The Knave and the Moon — Chapter no 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE MANY NAMES OF A COMMON

FLOWER

I’ll do anything you ask of me.

Rodrick Myndacious.

The knave. The foulest knight in all of Traum.

Rory. My Rory. Back from the dead.

And if he was here, and he remembered, Bartholomew and Maude couldn’t be far.

Fingers locked in my coif, it took effort not to smile as I moved with the king and his knights down the winding streets of the Seacht, the burden of loneliness and despair lightening—I practically floated as we made our way through the city.

I’d barely been able to hold myself up this morning, the pain in my abdomen insurmountable. Now, it had dulled to an ache. I could stand, walk —maybe even run—without buckling.

The spring water in Rory’s blood. It had tasted smoother, sweeter, more satiating, than anything I’d ever put on my tongue.

Next to me, the king was heavy in his walk, taking comfort in the flask on his belt and arguing with himself. “Maude,” he muttered. “This is her doing, and good ole Rory is a much finer actor than I ever credited him to be.” He grimaced. “Or he’s not acting at all.”

He eyed me over his shoulder. “Which was worse? My kiss, or the fact that he did not care about it?”

He’d dug his own grave hiding my face behind a veil—I gave him nothing. “Go to hell, Benji.”

“The latter, then.” He looked like an anxious dog when he smiled like that, teeth on display. “For better or worse, the loom stone is gone. If he has truly lost his memories, there will be no remembering for him.”

I said nothing.

The knights led us past roaring canals and over bridges, following the sounds of music, of laughter and jovial voices, our footsteps against cobblestones a counter beat against the clamor.

“Where is it?” I asked. “This fete?”

Benji rolled his shoulders. “You’ll know it when you see—”

The street began to shake, rumbling so violently I felt it in my teeth. I caught my hand on a brick wall, and the knights steadied their king, armor

rattling.

The rumbling stopped.

“Another earthquake.” The king looked up, as if the answer was writ upon the twilight sky. “I don’t like it, Six.”

“Perhaps it’s a portent that your tournament is doomed.”

He shot me a narrow look. “Don’t be funny. It doesn’t suit.”

The streets grew more and more narrow until finally we entered an alley laden with ivy. I looked around. Laughed. “You’re kidding. Here?”

There was a guard in the alley. When he noted Benji—and me at his side —he pulled back a sheet of ivy, revealing a small wooden door in the reaching alley wall. He swung it open, a long, dark corridor waiting, music and voices echoing beyond. The knights led us down the corridor, their boots, and my bare feet, making no sound against dark woolen carpet.

There were paintings on the walls. Portraits of pale bodies, twisting. The ghost of Aisling Cathedral was upon me—the animal urge to run. Yes, I

knew this place. I’d been here before.

In my dreams.

I was back in the Harried Scribe’s lair.

Light slipped beneath a door. Benji shoved it open, and I was assaulted by the glow of torches, the sharp knell of fiddles—the raucous sound of hundreds of folk gathered in celebration.

They stood in the heart of a circular room, the space as vast as the melee arena. Soaring, book-laden shelves reached upward to the room’s only window—a glass dome, where glimpses of the twilight sky peeked. When the audience began to applaud at the sight of the king, the sound echoed against the dome, and Benji brightened.

A quartet played their instruments. Dancers moved in measured steps, and a pair of actors, one wearing black, the other blue, feigned combat with paper weapons.

A minstrel sang. “A colorful dream, the bright land of Traum, where the wind on the moors hums a tune. Where the holloways lead you awry and along, and the gowans are always in bloom. The knights are all noble, and the ladies so fair, and the scribes all set in their trade. The books are all read, and the folk are all fed—and the gods, through dreams, lend us aid.

“But wherever you ramble, from woodland to sea, pray find the young king on your way. I lent him my hammer, and he lent me his faith, and to his queen, the Diviner, did I pray.”

An ancient scribe came up to the king and me. “Over seven hundred gold coins won in the melee, sire. The funds are in the city vault—your champion is a lucky man.”

Others came up to us. They peered at my veil, searching, and Benji was offered congratulations on the melee. But for every compliment folk of the Seacht paid their king, so too did they tender a question: Who is he? Where does he come from? Do his eyes tell the future as the Diviner’s do?

Dedrick Lange and his inkwell had meant to inspire faith in the arena.

But all anyone was talking about was the knave.

Benji’s response was but a strained smile. “Time for a dance, I think,” he told me.

The king grasped my hands. Others joined the dance, swaying with the same sort of weightlessness I felt every time I thought of Rory. Merchants, folk of the Seacht—even scribes—all tugged like puppets across the vast room.

