The Knave and the Moon — Chapter no 17

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE RECORDS AND FINDINGS OF

BENEDICT CASTOR THE FIRST

Iripped away from Tory, darting between knights. Maude had barely a moment to open her arms before I was throwing myself into them. She caught me, then laughed in her throat, her arms around me as fortifying as armor. “My girl.”

I shut my eyes and hugged her so tightly it stole my breath.

The gargoyle sighed contentedly. When I was out of Maude’s arms, I reached for him so desperately I bruised myself on his body, tears wetting my veil. “I missed you so much, Bartholomew.”

Poor thing didn’t know what to do in my arms. He gave a small shriek and squirmed like a cat fumbling backward. But then he eased, and his stone arms found their way around me. He said, with a kind of wonder that sounded like both sadness and joy, “Oh, Bartholomew, I was forlorn without you. What a marvelous capability for love I have.”

“Excuse me,” Hamelin barked. “Maude Bauer, Rodrick Myndacious, and the abbess’s stone watchdog were all said to have died on the tor.

Suddenly all three are back, winning tournament events. What’s next, a fucking gargoyle champion?”

I pulled back, ready to flay him with my tongue, but the gargoyle spoke first. He hemmed and hawed so loudly it came out a bark, then turned to the

king and his knights. “I am the final gargoyle. A last vestige, like the Diviner, of the tor. Let me be resolute: We three were not killed by the crumbling of the cathedral, but we did scatter to the wind. It was only when we learned of the tournament that we, like sheep of a feather, found

ourselves together once more.”

“Birds of a feather,” Maude said.

The gargoyle scowled. “Anyway. Now that we are back, it is our duty to stay. Bartholomew is still a knight, and I am still her squire.”

“Everyone knows that gargoyles are ancient sprites, domesticated by abbesses of old.” Samuel Eichel clutched his sword like a noblewoman clutches her pearls. “And there have been egregious troubles with sprites of late. This is a terrible portent, sire. We should not allow the gargoyle to remain.”

Rory snorted, and Maude’s hand fell to her axe. “You know my family’s repute,” she said. “Do you really believe anyone of the Bauer name would suffer a sprite to live lest the creature was of no threat?”

Samuel snapped his mouth shut.

The gargoyle cleared his throat. He was peering at Benji. He might have been trying to smile, but those fangs… He looked like he was holding in a mountain of loathing—or a catastrophic sneeze. “Surely the king bears me no ill will. He remembers how loyally I assisted in taking up the mantle of his endeavors.”

The king’s cheeks were ashen. He was still looking at Maude. The knights threw their skepticism at a gargoyle and a knave like Rory, but Maude? No one asked her where she’d been or why she’d bothered entering the joust or what she’d done with her winnings. She’d have told a lie, or she’d have told the truth, and it wouldn’t have mattered. No one saw a Diviner as anything but a girl who drowned, and no one heard the name Bauer and gave it an ounce of doubt, the mighty bell of its legacy ringing in the air.

Maude stepped forward. Opened her arms to Benji like the abbess had so often to me. “Forgive me. I’ve been away. Recovering from old injuries in the Chiming Wood. I had a long while to think, King Castor. And now that I am here—”

She put her hand on his shoulder, clasping him with poignant force. The last time he’d seen her, Maude had been withdrawing from his knighthood

—condemning Benji with tears. Now, she was smiling down upon him.

“Let bygones be bygones. I can’t think of where I’d rather be than at your side, Benedict. Your champion. Your knight. Your friend.”

Benji’s gaze widened, his blue eyes full of clouds. That’s the trouble

with spectacle and illusion.

How do you truly know what’s real?

The king looked to his knights, who had all fallen silent in deference to Maude, and his lips thinned. He put his hand on hers. Said, with all the magnanimity he could muster, “I’m pleased you had all that time to recover.

You’ve missed quite a lot.”

The subtext was loud. What have you really been doing?

Maude merely grinned. “You’ve gained yourself a queen in my absence, and a knave at that.” She looked over his shoulder at Rory. Pitched her voice low. “Shame. About his memory. It’s like he’s a boy again. Sharp and violent and entirely without direction.”

I glanced at Rory, standing with his usual idle tilt, brows low over his eyes, mouth cut by a semi-permanent sneer. It was hard to imagine he’d ever been a boy.

Benji eyed him, too. He did not say the words spring water, but as assuredly as they were in my blood, they were there. “Was it you who gave it to him?”

The knights were leaning in now, scowls on their faces, particularly Hamelin’s, as they worked to understand what was happening between their king and Maude Bauer.

