to leave nothing behind. ”
A chill ran down Elodie’s spine. Strategic destruction. Scorched earth tactics. This wasn’t random violence—it was calculated. Alaric, she thought. It has to be.
An old man grabbed her sleeve as she passed, his accent thick with the rough burr of the northern moors—not unlike the way Bertram spoke when he forgot himself. His words tumbled out in a rush of grief and confusion, something about his daughter, his grandchildren, a village that no longer existed.
Elodie knelt beside him, taking his weathered hands in hers. She couldn’t understand half of what he said, but she didn’t need to. Some things transcended language.
“I know,” she said softly, squeezing his fingers. “I’m so sorry. You’re safe now. We’ll take care of you.”
The old man’s rheumy eyes searched her face—this strange woman in fine clothes who knelt in the rushes like it was nothing, who looked at him like he mattered. His lip trembled.
“Bless you,” he managed. “Bless you, my lady.”
“My lady!” Marian appeared at her elbow, slightly out of breath. “Cook wants to know if she should slaughter another pig. And there’s a woman asking for you—says her babe won’t stop crying, won’t take milk—”
“Tell Cook yes on the pig. And bring the woman to me.”
The baby, it turned out, had colic. Elodie remembered her cousin’s nightmare with her firstborn—the endless screaming, the desperate google searches at three in the morning.
She showed the exhausted mother how to hold the infant against her chest, belly-down across her forearm, and gently bounce. The crying stopped.
The mother stared at Elodie as if she’d performed a miracle.
“Old family trick,” Elodie said, which was technically true if you counted YouTube tutorials as family wisdom. “Keep her warm, keep her close. She’s scared. She doesn’t understand what’s happening.”
Father Aldric found her bandaging a gash on a young boy’s leg.
The priest stood in the doorway of the great hall, his dark robes a stark contrast to the chaos of injured peasants and harried servants.
His face was unreadable—that same pinched expression he’d worn in the chapel when he’d tried to drown her in holy water.
Elodie braced herself for another exorcism attempt.
But the priest simply watched. His gaze tracked her movements as she cleaned the wound, applied a poultice of herbs Wynne had pressed into her hands, wrapped the leg in clean linen.
She spoke softly to the boy the whole time—nonsense, really, stories about brave knights and clever foxes, anything to distract him from the sting.
When she finished, the boy clutched her hand.
“Are you really a faerie?” he whispered.
“No, love. Just a woman who talks too much.” She ruffled his hair. “Rest now. You’re safe.”
She rose, expecting Father Aldric to have retreated. Instead, he stood exactly where he’d been, his expression shifted into something she couldn’t quite fathom.
“You know healing,” he said. Not an accusation. An observation.
“Some. I worked with healers for two summers.”
The priest was silent for a long moment. His fingers moved over his rosary beads, counting prayers or doubts or both. “Perhaps,” he said finally, his voice grudging, “the Lord sends His angels in unexpected forms.”
And then he was gone, robes swirling, leaving Elodie staring after him with her mouth hanging open.
Did the priest who tried to exorcise me just call me an angel?
She didn’t have time to process that particular development. A child was crying somewhere, and Wynne was calling for more clean water, and someone had apparently lost track of the goat, which was now eating one of the tapestries—
Gareth found her two hours later. She was directing a group of servants in setting up a makeshift infirmary in the corner of the hall, her hair escaping its braid in wild tendrils, her face streaked with soot and sweat and something that might have been dried blood.
Her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, her voice hoarse from giving orders, and she was gesturing emphatically at a bewildered cook’s assistant who clearly couldn’t understand why the lady wanted the broth without salt for the sick children.
She looked, Gareth thought, like a general commanding a siege.
He’d come down from the walls expecting chaos. What he found was... this. Order emerging from disaster. Frightened peasants calming under her steady voice. His household—servants who’d once whispered about the faerie witch, followed her commands without question.
Miles appeared at his shoulder. “The refugees’ stories confirm the pattern, my lord,” he said quietly. “Three villages hit in the past se’nnight. All in our territory. All burned to the ground.”
Gareth nodded, but his eyes never left Elodie. She’d spotted him now. Her face changed—relief and worry flickering in quick succession—and she handed the ladle she’d been holding to the nearest servant before crossing the hall toward him.
“You’re back.” Her voice was breathless. “The riders—are there more coming? Is it—”
Just refugees, he signed. Alaric’s work, but no soldiers. Not yet.
“The villages they came from—three of them. All strategic points, Gareth. He’s cutting off your supply lines, isolating you.” She said it like she’d been thinking about it for hours, like she’d mapped the attacks in her head while bandaging wounds and soothing children. “He’s planning something.”
He knew. He’d drawn the same conclusions. But hearing her say it—watching her mind work, quick and sharp as any commander’s—something twisted in his chest.
You should have stayed in the solar, he signed.
“Yes, well.” She pushed a strand of hair out of her face, leaving another smudge of soot on her cheek. “I’m rubbish at following instructions. Ask anyone who’s ever supervised my fieldwork.”
He didn’t know what fieldwork meant. He didn’t care.
She was covered in ash and exhaustion and other people’s blood, her fancy gown ruined beyond repair, her hands rough from work that should have been beneath a lady’s notice.
And she was looking at him with those fierce green eyes, daring him to scold her, daring him to tell her she’d done wrong.
He had never wanted to kiss anyone more in his life.
You did well, he signed instead.
Her shoulders dropped slightly. “They needed help. I helped. That’s all.”
That is not all. He gestured at the hall—at the organised chaos, the sleeping children, the grateful faces. You did this. My people will remember.
“Your people needed—”
Our people, he corrected.
She went still.
The words hung between them, heavy with implications neither was ready to examine. Elodie opened her mouth—to argue, probably, or to deflect with one of her jokes—but before she could speak, Marian appeared at her elbow.
“My lady, the mother with the colicky babe is asking for you again. And Old Wynne says the man with the leg wound needs the bandage changed, and Cook wants to know about breakfast portions for tomorrow, and—”
Elodie closed her eyes briefly. “Right. Yes. Tell them I’m coming.”
She looked back at Gareth, something complicated moving behind her expression. “We need to talk,” she said quietly. “About Alaric, what he’s planning. About—” She gestured vaguely at the hall full of displaced villagers. “All of this.”
Tomorrow, he signed. Tonight you rest.
“I’m not tired.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Fine. I’m exhausted. But there’s too much to do.”
The servants can manage. You have given them a purpose. He reached out, almost unconsciously, and brushed the soot from her cheek. His calloused thumb traced her cheekbone, gentle as a whisper. Rest. I will keep watch.
For a moment, she leaned into his touch.
Then Marian was tugging at her sleeve again, and the moment shattered, and Elodie was swept back into the tide of demands and decisions. But she looked back at him once—just once—before disappearing into the crowd.
Gareth stood in the doorway of his great hall, watching his household work under the direction of a woman who’d fallen from the sky three months ago, and wondered how he’d ever survived without her.
He had a war to prepare for. An enemy to vanquish. Villages to protect and alliances to forge.
But tonight, the only battle that mattered was the one in his chest—the terrifying, exhilarating certainty that he was lost, completely and irrevocably lost, to a woman who might vanish with the next storm.
Please, he thought, the word a prayer to any god listening. Let her stay.
Down the hall, Elodie was showing a young mother how to swaddle her infant, her voice soft and sure, her hands impossibly gentle. She didn’t look up. But somehow, Gareth knew she was thinking of him too.