But then—a great noise. Another booming round of applause filled the room. Benji and I both turned, the king straining and I barely breathing.

The knave had arrived.

He came behind the king’s favorites, Dedrick and Hamelin and Samuel and Tory pushed aside so that folk might get to Rory, his teammates from

the melee, scribes, even nobles waiting to speak to him. Red in the cheeks, smiles on display, women gathered, too, their handkerchiefs at the ready. I couldn’t hear what they were asking him—couldn’t hear Rory’s responses through his helmet. He took their wine, retrieved their fallen handkerchiefs —he’d have been the picture of magnanimity were it not for that daunting black armor.

“Do you remember what you told me the last time we danced?” Benji was staring at Rory, barely touching me as we swayed through the room.

“‘You should be more concerned with the five bad portents you garnered than winning my esteem, King Castor.’ So frightening. So unwavering in your conviction.” His blue eyes shone. “You were full of power, of promise.

I thought I’d do anything to make you my friend.”

“And we know how well you treat your friends, Benji.”

He pondered that. Slowly, he said, “Everyone deserves a second chance.”

The king let go of me, arms open and welcoming as he moved through the crowd toward the knave. “There’s my champion,” he called, drawing the attention of the fawners. When Benji stood beside Rory, the crowd’s adoration spread to him, and the king smiled, the last rays of daylight falling from the dome ceiling and catching along his crown.

Otto Lange was there as well, a deal less jovial. He carried a long gray sash with an inkwell embroidered into its fabric. Benji took it. Held it out to Rory. “Your champion’s sash.” From his belt, he withdrew a single gold coin. “And a token of your winnings—the first of seven hundred. You’re a

wealthy man, knave.”

The audience cheered.

“Tell us.” Benji held the coin out to Rory. “What do you aim to do with your winnings?”

Rory took the sash. Slipped it over his cuirass. “What anyone does with gold, King Castor.” He withdrew the coin from the king’s hand and closed it

in his fist. “I aim to change things.”

Benji’s smile faltered.

The crowd swelled, scribes and nobles alike moved close. “My queen,” they called. Some drunk, some reverent, some curious. “My Diviner.”

Faces and bodies blurred around me until they looked like the paintings in the Harried Scribe’s corridor: strange, twisted figures. Men in gray robes,

women in fine dresses—all of them eager to look at me.

“I came to Aisling a hundred times, but the abbess never accepted my fee.” A woman reached up. Tried to move my veil aside and look me in the eye. “What a blessed honor, what a fine sign, to meet you.”

“Diviner.” A scribe upended his inkwell on the floor, black ink sopping into floorboards, staining the hem of my dress. “Tell me, what do you see?

What does the Harried Scribe say? What does my future entail?”

A man with a cut across his chin and a black streak of paint over his jerkin called me a beautiful mystic and asked me to dance. I refused, and he slipped away.

“Whore,” another called me, a scribe wearing a hood and pointing at me with an accusatory finger. “What business have the Omens in the affairs of men? Aisling is fallen—your gods have no power here.”

I shoved him. He stumbled back, knocking into more scribes. The crowd pulsed, holding me too tightly in its engorged stomach. The instruments were too loud, the air too close— The crowd parted, a scar carved down its middle. The room went quiet but for a perforating buzz, the sound of hundreds of conversations going quiet. When I looked up, the knave was cutting through the room and didn’t stop until he was standing right in front of me, the layers between us, his visor, my veil—his iron, my gossamer—as restrictive as cuffs.

His voice low. Warm. “Diviner.”

“Knave.” I searched for his eyes. Needed to see them. “Take off your helmet.”

His gauntlets scraped together, his fingers trilling in a strange rhythm at his side. He reached up. Hooked his thumb beneath the rim of his helmet—

Then drew it right back out.

I raised my brows. “You’d tease me?”

“The king’s lackeys called me a lost cause and told me to keep it on.” A note of humor flickered through his voice. “Threatened me with another

beating.”

“Another?”

Rory shrugged. “They tried their best. Then again—” He reached up.

Withdrew his helmet and dropped it upon the floor, never taking his pale gaze from mine. “Fuck their rules.”

The buzz in the air quickened, gasps resounding against shelves and

walls and glass. Everyone turned to look at Rory’s stone eyes.

But I was looking at his ear.

The gold bands were missing, the skin red and swollen. Rory had shaved, his hair wet, the charcoal around his eyes washed away. Someone had taken pains to make him appear less like himself and more like whatever a champion was meant to be.

