The Knave and the Moon — Chapter no 18

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A COLD, YAWNING CASTLE

We reached the Fervent Peaks the same way we had months ago: in the rain after dark.

The road up the mountains, steep and narrow, had been made thinner by erosion. The hot springs Sybil and I had once bathed in were brimming with earth and rock. Debris had broken away from the Peaks and was sliding precariously downslope into the Tenor River, which rushed now with a fervency I’d never seen, carrying chunks of shale with it as it fled into Traum.

All around it were pieces of broken nets, broken boats. We wove around them like we’d woven around Aisling’s ruins upon the tor—and we were not alone.

There were folk of the Peaks upon the road. Men and women and children in oiled leathers. Some held lanterns, others empty nets, and all wore the same thin, wanting face I’d only ever seen on sprites or in a

looking glass.

They were frightened and hungry.

When they saw Sybil in the cart, dozens of voices called out. “There was a terrible earthquake—the mountains are fissuring! What have we done to anger the Ardent Oarsman?” A man lunged over a crack in the road and

grasped at Sybil’s hand at the edge of her cart. “Please, Diviner. There is rock in the river, the fish are gone. Lend me a coin, that I might travel to the Chiming Wood—”

Hamelin reached to his belt and withdrew his sword. “Get back,” he barked, knocking the man off his feet with the broad side of the blade.

“For pity’s sake.” Sybil gripped the side of the cart. “Lend him some coin.”

Hamelin nodded at the faces on the road, then the darkened windows to the village houses. “We’re folk of the Peaks: Strength and vigor are our greatest qualities. Whatever disaster has befallen them, they will pull themselves out of it.” Hamelin did nothing but spur his horse. “What is harrowing is hallowed.”

I reached into Fig’s saddlebag. Drew forth the gold coin Benji had presented me with in the Seacht and held it out to the fisherman. “Here.” I lifted my visor. “Take it.”

When he looked up into my stone eyes, he gasped. “What are you, sir? A Diviner?”

I slid the coin into his hands. “I’m nobody.”

Up the winding road we went, our pace limping. Higher we rose, the wind sharper, the air colder. I waited for the road to bottom out on that plateau, where the basin and the windblown dwelling stood.

But we never made it there. Three enormous boulders stood in our way, blocking the road entirely. To its right, a new, crude path was cut, torchlight gleaming from its mouth. “Where is King Benedict Castor?” a cool voice called. “And where is my son?”

Benji and Hamelin rode to the front of the caravan, where several figures waited, Avice Fischer ahead of them all. Under dim torchlight, she looked like the Ardent Oarsman had the first time I’d seen him—shrouded in a cloak, movements as rigid as the surrounding mountains.

That, and she was holding his godsdamn oar.

Avice handed Hamelin the oar, then nodded to the king. “Welcome, sire.

We’re pleased you arrived safely.”

“The road is in tatters.” Benji was out of breath. Red in the cheeks and slumped in his saddle. “The way was a labor.”

“There was a great quake in the night, sire.”

Benji nodded swiftly. “But the tournament, the feats of strength, will

continue, surely.”

Avice’s eyes narrowed over the king, chill mountain air passing between her and the rest of us. Of all the nobles I knew, Avice Fischer wore her former knighthood the best, her affect befitting someone who had spent a deal of time in armor and had grown used to wearing an impervious exterior. “Of course, King Castor.” She found Sybil in the crowd and bowed. “It’s our pleasure to have you with us again, Diviner. This way, if you please.”

She led us up the new, crudely carved path. We traveled around the mountain in an upward spiral, stopping every now and then when we heard the quiver of crumbling rocks.

“It’s safe ahead,” one of the fisherman nobles called, his torch flickering in the wind. “The young king was gracious enough to alert us of the dwelling, high in the Peaks. A castle, tucked away, like a lost inheritance.”

He looked back at Sybil. Nodded solemnly. “A gift from the Ardent Oarsman.”

The gargoyle made a sound of flatulence.

Higher we climbed, the knights trailing behind, every sound swallowed up by the roar of the nearby waterfall. Mist wet my clothes, my hair. I felt a chasm behind me. An infinite openness. Were I to fall, it would be like one of Sybil’s dreams. A dark, horrifying plummet.

