Chapter Twenty-one #3
they got to Oloron, the more his daydreams were of Lara in a
sleek-fitting, low-cut gown of the slinky silk, her hazel eyes
smiling at him as green and bright as the emerald on her ring
finger.
He’d gained company in his
lovesickness. The miller, Arnulf, a stout, watchful man, had a
daughter, Doralice, a brown-haired, doe-eyed waif who left Phillipe
moon-eyed and tongue-tied in her presence. Talon and Oswald
suffered no such afflictions and teased Phillipe mercilessly, until
it was hard to say who blushed more at sight of the other, Phillipe
or Doralice. Arnulf, watching it all, kept his daughter close and
his axe closer.
When they finally rode into the valley
of Oloron in early October, the trees were in their full autumnal
show of reds and golds and greens, the colors of Lara’s flaming
hair and changeling eyes. Eyes that would either blaze with golden
embers of ire when she first saw him again or grow soft and mossy
green.
They rode past Oloron Manor, which
looked to be inhabited again by the servants bustling around the
courtyard, who stopped to stare at their passing. There were no
obvious signs as to who was in residence, something Anglbert would
surely know. As they rode past the village, the few people milling
about watched them with the same slack-jawed stares, as did the
field workers they passed farther down the road. A niggling began
to stir in Talon’s gut. Something was amiss.
“I’m off,” he told
Phillipe. “I’ll go by Lara’s house first, then meet you at the
keep.”
There was nobody outside of Willem and
Patience’s house when he rode by, though he did notice the new
addition to Willem’s workshop. He urged the Black into a gallop,
slowing only when they turned onto the path to Lara’s property. His
gut tightened in anticipation as they cleared the windbreak of
chestnut trees, then twisted into a strangling knot at the sight of
the gutted, burnt-out ruin that had been her house.
The world swimming around him, Talon
noted that the barn was still standing, and Honey and Gaea were in
the paddock with several goats and chickens. He dismounted, the
ground shifting under his feet, and ran into the barn, where he
checked the little room that had been Denys’s sleeping quarters and
saw a man’s leggings and tunic hanging on the wall peg. He made a
quick round of the rest of the barn but saw no signs of Lara. He
told himself she’d probably moved into the keep by now, that he’d
find her and his babe there, safe and sound under Anglbert’s care,
but his feet took him to the old oak, where two new graves lay
alongside Sophie’s.
There were no markers or headstones on
the new graves, and by the grass growing over them, they’d been
there since at least early summer.
Talon’s chest seized as he dropped to
his knees and his mouth worked wordlessly. One of the graves was of
a size for an adult, but the second one was smaller, large enough
for an infant in a coffin. Like his mother’s and the babe’s whose
birth had ripped her apart and killed her.
A keening moan rose up
from his belly and rent his chest. “No,” he railed, cursing God and the
heavens. “You cannot have her, damn you. She is mine. My curse. My
rose. My love. My life.” He buried his face in his hands. “I should
have come straight home to you. I should never have left you. Damn
me. Damn Charles and his cursed wars. Damn this world for ever
letting you leave it. Leave me. Oh God, Lara, how could you find me
again, how could you love me, let me love you, only to leave me
forever?”
Because death was forever, this much
Talon knew. He knew the hollow emptiness of wanting someone and
never being able to hold them again, of missing them and never
being able to see them or hear them, except for dreams and
memories. Lara was gone. Gone from this world, from him, and with
her, their child, of whom he only had dreams and no
memories.
“Oh God. How am I to live
without you?” He threw his head back and gazed up into the heavens,
finding not the slightest peace knowing she resided there. “What
manner of god are you to torture a man so? To bring me to her, only
to take her away? Why? When you know I have more need of her than
you?”
He collapsed onto the cool earth of
her grave and wept as he hadn’t since he was a boy and his mother
had died. He wept and cried and sobbed and cursed until his body
was as void of tears as his soul was of feeling, then he rolled
over and lay between the graves, staring up into the vast and
endless emptiness stretching out before him.
“Captain?”
He blinked his swollen eyelids and
focused on the voice floating above him. “Denys?” he
croaked.
“Aye.”
Talon stared up into a face much the
same, yet much changed from the lad he’d last seen. “What happened
here?” he asked, his voice as raw as the gaping maw in his chest.
“Where is my lady? My child?”
Denys shrugged and shook his head and
his mouth curled into a strange smile. “I don’t know. But they’re
not buried here.”
“They’re not?”
“No, sir.”
Talon’s heart went from stone cold and
still to beating triple time. “Then who is?”
“Goats.”