Over his shoulder, Hamelin and Tory and Dedrick and Samuel, lingering at the edge of the dancers, watching us. Hamelin raised his hand, waving at me. On his middle finger were the three gold bands Rory wore in his ear.

My molars slammed together.

“It doesn’t matter. I have no memory of them, besides. No sentimental attachment.”

But you do. My eyes prickled with furious tears. “I do.”

The corner of Rory’s mouth twitched. His eyes returned to my face—he had no trouble finding my eyes beneath my veil—and for a time that passed too long and too short, we stood unmoving, the air taut. Breastplate rising and falling, Rory’s breaths rushed and his throat hitched. His lips moved without sound. Sybil.

I’d have gone to him. Buried myself against his chest.

But I was the queen of Traum. A Diviner who moved through the hamlets, stoic and unknowable, that she might get her hands on the stone objects. And he, this subterfuge of the knave… he was fighting for his life to pretend he did not know me in all the ways only he had.

We stood inches apart. But the spectacle was a wall between us.

So was every person in the vast room who’d slowed their dancing to get a look at us. Fingers fidgeting at his sides, Rory cleared his throat. “Your turn,” he managed. “Take off your veil.”

I reached up. Felt thousands of eyes, pressing upon me. Let my hand

fall.

Rory frowned.

“Wouldn’t want to give the impression of familiarity,” I said. “To the knave, I’m but a holy stranger in white. Still.” I leaned close. Watched as crimson spread over his cheeks. “Strangers still dance, don’t they?”

“Yes,” he said, a little breathless. “Strangers dance.”

A song began, slower than the others. Rory yanked loose the straps of his armor just like he had during the Divination, dropping his gauntlets,

then his gloves, onto the floor atop his helmet. When he held out his hand to me, it was bare. “So dance with me, Diviner.”

The kingdom watched as I slid my hand into his. Our calluses dragged together, the pressure gentle but insistent. I let out a breath, and Rory did too, tucking his thumb over the back of my knuckles. I put my other hand on his shoulder, and Rory placed his into the curve between my ribs and

hips.

We began to move.

“Stone eyes, then.” My voice hummed against his armor. “If only you were pretty enough to be a Diviner.”

Rory spun me, then pulled me back against his chest. “You’re pretty enough for the both of us.”

Warmth flickered through my stomach. “What of Bartholomew?” I

whispered. “He’s all right? Maude?”

He nodded.

“I’ll see them soon?”

Another nod. Rory held tight to my hand and soft to my waist, and together we danced over the same marble floors where we’d once killed an Omen. “Those people out there,” he said, “knights and nobles—Pith, will you let me lead?”

I was trying to correct his path through the crowd. So far, he’d stepped on three feet and elbowed at least two scribes in the face. “You’re not very good at dancing.”

“Bad,” he rasped against the shell of my ear, “is the point.”

I glanced up at him and found him smiling. “They see what I am,” he said as we turned. “A knave who might have once been a bad knight but was always a nobody. And yet I beat their favorite in the melee. I have the same holy markings as you. Perhaps this tournament will prove even a nobody might yet be somebody in the Stonewater Kingdom. Contradictions are destabilizing things.” His voice turned wicked. “So is coin.”

I turned. Benji was still standing near the door, surrounded by scribes.

Only now he was not touched by light or grinning and accepting praise—he was in an all-out shouting match with Otto Lange.

“How long do you imagine the noble families of Traum will suffer a king who handed them wealth—only to lose it in his self-aggrandizing tournament?” The muscles in Rory’s jaw strained. “The boy’s time is nigh.

Kings come and go.”

How right he was. “I’m going to kill him,” I whispered against his

shoulder.

Rory looked down.

“I never intended to win,” I said, the truth spilling out of me. “There is no winning anymore—not for me. It’s the stone objects.” My throat worked. “If Aisling’s final vestiges are gone… and Benji with them, perhaps Traum might finally change for the better. All I need is a hammer.”

I hadn’t realized our fingers had laced together. Rory’s hand was hot, the air in his voice thin. “It will change,” he said. I could hear his heart drumming in his armor. “Things can be better than they’ve been. If it’s a hammer you want…”

He brought our entwined hands to his belt. Pulled free the blacksmith’s hammer he’d used in the melee and clasped my hand around it. “Have mine.”

I clutched the handle like it was a rope thrown down to me. A new tune began, the sound of the revelry continuing on and echoing into the cavernous room and ricocheting off the glass above. We moved through the crowd, I with practiced smoothness, Rory like he was trying to crack the stones beneath our feet.

Dedrick, Hamelin, Samuel, and Tory never stopped watching us.