But then the lip of the path was there. The nobles ahead stepped onto a tableland, and the king, Maude and Sybil and the gargoyle and me—the knights and their horses—joined them. Around us were the jagged fingers of the six mountain peaks that had once been seven, and another basin. A mountainous bowl, filled with the purest crystalline water. And next to it— an enormous edifice. Crude and made of shale.

The Ardent Oarsman’s castle.

Its door was bracketed by torches, the yellow light obscene against all the mountainous gray. But then that light fell upon the cold stone stairs at its entryway, and I froze.

There were creatures on the stairs. Twenty of them, looking exactly as they had the last time I’d been here. Jagged shale creatures the size of dogs,

sleeping upon the stairs.

“Sprites!” Samuel cried.

Knights dismounted, swords drawn, but Avice Fischer and her fellow

nobles didn’t move. Indeed, some were wearing smiles. “Take a closer look.” Avice’s voice was low. “As we said—it is safe here.”

Tory went first, her steps light. It was for naught. I saw it the moment I came upon the first stair. Not one of the twenty sprites was sleeping.

They were dead. Punctured through their necks by iron stakes and driven into the stone stairs, where they lay unmoving. From their stony backs, tiny gowan flowers had begun to blossom.

The gargoyle began to cry.

I stood unmoving, unable to parse what lay before me, blunted by a burning malice.

The nobles of the Fervent Peaks turned to the king, to Sybil, for their endorsement. “Ignoble creatures are capable of any wicked deed, but to destroy the cathedral…” Avice shook her head. “We chased them from this place last night, and they fled, bereft, from the mountains. Those that could not get away, well.” She looked upon the fallen creatures. “Would that every sprite in Traum would die so easily.”

Benji nodded, that craven little fool, saying nothing of the carnage laid out like a welcoming in front of him. But Sybil— “No.” She vaulted over the edge of her cart. Came upon the stairs with steps so menacing several of the nobles fell back. Her crown glistened in the moonlight and her veil caught the breeze. Grip tight around the neck of the hammer I’d given her, her visage was so beautiful and terrifying it heartened me. “It is you who are wicked and ignoble.”

Maude’s voice echoed over the basin. “This goes beyond cruelty.”

Avice was the only noble who held her ground. “This,” she said plainly, “is how it’s always been done. You of all folk should know that, Maude Bauer. Now come.”

Hamelin walked beside his mother, and when they each laid a palm upon the Ardent Oarsman’s door, it yielded to them straightaway. Benji followed, eyes forward.

I helped the gargoyle, who was still sniffling, from the cart. “It won’t always be like this,” I murmured to him as we passed the dead sprites upon the stairs. “I won’t let it.”

We caught up with Maude, with Sybil, and I dropped my hand, my armored knuckles grazing over her hip. We walked, just like last time, together into the castle.

Flaxen nets had been placed upon walls, but they were trivial to the purple banners wrapped around castle columns like fingers around a throat.

The king’s mark was everywhere, rendering the Ardent Oarsman barely a memory in his own home. A long wooden table had been placed over what had once been the Omen’s pool, an abundance of meats and breads and drink upon it, and yet for all that wine, all that food, nothing seemed to fill the cavernous belly of the hall. Our echoes abounded, the roaring hearth and savory scents no match for the chill mountain wind that glided through the columns. The castle was the same beast we’d trespassed upon months ago: cold and yawning.

“We’ve furnished the rooms, King Castor,” Avice said, pointing to a distant stone stairwell. “Though I doubt they will live up to your Castle Luricht standards.” Her voice made it apparent how offensive she found those standards. She turned her finger to the opposite side of the castle, where the pillars opened up, revealing the rest of the tableland and the adjacent basin of clear water. “I’ve erected tents for spectators should the weather tomorrow be unforgiving. Please, take your seats.”

The same minstrel whom I’d seen in Coulson Fair and the Seacht had made the journey behind the knighthood. The poor sod was wet through from the rain. He fumbled with his lute, cleared his throat, and began to sing, his voice echoing through the hall.

“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 oarsmen all set in their trade. The fish are all caught, though the weather be fraught—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 oar, and he lent me his faith, and to his queen, the Diviner, did I pray.”

“Doesn’t he know any other song?” muttered Maude.

The knights circled the table. “Over here, sire.” Avice led the king to where a cold shale throne waited like a beatless heart in the center of the room. The place the Ardent Oarsman had once sat. “The seat of honor.”