Maude took a deep breath. Let it go. “Sometimes, for things to go right,” she murmured, “you must do the wrong thing.”

“You taught her that, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle told the king sweetly.

“Don’t you remember? That night upon the tor?”

Benji paled. Rory, Maude, Bartholomew—all three of them had returned like haunting shadows, lingering in the corners of Benji’s gaze, refusing to confront him outright. I could tell in the way the king’s chest moved that he was breathing hard, disquiet sitting as firmly upon his head as his crown.

He turned abruptly. “It’s getting late.” Then he flicked his wrist at Hamelin and barked, “Lead the way to the Peaks.”

The line of knights broke apart as they moved into the stable, collecting weapons and horses. The gargoyle skipped away, and Rory’s dark visage

vanished from my periphery. Tory came forward. Reached for my elbow.

“Your carriage is on the road, Diviner.”

“I’ll do that.” Maude stepped into Tory’s path, eyeing her fellow knight down her nose. “She’ll be safe with me.”

Tory tendered a sidelong glance, like I was a prized horse and she did not yet wish to surrender my lead. “The king was explicit her care remain with his most trusted.”

Maude shot me a grin. “What do you think, Diviner? Am I trustworthy?”

Not in the slightest. I grinned. “I’d trust you with my life.”

“There you have it. She’s in good hands.”

Tory took a step back, glowering. “Mind her well. As Samuel said, there’s been plenty of trouble with sprites.” She nodded at Maude’s axe. “I know that thing’s not just for show.”

“I’ve got enough blood on my blade to paint you red, Bassett.” Maude knocked into Tory’s shoulder. “Excuse us.”

It began to rain. We moved upstream against a tide of knights, making our way toward the road and the carriage that sat upon it. “Well done,” I said, almost smiling. “You rattled the king better in an afternoon than I’ve been able to in six weeks.”

She laughed in her throat. “I doubt that.”

Gods, I loved looking at her. Every line in her face was a story I wanted to know over and over again. “So, Maude Bauer. What have you been up to?”

“Been having a chat with the kingdom’s nobles, actually. Regius Ormsby and Otto Lange, to be specific.”

I thought about what Rory had said in the Seacht. 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 boy’s time is nigh. Kings come and go.

“You’d win the events, strip the nobles of their coin, thusly stripping Benji of his crown.”

Maude nodded curtly. Said, so quietly it might have been to herself, “We took up the mantle, killed the Omens. But it was furtively; no one knew.

Perhaps none of this might have happened if I had been louder in my beliefs, if I’d spoken up about Aisling’s crooked system sooner.”

“They’d have stoned you like they did Benji’s grandfather.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Either way, I understand better now. No more killing tyrants in secret.” Maude’s green eyes were forward, steadfast, sure.

“Transformation should bear witnesses.” She gave me a wizened glance over her shoulder. “Not all spectacles are for illusion.”

“And who would you see stand in Benji’s place as king?”

“That’s up to the nobles.”

I frowned.

We moved to the road. Slowly, a sly little grin settled on Maude’s

mouth.

“What’s that smile about?”

“Hmm? Don’t know what you mean.” We reached the carriage. Two draft horses had already been hitched. Maude led me around them. Waiting on the other side of the carriage, where nothing and no one could see us but the open moorland— Was Rory. His horse, Fig. The gargoyle, too.

I bit down on a smile. “Oh.”

“Thought you two might want a moment to properly reunite without the entire kingdom watching.” Maude’s grin edged over her mouth. She waltzed away. “I’ll just be over here, checking on the horses. Come along, Bartholomew.”

The gargoyle stayed as he was, watching Rory and me with the same adoration one bestows upon kittens or lambs or any clumsy newborn creature. He’d likely have stayed that way had Maude not returned, taken him by the arm, and pulled him away.

For the first time since before he’d died, Rory and I were alone.

He took a step, watching my veil, his stone eyes beautiful and strange. I wanted to claw open his armor—feel that he was corporeal.

Three more steps and he was in front of me, so close I could count each of his dark eyelashes as they fanned his cheeks. He didn’t touch me. He just looked at me, a flush warming his skin. “Still no shoes, I see.”

I glanced at my bare feet. “I like giving you the chance to behave chivalrously.”

“No you don’t.” He took a final step forward, pinning my back against the carriage. “You don’t like me when I’m good, and you don’t like me when I’m bad.”

My heart thundered. “I like you all the time, knave.”

Rory’s lips parted, steam, like smoke, billowing from his mouth. “I’d tell you I like you so well that I don’t have words for it.” There was pain, and pleasure, in his voice. “But that’s not true. I have the exact word.”

