Elmwood
It seemed to distress Hilde, though. She kept glancing at the blister as they ate their slices of bread, sitting on the steps that led down into the kitchen from the garden.
Rollo was scampering about in the weeds behind them and kept barking at the sparrows teasing him from their perch in a nearby bush.
“It barely hurts,” he reassured her.
“Burns always hurt,” she said. She took his hand and cradled it in her lap, examining the blister. “Would you…would you let me try something? With my Charm, I mean?”
There was an eagerness in her voice that he found endearing.
“Anything,” he said.
She hummed quietly and passed her fingers just over the burn. There was a sort of tingle, and while he couldn’t detect a smell, he was nonetheless reminded of petrichor.
She withdrew her fingers. The burn was still there, but it might have been less red.
“Hmm,” she said. “I’m not certain that it worked.”
“Can you heal wounds, Hilde?” he asked, immediately certain that she could. She had healed things inside of him that he had thought were far beyond saving, after all.
“I don’t know.” She held up her own finger, which had a very faint pink line across it. “I tried to heal this cut…and I think it closed up faster than it would have otherwise. But it’s difficult to tell.”
He brought her finger to his lips and kissed it.
“I think that perhaps I will have to write you a saintsong. Saint Hilde, the healer.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” she said. Then she examined his burn again. “I do hope it helped a little. I wonder…perhaps if I practice, in time I could do something for your leg.”
Time. That was the one thing they didn’t have, but he could not bear to say so aloud.
“I have every faith you could,” he said, and she leaned her head against his shoulder.
She’d re-braided her hair that morning, and it hung down across her chest in a thick rope.
The image of it swirling across her naked breasts and clinging to the film of sweat that had glistened there burned brightly in the back of his mind.
Everything about her burned in his mind.
He loved having her at Merewyth. He was attempting to capture as many images of her here as he could in his mind’s eye, so that he would be able to conjure them up and find pleasure in the thought of her still being here when he was gone.
“I have a question,” he said, pressing his lips to the top of her head where it rested on his shoulder.
“Ask it,” she said, “though it is most definitely my turn. I shall take two in a row after this.”
“I accept your terms. Here is my question. If Merewyth were your own house, to do with as you pleased, how would you change it?”
“Hmm.” She lounged against the steps, tilting back her head to catch the sunshine. “To begin, I would clean up this garden. It’s a disgrace.”
“Yes, good; I expected as much. What else?”
“Well, I suppose I would lime the kitchen walls to brighten it up. I would do something about all the tattered draperies.” She paused.
“I wouldn’t touch much else. This house has a magic to it.
I’ve always thought so. We used to make up stories about it, when I was a little girl in the village.
My favorite was that Helms, Nimsby’s predecessor, was a Charmer, and that if you snooped about, he’d turn you into a snake. ”
Elmwood vaguely remembered Helms from his own, ill-fated childhood visit to Merewyth and suspected the taciturn man had probably spread the rumors himself to encourage people to keep their distance.
But Hilde’s assessment, that Merewyth had a magic to it, startled him a bit.
He had hated it so much as a child. Now, prodding at the matter in his mind, he discovered that he was…
fond of it. Perhaps he even liked it. It was all Hilde’s doing, surely, and to his mind, the magic resided with her, not with the house.
“I’m assuming you would paint murals on the walls. What would your subjects be?” he asked. “Nature, as at Croftholde?”
“No,” she said pensively. “I think that I would more likely take inspiration from the saintsongs you studied. You have that big expanse of wall in the Great Room. I would like to paint you there, as large as life, presiding over an array of forest creatures like that saint who could speak the languages of animals. Then you can be Saint Elmwood to my Saint Hilde. Or I suppose it would be Saint Erol…”
He chose to ignore her teasing and leaned in to kiss the place where her neck met her jaw.
“Animals are generally very fond of me.”
Rollo chose that opportune moment to tackle him with muddy paws, and it took the two of them working together to wrangle him back into the kitchen and dry his tummy and little legs with a cloth.
