The Knave and the Moon — Chapter no 10

CHAPTER TEN

WHERE THE WIND WHISPERS A MINOR

TUNE

The holloway road took us into its mouth, and the grass grew thicker, and we rode beneath the shade of reaching trees. Benji was on horseback, a horde of knights and castle guards riding in his wake. I was with Tory in a dark

carriage with gilt hinges.

Night fell, and it began to rain.

Wind slapped against the walls of the carriage. We jostled, and I winced.

“You need more sedative.” Tory’s words sputtered in my ears. “Is the pain truly bad?”

I could still taste ox-eye on the back of my tongue. Eyelids heavy, breathing out of my mouth like a panting dog, I chuckled. “No.”

There had been days in the last month when I’d curled in a heap on the floor of the Artful Brigand’s room, sweating and shaking and unable to speak, the agony radiating from my abdomen enormous. Still. No matter how much ox-eye I consumed, the rasping voice—the visions of the Omens and Aisling Cathedral—hadn’t returned.

When the pain was loudest, I wondered if I’d made it up.

“The king must be very disappointed,” I said. “His precious loom stone,

destroyed in the tumult.”

Tory’s mouth thinned. Benji had screamed at her all the way from the king’s box until the moment the carriage door had slammed shut. But if Tory suspected me of knocking her asunder and grinding the loom stone beneath my heel, she said nothing of it. Her stoicism was so enviable I’d

begun to hate her for it.

We rode on in silence.

The carriage jolted and groaned. Left then right we turned, faster, faster, then the path sloped, shooting upward like a lure dragged back by its reel.

I felt it, like a weight dropping though my body, the moment we arrived.

The carriage stopped. Crows cawed and horses whickered, both calls lost on a gale of wind. Tory opened the door and handed me out.

I expected to step into darkness, cast into obscurity by the ever-present shadow of Aisling Cathedral. But when my feet hit gravel, there was no shadow, just the night sky, a damaged iron gate, and a graveyard of broken stone beyond.

The king and his collection of knights and Castle Luricht guards dismounted; Benedict Castor was looking at Aisling’s gates like they were the postern to the afterlife and he ill prepared to cross their threshold and be judged. But then he glanced at me and drew his sword, remembering himself. He had overcome me, the cathedral’s conqueror—what was left to fear? When he slipped from his horse, Benji’s back was straight.

Tory put a finger to her lips, then pointed it upward. I raised my gaze to the sky.

There were creatures above us, high in the clouds. Winged and dark, some large, some small—scaled or feathered or naught but flesh and bone.

Their cries echoed, making the wind sound more wailful than usual.

Sprites.

One waited at the tor’s gate. At first glance, it looked like a hill, its enormous back covered in bromegrass and gray-brown rocks. But curling granite tusks protruded from its boar-like snout, dark, coarse fur growing upon its face. Were it to open its eyes, I knew what I’d see. Brilliant,

terrifying orange irises.

A mountain sprite.

It lay across, as if guarding, the path into Aisling Cathedral’s courtyard, its chest rising and falling, a low growl seeping from its closed lips as it

slept.

“Vermin.” Samuel Eichel held out his sword. “Shall we dispatch them, sire?”

Benji’s gaze was still aimed at the ruins. “Not yet.”

Tory’s voice was in my ear. “We go quietly.”

Knights and guards moved around the mountain sprite, Hamelin in the lead, Benji behind him, the rest of us following. Silence was impossible, armor rattling, rain pinging against iron, rubble stirring beneath our feet; there was no hiding our trespass upon the tor. I felt as I had as a girl—as I had in the hamlets. An intruder in a great, holy place.

Still, we managed to get around the mountain sprite without waking it, moving in a crooked line into Aisling’s courtyard. Or what was left of it.

The five statues that had once been hooded figures were in pieces, blending with the gravel beneath our feet, crunching under boots. There was glass as well. Remnants of the cathedral’s stained-glass windows.

We moved onto the vast broken corpse of Aisling Cathedral.

Then Hamelin fell out of step, returning to the slumbering mountain sprite. His grip on his sword tightened.

“Not very noble,” I said, cold to my bones, “killing him while he sleeps.”

“I’m killing it while it sleeps.” Hamelin raised his weapon.

“You think a pinprick from your blade will do him in?” said a voice muffled behind a helmet. “He’ll call out. Wake the others. Mountain sprites travel in packs. Stab him and a dozen more will sprout up.”

My gaze jerked down the line.

I hardly saw faces anymore. Never bothered to differentiate between knights or guards beyond the obvious markers—armor, weapons. There was nothing left to look for in a crowd anymore, and my perspective had narrowed for it. It took me a moment to recognize him.

