"But I know I shall miss him every day for the rest of my life."
Gabriel walked slowly through the castle. It was an amazing piece of work. Built over four hundred years ago of stone and wood, it was a sight to behold, from its turrets and towers to the moat and drawbridge. At one time, it had housed a hundred knights. Now its high stone walls sheltered a monster.
He moved through the Great Hall with its tapestries and long trestle tables, through the kitchens that hadn't been used in over three hundred years. Climbing the winding stone staircase, he wandered from chamber to chamber, pausing now and then to stare out one of the windows into the darkness.
Removing a key from his inside coat pocket, he unlocked the door to the dungeons and walked down the damp stone steps. Ancient instruments of torture lined one wall; a score of iron-barred cells bore mute evidence to a less civilized time. The walls were damp; the air was musty.
Returning to the Great Hall, he sank down in the thronelike chair that had belonged to the lord of the castle and stared into the enormous fireplace at the far end of the room.
The silence of the castle was absolute. The Hall was in utter darkness, as black as his soul.
He closed his eyes, and Sara's image came quickly to mind, her beautiful face framed by a wealth of honey gold hair, her eyes now filled with laughter, now shining with love, now cloudy with desire. Sara...
He saw her dancing the part of Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, an ethereal creature of beauty and light as she pirouetted across the stage during the Rose
Adagio; he saw her as Giselle, lamenting her lost love...
With a mighty curse, he forced her image from his mind.
Determined to pretend for a while that he was a mortal man, he decided to hire some men to come out and replace the rotting wood he had noticed on the drawbridge; he would hire a couple of women to sweep and clean.
In a week or so, Necromancer would arrive, along with the young man he had hired to act as stableboy.
Gabriel grunted softly. Perhaps he'd buy a couple of mares and raise horses. It would give him something to do to pass the time, something to think about besides Sara...
He glanced around the Hall, filled with a sudden yearning to see it filled with people, to hear the laughter of children, the gossip of women, to imagine, for a little while, that he was like any other man. For a moment, he closed his eyes and pretended that Sara was his wife, that she had come to him without fear or doubt, that she had agreed to be his for as long as she lived... for a moment, it was a dream sweeter than life itself. But the thought of watching her age and die was more than he could bear, and he put the image from his mind.
He was a creature of the night, destined to spend his existence alone. A bitter smile twisted his lips. After 355 years, he should have learned to accept it.
A fortnight later, the castle was humming with activity. He had hired two men to come during the day to keep the castle in good repair, and a woman to look after the house. He purchased three blooded mares to breed with his stallion, which had arrived the week before.
If the hired help found it odd that the master of the castle never appeared during the day, they did not mention it, at least not in his hearing. If the stableboy thought it most peculiar that the horses were bred at night, and that the master took the stallion out only after dark, he kept it to himself.
In a short time, the castle seemed to have roused from a deep sleep. The moat was cleared of debris, the windows were washed clean, the floors were swept daily, the tapestries had been aired. One of the maids planted a flower garden, weeds and briars were removed, trees were pruned.
Determined not to sit in his castle and brood over what could never be, Gabriel paid several visits to the local tavern, where he sat alone in the back of the room, his only companion a bottle of red wine. He knew the villagers were curious about his identity. Rumors and gossip abounded, implying that he was everything from a defrocked priest to an eccentric nobleman.