Sybil was placed between Avice and Maude, and I sat between Maude and the gargoyle. Folk of the Peaks stared at me, then again at the gargoyle, clearly flummoxed to see a creature like him among knights and nobles and

champions. They whispered behind their hands, words like knave and Aisling and magic abounding.

Grumbling, I confronted my plate—gamey gray meat. I took one bite, thought of the dead sprites upon the stairs, and spat it onto the floor.

“Which is worse,” the gargoyle pondered. He was watching Benji, alone at the head of the table in the Ardent Oarsman’s chair. “A sword through the side from a friend? Or the slow, agonizing degradation of a thousand nicks upon he who has none?”

I glanced at the king. He was fiddling with the stone coin. Rubbing it beneath his thumb and gazing upon it with a kind of adulation I’d seen the Artful Brigand tend. It was easier to think of Benji that way—a new version of the Omen who’d used me. Hurt me. Hurt her. Sometimes it took all I had not to close the distance between us with a blade and end him the way I had the Brigand.

But then I’d remember the little boy I’d carried in my arms, the one I’d spent my life trying to protect, and I was filled with such a wretched sadness I could barely hold myself up. Benji had been right about Aisling and the stone objects and the Omens—all that power had to go somewhere.

But what became of love when it was reduced to ruin?

“Either way,” I told the gargoyle. “He’s on borrowed time.”

Down the table, Hamelin was loudly explaining to Sybil the feats of strength. “There will be three,” he said, chewing his food. “The breaking of stones, the throwing of stones, and the lifting of stones.”

“I understand you intend to compete, Diviner. Commendable.” Warmth touched Avice’s chilly voice. “My son, of course, will be competing as well.

Hamelin was lifting stones since before he could stand.”

“Dropped a few on his head, too, I imagine,” Sybil said.

I laughed into my cup. Maude elbowed me under the table.

“Think you’re stronger than me, Diviner?” Hamelin said. I could hear

the challenge in his voice.

“I know I am,” Sybil answered.

I peered around Maude. Hamelin had placed the stone oar on the table and was leaning over it, smiling, my fucking gold rings glimmering around the wrist of his gauntlet. And while his teeth were white and straight and nothing like the Ardent Oarsman’s jagged smile, I saw the Omen plain enough in the way Hamelin was looking at Sybil. Like he was hungry for a

bite. “You are bodied,” he told her, “I’ll give you that. But let’s give credit where it’s due.” He scratched the corner of his mouth. “I handled you well enough in the glen outside of Coulson Faire at the end of summer. A few

heavy stones are nothing to that.”

My hands splayed on the table.

Maude gripped my elbow and held me in place the same moment Avice turned and snapped at her son. “Go sit by the king. Make sure he’s comfortable.”

Hamelin smiled one more time at Sybil, took the Ardent Oarsman’s oar, and sauntered to the head of the table.

Sybil hardly noticed. She was looking at the food on her plate. Dragging a finger through it. “There are folk in your hamlet who might eat better at this table than you or me, Fischer. Folk of the Peaks are strong, I know. But muscle, like your mountains, erodes.” She looked up at Avice. “If your people cannot fish, they will grow hungry.”

Avice was as unflagging as ever. “Commerce will come on the heels of this tournament. My son will triumph, and the winnings shall return to the Peaks, just as the king promised.”

“Things,” Sybil said slowly, “do not always go as promised.”

“Spoken from experience, I gather.” Avice set down her fork and knife.

She spoke closely to Sybil, her thin voice putting prickles on the back of my neck. “Hamelin told me how you tried to take the king’s life before the wedding. How you were brutally wounded in his care.”

I was practically sitting on Maude’s lap, trying to eavesdrop.

“If it is still your wish to be rid of the king,” Avice whispered to Sybil, “I will make it so. And after—” She looked out into the Ardent Oarsman’s hall. “All this can be yours. You are a strong woman. You will like it in the Peaks. If you are here, folk will come. Bring more coin. We will restore what has been damaged. Begin again.” She clasped her hands together.

“And if it suits you both, you may have the hand of my son in marriage.”

I bit down so hard my jaw popped.