“Tell me,” I said, low enough only Rory could hear. “What do you know about ox-eye?”

“It’s a draft. A sedative, I think. Saw plenty of it back when I lived at Castle Luricht. Why?”

I leaned in close and told him about the visions I’d had. Of the Omens, the abbess, the Diviners—the tor. How there was a rasping voice, and that voice spoke through me, telling me the past was a portent, showing me Aisling’s crumbling ceiling, then darkness.

“It’s like a dream. A white light. Shadows, moving in and out. But in dreams, I fell through the hamlets, and in these visions I cannot move at all.

I’m stuck on my back, forced to see whatever happens above me, and my thoughts… I don’t know. It’s like someone else is seeing. Feeling.

Remembering.”

Rory listened without interrupting, his hand tightening over mine.

Neither of us was trying to lead now. We were like water, swaying in

perfect rhythm, two bodies familiarized with each other in motion.

“Whatever happens,” I said, “in this tournament or after, if I cannot find out who or what is causing these visions, keep searching.” I took a shallow breath. “Do what you once promised. Take care of Bartholomew.”

Rory’s brow furled, his voice dangerously soft. “You say it as if you will not be there to do it yourself.”

The song ended. Two seconds later, the king’s knights were upon us.

“What remarkable partners you make,” Samuel said.

“Agreed.” Dedrick was holding Rory’s helmet. He slammed it against Rory’s chest. “One would think you danced before.”

Hamelin’s teeth were bared. “I told you not to touch her.”

Rory slouched forward, positively bored. “The queen bade me to dance.

I’m a good little soldier—I do as I’m told.” His fingers trailed over my long silk sleeves, shifting the fabric until it fell over my hand, hiding my fist— and the hammer within—from view.

He let go of my hand. Tendered a final glance. “Diviner.”

Then he slipped away into the crowd.

“Prick.” Hamelin watched him go. “Might have the king and everyone else fooled—but not me.”

Tory reached for my arm. “Come, Diviner. The king would like you to —”

She began to tremble. So did Hamelin and Dedrick. So did I, the scribes, the candle flames. Books danced on their shelves, and the ground shook.

Shouts sounded. “Earthquake!”

The Harried Scribe’s lair shook so violently it upended, books raining down upon the king’s guests, clunking them on their heads and shoulders and knocking them off their feet. Bows scraped over fiddle strings, the instrumentalists stopping mid-note. The shaking grew until it rattled my teeth, the horrible sound of wood splintering echoing in the room. High above, the glass dome shattered, raining thousands of shards down upon us.

I don’t know who ran first. But there was a sudden, screaming rush for the door. A tide of bodies.

“Get outside,” Dedrick shouted. “Before we’re crushed.”

More knights joined us as we pushed out of the door into the dark corridor, Benji among them. I lost sight of Rory, the crowd dense as it fled the Harried Scribe’s dwelling, the room emptying out like blood from a split

artery.

Dedrick caught me by one arm, Benji by the other. “Come, Your Majesties.”

He ripped us away from the crowd. Down alleys, left then right, we turned, disappearing like ink into the dark well of the Seacht, tripping over ourselves as the earth continued to shake.

A minute later, the world was still again. Only the rushing sound of the Tenor River and the echoes of distant screams remained. When I looked back, a great cloud of dust was rising, a gap sitting among the buildings like a mouth newly shy of its front tooth.

The Harried Scribe’s lair had fallen in on itself.

“All those books.” Benji was spitting. Slurring. “Pith! When is that damn quaking going to stop?”

“It has stopped, you bungling drunkard,” I hissed.

Dedrick brought us over a narrow bridge, and I heard a noise. A low hum. Not the rush of the Tenor or the call of water sprites. This was a soft, eerie song, slightly out of tune. I looked behind me.

There was nothing there.

“Gods, what a disaster. And I know what Samuel will say.” Benji pinched his nose and spoke in a stuffy voice. “‘Another terrible portent, sire!’ Shut up, you old windbag.” He turned, remembering me. “You don’t happen to have any of that flower on you, do you, Six? I could use a little sedation right about now.”

We stepped onto another bridge. “It’s ox-eye,” I said. “Not a flower.”

“Pious and well-informed never made good bedfellows, my naive friend.

Ox-eye is a flower,” Benji garbled, waving his hand at me. “There are iterations, depending on which hamlet you’re standing in, because apparently no one agrees on anything in this kingdom. Some folk call it moon daisy. Ox-eye is a crude appellation. But if you’re going for the traditional name, gowan will do.”

My ears perked. “The flower that grows on the tor?”

“It’s a boring flower. Terribly common. But in extravagant doses—well.