“My turn,” said Hilde, once Rollo was sorted and gnawing on a piece of bread crust. He wondered if she would ask him something fanciful, but then her hand clasped his, and her eyes grew somber. “I know you said you shouldn’t speak of it, but please tell me. Where will Mr. Winthrop send you next?”
He squeezed her hand, pulling her closer. “I will tell you soon, but not yet. I claim the right of delay. You must wait until our final day to know the answer.”
“You are always making up new rules, and it is most unfair.” There was perhaps slight frustration in her words but no real anger. Still, he wanted to make it up to her.
“Ask your second question, then, that I might redeem myself by answering that one promptly.”
“I don’t think you’re going to like it any better.”
“Try me,” he said, sitting at the table and pulling her down onto the bench beside him, not relinquishing her hand.
“Very well.” She paused, as if uneasy. “Last night, when we were talking about the Harrier…you said he was a liar and a fraud. What did you mean by that?”
Why? Why must she ask about the Harrier? He leaned his forehead against her shoulder. He could feel her inhaling, preparing to remind him that he had promised, so he answered before he could think better of it.
“I discovered that he was receiving information about the movements of the Relancian troops, not reporting it to the other commanders, then deliberately putting our soldiers in harm’s way so that he could swoop in and be the hero, turning the tide of the fighting and saving the day.
He did it again and again, and it cost so many lives, Hilde. So many men dead to feed his vanity.”
“Why would that even be necessary? You’d think there would be plenty of opportunity for real heroics in a war.”
“I don’t know for certain, but I expect that it has something to do with the fact that enthusiasm for the war is waning quite seriously, on both sides.
The Harrier doesn’t want peace. He wants endless fields to paint with blood.
So he developed this scheme to feed into the story that the Relancians are advancing and killing our troops in great numbers, and only he can save us from them. ”
Hilde seemed to grapple with his words.
“Isn’t that treason?” she asked.
“Withholding information on the Relancians’ movements certainly is.”
“Then we must tell someone! If the Harrier was charged with treason, then—”
“It’s not possible.” He drew away from her so that she could see how serious he was.
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“You have to understand, I tried to tell them what he was doing. I watched him for months, and I took notes, and I laid it all out for them, but it didn’t work.
I couldn’t get my hands on the actual letters he received, so when I accused him, it was my word against his, and who do you think they believed—the useless rake who joined up on a lark, or the war hero? ”
“What happened then?” Her brow was crinkled with worry. Perhaps she could see that even creeping up to the edge of this memory made his pulse race and his lungs short of air.
“Hilde, please listen to me,” he said, as calmly as he could when his heart was banging like a horse galloping between his ribs. “I can’t…I can’t go too deeply into this. I just…I can’t.”
He watched her, certain that her desire to figure out some way to stop the Harrier and save Croftholde would win out over whatever affection she felt for him.
He wouldn’t even be hurt by it—her determination and stubbornness were part of her nature, and he would not have her any other way.
But he couldn’t give her what she wanted.
She reached out and smoothed the fabric of his waistcoat, which was hanging open. It was an old rust-colored velvet one embroidered with fanciful insects that he had found in one of the trunks in Merewyth’s attic, and it had seen better days.
“This button is about to fall off,” she said, tugging on it gently. “Shall I fix it for you?”
Tears blurred his vision as he reached out and gathered her to him, holding on to her with all his might.
After a while, she made good on her offer, and he watched her reattach the button with deft fingers.
Then they spent the rest of the morning tidying up the kitchen and taking Rollo for a walk through the woods, during which he didn’t get stuck in any crevasses.
Though at one point, Elmwood backed Hilde up against a tree and whispered that he would very much like to explore hers.
At this reminder of their first meeting, she laughed, just as he had intended, and he basked in the sound of it.
By the time they got back to the house, entering through the kitchen and stomping mud from their boots, he was more than ready to take her back to bed. He was about to demand they hie themselves there immediately when he realized the kitchen wasn’t empty.
Nimsby was standing by the hearth. The man looked absolutely haggard, splattered in mud to his thighs.
“Harrier’s coming for you, my lord,” he said. “Best you run for it.”
Nimsby slammed two flagons of ale in alarming succession, then shared his story, characteristic brevity notwithstanding.