Sybil had not lifted her veil to eat or drink. She stirred the wine in her cup, speaking to the dark swirls. “When I was a girl at Aisling Cathedral, the abbess told me I would never be safe beyond the tor because I was holy, and people wanted holy things for themselves. She told me many things that made me hold still and kept my world small. But that did not always make

them untrue.”

She turned to Avice. “You don’t want a wife for your son any more than the king wanted one for himself. You want a holy object—someone to distract folk when they are frightened and hungry. But you of the Peaks should know stone does not make for good nourishment. And I am full of stone.”

Like the mountains after the quake, Avice Fischer’s stoicism began to fissure. “You don’t understand, Diviner. I do not want you to remain here to distract folk of the Peaks. I want you to remain to give them hope.”

Sybil’s laugh was strange. Resounding and entirely empty. “I won’t be remaining anywhere in the Stonewater Kingdom. Least of all here.”

My brow went low.

Whatever happens, she’d said in the Seacht, in this tournament or after, if I cannot find out who or what is causing these visions, keep searching. Do what you once promised. Take care of Bartholomew.

I hadn’t liked it then, and I hated it now, and I’d yet to understand what it meant. “Bartholomew?”

The gargoyle was finger painting with his food upon his plate. “Yes, Bartholomew?”

“Something’s wrong.” I didn’t know what it was, only that the not knowing made me feel disgustingly useless. “How did she seem to you in the carriage?”

“I am her squire,” he said plainly. “I know when she bears armor and when she does not.” He peered up the table. “There is a burden upon her shoulders. Pain that the strange draft of eye-ox cannot dull.”

Ox-eye.

Perhaps I did not have to be disgustingly useless.

I took the gargoyle’s hand and pushed from the table.

“Where are we going?” he asked, hugging his robe to him as we walked.

We passed columns, our echoes abounding down a long stone corridor.

“To help lighten her burden,” I said. “We’re going to find some ox-eye.”

Gods I hated this castle. Of course there’d be no kitchens, no larder, because that Ardent Oarsman didn’t eat anything but Diviners and their blood. It took the gargoyle and me nearly an hour to find where Avice Fischer had stashed the poor sods responsible for tonight’s feast.

“Oi!” I said, barking at three fishermen cleaning dishes over a trough and feeding a dying fire. “You got any ox-eye?”

“Ox-eye?”

“Eye-ox,” said the gargoyle.

“It’s a sedative,” I said.

The fishermen shook their heads. “Try Medkel, our physician.”

Medkel was a man with skin like leather and knuckles so swollen it was a miracle he managed to put on his own trousers let alone thread a suture through a needle. “Ox-eye.” He sucked his teeth and spat out a fishbone.

“What’s that?”

“A sedative made of gowan flowers.”

He shook his head. “Sounds right awful.”

“I’m a sick man.” I pulled a copper from my belt. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got.”

He eyed the copper. “I’ve got nothing to give you.”

I left him the coin anyway, then went to find one of those assholes the king had replaced me with. For every corner we turned, I prayed we’d find Hamelin Fischer on the other side. A splash of red in all this gray would really liven the place up.

“I do not like it here,” said the gargoyle, peering up at stone buttresses.

“A crude imitation of the cathedral.”

“That’s all gods ever are,” I muttered. “Crude imitations.”

We found Samuel Eichel instead, smoking idleweed and coming out of a hallway garderobe. “Knight.”

He jumped, then stared, mesmerized, into my eyes.

“Ox-eye. Do you have any?”

It took him a moment to catch up. “Is the Diviner unwell again?”

“Yes.” I put on an atrocious smile “Get it.”

“Pith, haven’t forgotten your pompousness, have you? If you want ox- eye, try the king’s saddle bags.” Samuel paused. Looked at me, then the gargoyle, like he could not decide which of us was less trustworthy. “On second thought, I’ll get it.”

Twenty minutes later, the gargoyle and I were in a stay-room, crouching over a fire, pouring shit-brown ox-eye from a glass bottle into two cups. As I handed one to the gargoyle, I caught a sharp, pungent odor.

The gargoyle sniffed his. “Lovely. Smells like death.”

“What are you two idiots doing?”

I jumped and the gargoyle shrieked. When we turned, Maude was there, hand on her hip.

“Bartholomew!” The gargoyle nodded at the cup. “Care for a libation?”

I straightened. “Where’s Sybil?”

