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.
CHAPTER 10
The afternoon sun slanted through the solar’s narrow windows, painting bars of gold across the stone floor. Gareth sat in his customary chair by the fire—cold now, unnecessary in the warming late May weather—and listened to Elodie talking.
She was always talking.
In the weeks since she’d stumbled into his life, he’d grown accustomed to the constant flow of words. She filled silences the way water filled empty vessels—naturally, inevitably, as if she couldn’t help herself. He’d found it grating at first. Now he found it... something else. Something he wasn’t ready to name.
“—and so the concept of zero, right, it seems obvious to us now, but medieval mathematicians were genuinely confused by it. How do you count nothing? How do you—” She caught herself, cheeks pinking. “Sorry. I’m doing the thing again. The rambling thing. You’re trying to learnfoodand I’m over here nattering on about mathematical philosophy.”
Gareth’s mouth twitched. He signed.I do not mind.
“You’re very patient. Suspiciously patient, actually. Most people start glazing over around the five-minute mark.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear—a nervous gesture he’dcatalogued along with her habit of touching her throat when she was thinking, her tendency to pace when excited, the way her hands moved even when she wasn’t signing, as if words alone couldn’t contain everything she needed to express.
You are interesting,he signed.Continue.
Her face did something complicated—pleased and embarrassed and oddly vulnerable all at once as her cheeks turned pink. “Right. Yes. Where were we?Murderer.” She demonstrated the sign—a sharp, violent gesture, one hand striking down against the other. “Andtraitor.” A twisting motion near the heart, as if something were being torn out.
He copied both, his large hands surprisingly nimble after all the practice. She’d been a good teacher. Patient. Clear. And she never looked at him with pity when he struggled with a gesture, never made him feel diminished by his silence.
’Twas a gift, that. Rarer than gold.
“Perfect,” she said, beaming. “Jennifer always said I was too impatient to teach properly, but apparently I just needed the right student.” She paused, her expression flickering. “She’d love this, actually. She’s always going on about how sign language should be more widely taught, how it’s this incredible tool for communication that most hearing people completely ignore. She’d be absolutely chuffed to see a whole castle learning it.”
Gareth’s eyes narrowed, just slightly. There it was again—that odd note in her voice when she mentioned her friend. The way she spoke of this Jennifer, as if they’d been parted by more than mere distance.
Your friend,he signed slowly.You miss her.
“I—yes.” Elodie’s hands stilled in her lap. “Yes, I miss her terribly. She’s... she’s very far away.”
How far?
Something shifted in her expression. A flash of something that might have been panic, quickly suppressed. “Quite far. Very far, actually. Impossibly far.”
The words hung between them. Gareth studied her face—the tight set of her jaw, the way her eyes wouldn’t quite meet his. He’d learned to read people in his years of silence. Learned that the words people spoke were often less honest than the ones they didn’t.
And Elodie Hart, for all her ceaseless chatter, had been hiding something from the moment she’d appeared on his lands. He’d known it, of course. No woman simply appeared in the middle of a storm, dressed in gossamer and moonlight, babbling about archaeology and lost necklaces. The servants whispered about faeries and hollow hills. Father Aldric muttered about demons. Gareth had dismissed both explanations as superstitious nonsense.
But that left the question. If she wasn’t fae and she wasn’t a demon, what was she?
Tell me more about her,he signed.Your friend.
Elodie’s laugh was too bright, too quick. “Oh, Jennifer’s brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. She designs things—visual things, pictures and layouts and...” She trailed off, her brow furrowing. “Hang on, how do I even explain graphic design to a medieval?—”
She stopped.
Gareth went very still.
The color drained from her face. She pressed her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide above her fingers, and for a long moment neither of them moved. The silence stretched between them like a held blade.
“I didn’t mean, that is to say—I wasn’t—” She was babbling now, words tumbling over each other in her haste to take back what she’d said. “Medieval as in, you know, the aesthetic. Themedieval aesthetic. Very popular where I’m from. All those tapestries and pointed arches and?—”
Stop.