You’re familiar with what it does. My grandfather’s recipe, you know. He was such a learned man. A bit of a”—he belched—“a bit of an alchemist.

Indeed, ox-eye came from his own attempts to replicate the very spring water you dreamed in. Though I hardly imagine he ever considered his

concoctions would be used to placate vengeful Diviners such as yourself.”

He sighed, wistful. “Sadly, just like his kingship, my grandfather’s designs failed. He did not slip into unconsciousness and dream of portents or gods like he intended. Ox-eye is nothing like the spring water; it won’t give folk stone eyes, and it sure as hell can’t bring them back from the dead.”

Dedrick stopped in the middle of the bridge. “Bring folk back from the dead?” It was horrible, seeing him like that. Gray eyes wide, gray teeth on display. “Is that what happens when one drinks the water on the tor?”

I turned to Benji. Gave him a murderous look.

“You—” In three steps Dedrick was right in front of me, my back against the bridge’s wooden rail. “You’ve consumed that water. Drowned in it over and over.” He was staring at my veil. “Aisling’s fucking waters, you’re dead?”

He barked out a laugh. “It’s nothing to do with the Omens at all, is it?

It’s that spring.” He reached for his belt. Withdrew the inkwell. “You can’t tell the future any better than this thing, can you? And Myndacious…”

Realization washed over his face. “He’s dead, too, isn’t he? Stronger for it. The fucking cheat.” Dedrick caught my arm. “You’re going to tell the noble scribes exactly what that spring water does and get my uncle’s fortune back or I’ll—ugh.”

Dedrick jolted, face twisting, mouth going slack. Blood spilled from his body, pouring from his armor, slicking down his leg and onto cobblestones.

He looked down.

The king’s sword was buried in his side. Dedrick peered at his wound, then back at Benji in a bleary kind of wonderment, as if, for all his guile, he’d never imagined this outcome. He let go of my arm. Lunged forward.

Struck Benji so hard in the face the king was thrown back, hitting his head and crumpling into a ball.

Then Dedrick turned. My gaze fell to the inkwell in his hand, and I knew like I knew when the sun was setting and darkness nigh that it was time.

The hammer Rory gave me was still in my fist. I loosened my grip, letting it fall just enough so that its weight was perfect in my palm.

And swung.

I hit Dedrick’s arm, knocking the inkwell from his hand. The knight let out an ugly shout, and when I raised my weapon once more, he tried to

catch it. Tried to stop me.

But he was not strong enough.

I brought the hammer down upon the Harried Scribe’s inkwell, shattering it, ink, like blood, spilling from hundreds of broken shards.

Dedrick stared at the carnage, his face twisted, then whirled on me, swinging his fist with the easy violence he’d exacted when in my chamber the night before.

I dodged his blow, caught his shoulder, and shoved him. Back he staggered, and forward I rushed, pushing him with full force until his spine slammed against the bridge railing. Air fled from Dedrick’s lungs. He coughed, choked, and fell to the ground, his underestimation of my strength written in the whites of his eyes.

“Tactical stratagem is well and good.” I panted like an animal. Dedrick struggled, and I kicked him in the stomach like he had me. Held him down with my foot. “But hitting things over and over again has its merits.”

But then he slammed his gauntlet into my ankle, blinding me with pain, and I lost vital footing, the cobblestones beneath my feet slick with blood.

Dedrick made it to his feet. Caught my wrist, the intellect washed from his eyes, a primal menace all that remained of him as he bled out. “If I must fall from the board,” he rasped, “so too shall y—”

A whistle echoed through the air, sharp, exact, then—a horrible crunch.

Dedrick’s eyes went wide. He let out a choked breath, spit dribbling down his chin. Blood spurted from the side of his head where his skull had cratered in. Something had hit him. Something that lay at our feet, coated in red. It took me a moment to recognize it.

A pale chunk of limestone.

Dedrick stumbled forward, still holding on to my wrist. When his feet slipped over the smooth stones at the edge of the bridge, he toppled over the railing and fell like an anchor into the Tenor River.

Taking me with him.

Cold water filled my nose, my mouth, my eyes. I churned my arms, pressed my lips together—tried to swim without knowing how. But the current was strong, and the Tenor dark. I was getting turned around, up and down muddled, the air in my lungs already beginning to burn.

A hand caught my arm and lifted me from the water. I looked up into the face of a stone creature. He’d pushed aside a veil, revealing fangs and wide

limestone eyes, a protruding brow upon a batlike face, and—a pink robe?

The gargoyle looked down at me and smiled. “Hello, Bartholomew.”

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