He’d intervened when the merchant got too close. The boorish lout who’d followed me into the arena and asked for recompense.

The knave who’d wanted a kiss.

Hamelin turned, his weapon swinging from the mountain sprite to the

guard. “You an expert in sprites?”

The guard slouched forward. Shrugged.

“Then shut your damn mouth.”

“I said not yet, Hamelin,” Benji snapped, wincing against the rain.

“This is where the door was,” Tory murmured, nodding at the rubble ahead. “And the narthex.” Her brow twisted. “The sprites have rearranged

the wreckage.”

So they had.

The last time I’d seen the cathedral, its stone edifice had crumbled into an unceremonious heap, like a decaying gourd fallen in on itself. A heap of stone, centered over the magical spring. Now, the stones had been split into piles, the rubble thinnest in the heart of the tor.

I could see it plainly in my mind. We were standing in what had once been the north aisle. Ahead, where the rubble had been moved, was the chancel, and the great limestone upon it.

“What would sprites want with the piles of broken stone?” Benji hissed, and the wind stole it away, transmuting it into a minor note. “Spread out,” he called.

The line broke. Forward I stepped, bracketed by knights and guards.

Rain pelted against my veil, but then—a scent on the wind. My nostrils flared, saliva building at the back of my tongue. The air was sickly sweet, like rotting flowers, like life and death—like a dream.

How long had it been since I’d tasted Aisling’s spring? How long since I’d sucked and supped from it until I’d drowned? The water had always made me sick, but I didn’t feel sick now. The agony beneath my wound had dulled to an ache. I felt, for the first time in weeks… Hungry.

The hem of my Divining robe caught on a jagged piece of wood. I yanked, and it tore, a thin piece of silk ripped away, taking the VI on my sleeve with it. A pale light flashed behind my eyes, the rain melding into a gray blur, the tor and everyone on it disappearing in a pale haze. My head was pounding, my breath shaking, my eyesight stretching and shrinking.

Shadows darted in my periphery.

The world slipped, the night sky disappearing. I was no longer peering out at the tor, but up at a stone ceiling. Aisling Cathedral stood erect once more—I lay on my back on the chancel, looking up at its arches.

This time, there was no rasping voice. No vision of the abbess, the

Omens.

I saw Diviners instead.

Six girls in white gossamer looked down at me. Beautiful they were. So young, so full of promise, whispering and giggling behind their hands. How small they seemed in the great belly of that cathedral: six pale moths in a yawning darkness. One had wild black curls, another waves of red. Some had short hair, others long, and all wore shrouds over their eyes.

They were cooing at themselves, wiggling their eyebrows at me and playing with their hair, as if peering into a looking glass.

One sat perched farther away than the others. Her silver-blond hair was poorly cropped. It didn’t matter that I could not see her eyes through her shroud; it was written all over her face—the fear, the wonderment she felt when she looked at me.

In her little hands, held tightly, were a hammer and chisel.

I knew no matter how loudly I cried that the little Diviner would not hear me. No one who looked upon me saw me, and if no one hears you, sees you, you begin to wonder if you even exist. But that little girl—she existed. What terrible woe; I knew, just like the others who’d borne that hammer and chisel before her, that the girl would one day turn into a gargoyle. To stone. I whispered to her in a voice that went nowhere, low and rasping and tired, and said, “Soon you will not have to drown.”

The Diviners vanished, and so did the cathedral.

I was standing with the king’s men among ruins once more, sprites circling above. For a terrible moment, I did not know who I was—creature or woman or nothing at all. But then I felt my body, the rain on my skin and the wind in my hair, and remembered. I was Sybil, Six, and there was not a

single part of me that was not in pain.

“Diviner.”

I turned. A man was there. A smudge in the darkness.

The guard. The knave. In his hand was the tattered scrap that had torn off my Divining robe, the VI clear even in the dark.

Above, a winged sprite the size of an eagle let out a menacing shriek and dove, talons out.

The knave didn’t raise his spear. He merely cupped his palms and slammed them together in several booming claps that echoed like thunder.

The sprite veered, its confidence broken, its talons never finding a mark.

The knave clapped thrice more, and the creature retreated into the sky.

I watched it fly away. “I see they haven’t trained you in barbarism yet.

Then again, you are only a guard.”

“Steady with the compliments.” Rain pinged over his helmet. He pointed at the hem of my Diviner robe. “You do realize you’re bleeding, don’t you?”

I looked down. The hem of my robe was dark with blood. When I lifted it, a shard of stained glass, so sharp I hadn’t felt it slide into flesh, was lodged in the bare arch of my foot. “Oh.”