He leaned in, swallowing the little sound that fluttered out of my mouth.

Hands fast as a thief’s, he lifted the veil from my face. “If I were to ask for a token,” he said, looking into my eyes— “Yes.” I shoved my fingers into his hair. “Kiss me.”

Our lips collided.

Rory pressed me against the carriage and I wrapped my arms around his neck so hard his armor groaned. Rain fell over us, wetting our faces, and we fought with our mouths, pushing and pulling and gasping.

I threw a leg up around his hip and Rory caught it, pressing kneading fingers into the flesh of my backside. He nipped my bottom lip, then ran his tongue over it, my name shattering out of him. “Sybil.”

I answered in kind, my hunger and desperation caught in the notes of his name. “Rory.”

A low, desperate sound clawed up his throat. Rory put his hands on the carriage, fumbling for the door. When it opened, he took me by the waist and I grasped him by the shoulder, both of us hauling the other into the cramped space and slamming the door shut behind us.

I landed with my back on the carriage floor with Rory on top of me, my leg still hooked over his hip. He ripped off my veil, my crown, tossing them like conquered foes onto the floor. He hadn’t donned his gauntlets after sparring; when he touched me, it was with bare hands. Calluses scraped up my right leg, his palm so warm it put heat in my entire body. I pressed my tongue over his, panting into his mouth.

His hand rose up my thigh, pushing my woolen tunic up with it.

I arched up. Rolled my hips against his pelvis—felt a sharp pain.

Cried out.

Rory pulled back, searching my face. “Did I hurt you?”

My abdomen. A biting, snapping agony had begun just beneath my wound, radiating all the way up to my breasts. “No. It’s just my—where the spear…” I was loathe to say it. “There’s stone in my body.”

The pulse in Rory’s neck jumped. He looked down at my abdomen.

“May I?”

I bit my lip and nodded.

He raised himself to his knees. Reached down. Wrapped his fingers around the hemline of my tunic, wool snagging against toughened skin.

With arduous slowness, Rory pulled the fabric up over my legs, past the crook of my thighs—breath shuddering out of him—all the way up to my pelvis.

A scar waited there. Even in the dim light of the carriage, the skin showed its damage: a violent reddish hue where the spear had impaled me.

The surface was aggravated, the skin swollen and raised and angry.

A hiss fled Rory’s mouth. He looked at my wound the same way he’d once looked at the Omens. With so much hate I felt it on the back of my tongue. But then he bowed forward, dropping the faintest kiss upon the scar and murmuring against ruined skin. “You’re in pain?”

“Near you? Always.”

His eyes rose to my face. Martyr, I waited for him to call me, but he didn’t. No derision or disappointment or admonishment flittered between us. Rory simply nodded, pulled back from my scar, lifted my leg.

And dragged his lips up the inside of my thigh until his mouth was on my sex.

I swallowed an utterly base sound, my hands dropping like anvils and flexing possessively in Rory’s hair. “What are you doing?”

“Taking my token.”

He kissed me between my legs, sending my eyes rolling so far back I painted the carriage ceiling with stars. Then he took me by the hips. Kissed me again with an open mouth, moaning into me— Three loud thumps shook the carriage. “Time to go,” Maude called from outside.

Rory swore, the gravel in his throat vibrating up my spine. “No.”

“The knights are doing a head count. Get your lovesick ass out here, knave.”

Rory raised himself off me, shot out a furious sigh, cupped my face, and pressed my cheeks, making my lips part and pucker. He kissed me wetly.

“I’ll find you when we reach the Peaks.”

He fixed my tunic and kicked open the carriage door, turning to give me one last agonized look, then stomped out of sight. I peeled myself off the floor, climbed onto the bench, and attempted to breathe.

A moment later, the gargoyle was there, holding his hennin and wimple

to his head as he scuttled into the carriage and shut the door. “What vile weather. All this rain is not good for my clothes—Oh dear, Bartholomew.

Are you sick? You look positively feverish.”

I scrubbed my hand down my face, and Maude snapped the reins. The carriage jolted forward. “It’s entirely likely.”

The gargoyle squeezed onto the bench next to me, found a blanket balled up near his feet, and threw it over both of us. “That boy in the golden crown cares a great deal how his knights look upon him. If I’ve taught you anything, Bartholomew—and I hope I’ve taught you a great many things— let it be never to care what others think of you. Oh, he is clever not to trust us, but to let us remain beneath his pointy little nose simply for the wealth, the awe, we afford him…” His fingers drummed excitedly on the carriage bench. “I am a cuckoo in the nest of my enemies.” He paused. “A cuckoo isn’t a bird, is it?”

The carriage began to roll. “His grandfather didn’t care how his knights looked upon him,” I said quietly. “And they stoned him.”

“Perhaps that is the cost of faith in one’s own integrity.”

“There is no faith in the Stonewater Kingdom,” I said without thinking.

The gargoyle turned. Looked me in the face. “You know, I think there is something different about you, Bartholomew. The light in your eyes has dimmed.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I put a protective hand over my abdomen. “There is no light in stone.”

A minute later, the gargoyle was snoring, and I began to doze.

For the first time in weeks, I slept well.

I woke with my arms locked around the gargoyle. The sky was dark now, daylight held captive by a heavy mist that sat over the moors.

He was awake. When he saw that I was, too, he let out a breath, like he’d been trying to hold very still. “Oh.” I smiled and withdrew my arms.

“Was I smothering you?”

“Yes,” he said happily. “I must tell you it is good we are back on our

adventure together, Bartholomew.” He looked me up and down and wrinkled his nose. “I shall take up my duties as your squire immediately.

You look…” He trilled his fingers in my face. “Ugh.”

The forgotten song of laughter hummed in my throat. It lightened me so well I opened my mouth and began to talk, and we rode another hour before I stopped. I told him everything. Of the wedding, the king and his knights and the stone objects he’d gifted them. I told him of the ox-eye—of the strange visions of the tor and the rasping voice that came from my throat.

He talked, too, telling me of how he and Rory and Maude had returned to the Chiming Wood. How they’d learned of the tournament and fitted themselves in new armor and disguises—he spent at least ten minutes telling me about his wimple and corned hat and pink robes—and how they’d managed to slip into Coulson Faire. How Maude planned to turn the noble families against Benji. How Rory had gotten his memories back.

When he was done, the gargoyle was so heartened by his own approximation of, as he put it, “the important matters of state,” that he began to clap.

“Tell me,” I said, sudden and serious. “That piece of limestone you threw at Dedrick Lange. Was that a piece of your body?”

“A very talented bit of violence, I must say.”

“But it came from your body?”

He stared, like he found me prodigiously dim. “Obviously.”

“You should not have done that! Benji broke off your wing—there are cracks in your chest.”

Again, like I was a truly singular idiot, “Obviously.”

I dove for his robe. Flung up the hem.

He screamed. “Have a care for my virtue!”

My heart plummeted. There were fissures down his chest. Chunks missing from his left shoulder and a thousand more from his arm. Even now as we sat in the jostling carriage, tiny fragments of limestone broke from his body, catching in the fabric of his clothes.

The gargoyle ripped his robe away.

“You need to be more careful.” I waved an admonishing finger in front of his face. “I won’t have anything else happen to you.”

He stuck up his nose at me and faced the wall for several moments, peering over his shoulder only after whatever he deemed a punishing

amount of time had passed.

“If you are willing to speak to me, I have questions for you still, Bartholomew. What do you know about ox-eye?”

“Eye-ox? Nothing.”

“Ox-eye. The sedative that gave me those visions. Apparently Benedict Castor the First made it from the gowan flowers on the tor. An attempt to dream like Diviners did—a failed experiment, leaving a hundred unanswered questions.” I sighed. “A pity the only good king the nobles ever suffered was the one they killed. But kings come and go.”

“Don’t they just.” The gargoyle reached into his neckline. Extracted a notebook with a beaten leather cover and yellowing pages. “But let us be optimistic and hope that knowledge is slightly less fleeting. The art of thievery, too.”

I snatched it from his hand. Kissed his head. “Oh, you beautiful, beautiful creature!”

We pored over the pages, I reading aloud, the gargoyle nodding along and tracing the tip of his claw over the illustrations. And while it became immediately apparent that Benedict Castor the First was a prolific writer, a talented artist, an astute topographer, an indisputable scholar, his notebook was absolute rubbish.

We didn’t learn a damn thing about ox-eye.

It was afternoon. We’d been jostling in the carriage and reading for two hours and I’d lost my patience ninety minutes ago. “Listen to this tripe: ‘The sprite exceeds even its own oddity; it hardly ever breeds. Rarely in any hamlet have I observed mating habits, newborn creatures remaining young for a long while—indeed I have reason to believe the life cycle of a sprite is triple, or perhaps even quadruple, that of a human.’”

“What’s he doing, tromping around, looking for a pair of rutting sprites?” The gargoyle made a face. “Bit of a pervert, this king.”