“May I?”

I waved him away. “I’m fine.”

He exhaled, steam shooting from his helmet. One step and he was directly in front of me, leaning forward and whispering in a rough voice.

“Please. Permit me.”

I went rigid. Nodded.

He dropped his spear. Went down on his knees. Lifted the muddy hem of my dress. The wet leather of his gloves grazed the back of my calf, and when he drew closer, his breath swept up my leg, putting pinpricks over my skin.

He cuffed my ankle. Urged it off the ground. I heard a low hiss—hot and sharp—as he took the bloody shard of glass between his fingers, retracting it from my foot with slow, gentle precision.

Still pitched low, distorted in his helmet, his voice carried none of the coyness I’d heard in Coulson Faire. How it sounded now… I didn’t know what to call it, only that every word he spoke seemed to cost him something great. “The queen wears a gold crown, a gossamer veil, a silk robe—and still they don’t give her anything for her feet.”

They had. But to bend and tie the laces of boots or slippers had hurt too keenly, and I’d be damned before I asked anyone in Castle Luricht for help.

“I prefer it this way.”

“Do you.”

When the glass slid from my foot, a noise of relief escaped the line of my lips. The knave looked up, holding me in the dark slit of his visor as he flung the glass away into stones, then lowered my foot back onto the ground. Slowly, he rose, standing before me, blotting out the sky and its cold, heavy rain.

He held the scrap of silk from my robe out, the VI shaking in the wind.

“This is yours.”

“Keep it,” I told him. “For meager services rendered.”

“If I was going to ask for a token, it would hardly be silk.”

This again. “I already told you. I’ve nothing left to give. If it’s a kiss you’re after”—my mouth thinned behind my veil—“you’ll die waiting.”

A low laugh echoed in his helmet. “You think I wouldn’t?”

Benji began calling out in fervid whispers. “Keep a knight stationed here at all times,” he told Samuel. “The castle guards will remain. The ruins must be left as they are—don’t let anyone or anything near that fucking spring. The rest of you”—he churned his hand, beckoning—“we ride south.”

“You heard him.” Hamelin aimed his sword toward the horses on the far end of the tor. “Quickly.”

The knave took a step back from me. “It’s been a pleasure, Diviner. And to think”—he was breathing hard, his voice like gravel in his helmet—“it might have all been avoided had you been wearing shoes.”

I froze.

Then Tory was behind me, grasping my elbow and pulling me with her, the knights fleeing the tor just as quickly as they’d ventured upon it.

“What of the sprites, sire?” one of the guards asked, gazing upward.

“As you see,” the knave deadpanned behind me, “they are easily frightened away.”

“Perhaps it would be more prudent,” said Dedrick Lange, “to simply let them dig up the spring that the Diviner might dream in it again.”

My back went rigid, and so did the king’s. Benji reached into his pocket.

Withdrew the Artful Brigand’s coin and tossed it, rough side up, directly at the mountain sprite.

There was a horrible squelching sound. Wet and loud. The mountain sprite shrieked, its body fracturing into a thousand pieces, blood spraying across loose stone, watering the tor like the rain. The poor creature opened his orange eyes only a second, its final cry a terrible sound of anguish that caught the wind and rode it, echoing near and far and burrowing in the

walls of my mind.

The sprite shut his eyes. Went still.

“The spring will not be defiled by vermin.” The king waded through blood, found the Artful Brigand’s coin in the broken body of the mountain sprite, and wiped it clean on grass. He didn’t look at the carnage he’d

exacted. He just got on his horse. “Destroy any creature who deigns to move a stone upon the tor,” he told the castle guards, pointing to the sprites circling above. Then he signaled the knights, spurred his horse, and rode away.

My hands were shaking when I entered my carriage. Tory slammed the door behind me and took the box seat. When the wheels began to roll, I looked back. The castle guards had dispersed, all of them taking up weapons, some throwing spears, some shooting arrows, at the sprites in the

air. All— But one.

The knave stood away from the others, silhouetted by storm clouds, an inky blot in the darkness, menacing and corporeal among all the ghosts I’d left in the ruins. There was no seeing his eyes. No way for him to glimpse mine. Still, I felt his gaze as he watched my carriage ride from the tor.

Even when the road dipped and ruins fell from sight I stared back, pulse pounding, an invisible hand pressing over my chest. You’re a fool, I told myself. Pain has made a dreamer of you again.

It had. Because, rain in my hair, the smell of spring water in my nose, the knave, tall and broad in the shoulder and hidden beneath his helmet… he’d almost been familiar. Voice full of gravel, I’d have sworn he’d

sounded, if only for a moment— Exactly like Rory.

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