I flipped through twenty more pages, then ten more. “Wait.” I turned back six pages. There, in delicate inky lines in his book, an enormous beast was drawn. An ox. Its body was long and wide and, from what I could tell, made of stone. Bromegrass and gowan flowers grew from it. Its tail was that of a snake—it had claws as well as hooves. Its eyes, pale and entirely without pupil, were just like the gargoyle’s and mine. Stone.

Der ewige Mond.

I pointed to the passage beneath it. “What do you make of this? ‘The sprite dies like any animal slain, but does not suffer decay, nor does it rot or become food for other sprites or a home to maggots. Indeed, if left to rest (not commonplace in hamlets that burn their dead), the sprite lays heavy upon the earth, slowly succumbing to grass or rock or water. It sprouts gowan flowers from its body and, simply put, becomes the very landscape

upon which it fell.’

“Bizarre,” I muttered.

“Keep reading,” the gargoyle said.

“‘Stranger still, the sprite leaves no skeleton behind. Indeed I have dug, searching moorland and woodland, beaches and muddy ravines, for bones that are not there. Once, I found a water sprite with a blade in her stomach.

She’d crawled onto the embankment and died under the generous shade of a great oak. I buried her where she lay and came back a full year later to a meadow of gowans. But the great oak! It was dying. I dug beneath the gowans and found no bones—all that was left of the sprite was a stone. It had crushed several of the oak’s roots, depriving the tree of water.

Limestone, it was. Heavy and hard and without flaw—just like that which sits on the tor.’”

I looked up at the gargoyle, lifting—straining—to understand a truth that lingered just out of sight. “The story always seems to return to one place, doesn’t it? It always returns to the tor.”

He nodded solemnly.

The carriage rumbled, jolting, the road growing rockier. When I looked out the window, the entire caravan was shrouded in mist, heavy, dense, bleak. It stole our noise, our vision; I could barely see the next knight, riding ten paces next to us. I jostled, listening for signs that we were drawing closer to the Peaks—for the lulling sound of the Tenor River—but I never heard it. The air was too thick.

Another violent jolt shook the carriage. We came to an abrasive halt.

“Maude?”

The door ripped open. Maude’s face was pinched. “We broke a wheel.

There’s a cart ahead. Come on.”

The gargoyle and I spilled out of the carriage and were immediately swathed in grayness. Beyond, I could hear the knights and their horses, their shapes reduced to eerie silhouettes in the thick blanket of mist. Maude led

us to the cart, and I handed the gargoyle in.

Something the size of a dog whipped by my legs.

I jolted, but the creature had already disappeared into the mist.

Up ahead, a horse screamed. A cracking, groaning sound seeped through the heavy air. Knights began to shout. I heard the word I always did when the sound of steel, of swords being drawn, filled the air.

Sprites.

Maude drew her axe. “Get in the cart,” she told me, peering into the gray landscape. The cracking sounds had grown louder, and with them, the heavy knell of footsteps. Something was out there in the mist.

Another creature whipped by me, blowing cold air in my face. Then another—then ten more. I held in a scream and clung to the cart.

Craggy hands. Jagged teeth. Gray textured skin that might be mistaken for shale. These were sprites that lived high in the mountains. The ones I’d seen in the Ardent Oarsman’s castle.

And they were running. Fleeing under the cover of mist, going west, back from whence we’d come.

A moment later their footsteps quieted, and the air went still. Maude’s blade hadn’t fallen on a single sprite—none had attacked. We stared at each other, the bewilderment on her face matching my own. “Where are they

going?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

On we traveled. But the path to the Fervent Peaks had changed since I’d last traversed it. There were holes in the road. Dark, yawning chasms that opened into the ground, crumbling and wildly unstable.

“Watch it!” I heard a knight call from the mist ahead. A second later, Maude jerked the reins, the cart barely avoiding a collapsing gap in the road.

Cloying apprehension nestled into my chest.

“Look,” called the gargoyle. “There’s a bit of clear sky ahead.”

We chased it for the next hour, several knights patrolling for sprites.

There were times we had to abandon the road altogether, rolling over chunks of rock and fields to avoid more collapsing holes.

Slowly the mist began to dissipate, the evening sky a haze of purple, the road finally clear. We all looked ahead, the knights cheering—then going immediately silent. Maude gasped, and I put a hand to my throat, staring up

at seven jagged mountains ahead.

Only there were no longer seven of them. There were six. The Fervent Peaks, Traum’s proud, indefatigable mountain range— Were crumbling.

OceanofPDF.com