“Still at dinner. I wanted to check on you two.” Maude’s nose wrinkled.

“What’s that?”

“Eye-ox.” The gargoyle wiggled his brows. “I made it myself.”

“Ox-eye?” She stomped to the fire. “That’s a bloody sedative.”

“It’s more than that for Sybil,” I said. “Let’s see what it actually does.”

The gargoyle took the cup and raised it to his mouth. “I confess it has been a long while since I’ve had any visions. Bartholomew said this draft gave her quite the rattle—”

“Ah, ah.” Maude put her hand over the rim of his cup. “Maybe I should try. We don’t need you shaking loose any more pieces of yourself.”

She took the cup. Sniffed it. Made a face I’d only ever seen her make when I’d been a boy and she was picking lice out of my hair. Chin up, Maude downed the drink in heavy gulps. “Fuck me.” She put a hand to her mouth. Held in a burp. “I might puke.”

“Don’t be a baby. Any visions?” I waited. “Feel anything coming on?”

“Just the insides of my stomach.”

“Perhaps it does not work for everyone,” the gargoyle mused. “Perhaps you need to be special.”

“And aren’t I just that.” I took the cup. Threw my head back and drank.

The gargoyle’s fingers trilled. “How was it? Scrumptious?”

My stomach rolled, bile shooting up my neck. I put a hand to my mouth, dropping the cup onto the floor.

Sweat prickled along my brow. I felt dizzy, my voice strange in my ears.

“Whoa.”

Maude’s face was in mine—blurrier than it should have been. “Pith, Rory. You’re turning gray.”

I tried to answer, but I was unmoored. The fire, the walls, Maude and the

gargoyle—they blended together into a pale stain. I was as confused as I’d been when I’d woken from death, not Rory or even the knave, but something or someone far away from myself, so much larger than my body could hold. Cut me open, and you would see earth, water, wind. I was the grass and the frost that covered it. Sun, and its spectral light through a dewdrop. I was everything, and to be everything is also to be nothing, and suddenly I felt so alone, knowing deep down that no one knew me or looked upon me— A white light took hold of my vision, eclipsing everything. When it softened, I was looking up at a vaulted ceiling. How tall the sanctuary walls reached. How brilliant the stained-glass windows looked in the moonlight. I knew where I was—Aisling Cathedral—but I was not me. Not entirely. I was looking up from a place from whence I’d never gained perspective; I was lying on my back atop the chancel.

Above me, two figures approached. A figure veiled by silk, and a young

woman. The abbess—

And Sybil.

“Lie down,” the abbess said.

Slowly, Sybil stepped over me, and the cathedral ceiling rippled, as if made of water. The abbess pressed both hands over her shoulders. “Dream.”

She shoved Sybil down. I couldn’t see the cathedral ceiling anymore, only Sybil, who held perfectly still as bubbles escaped her mouth. She did not struggle or flail against the abbess’s oppressive hand. She didn’t put up a fight. She simply jerked, barely making a ripple in the water.

And drowned.

I felt my own body jolt, my eyes rolling back in my head. When I spoke, my voice was a low, terrible rasp. “You look upon me, but you do not know me. I am older than the world, younger than time, permanent as the sky, and temporal as a dream. It is I who measures Traum’s portents. I who Divines what is to come, for naught but the past can foretell the future.”

Maude and the gargoyle startled. “Rory?”

But I was still far away. Sybil and the abbess had disappeared. I spoke now to the unlistening stone of Aisling Cathedral’s ceiling. “What happed before will happen again,” I said in the same horrible voice. “Tools will turn to weapons, and the stacked stones of faith and accordance shall crumble.

The Stonewater Kingdom shall end as it began: Fractured. Bloody.”

And then Sybil and the abbess were back. Only they were different now.

Sybil wore armor—bore a hammer. Now it was she who pressed the abbess down into water. She who did the drowning. Then she pulled her out of the water. Leveled her hammer and struck, reducing the warden of Aisling Cathedral to dust.

And she wasn’t alone. Bartholomew was there, and so was a king with two knights, and together with Sybil, all five began to destroy the cathedral.

I watched from my vantage on the chancel. When the ceiling began to quake, they fled, leaving me alone. I was gasping, throat sticky, despair touching every part of me. “The cathedral falls,” I called, knowing Bartholomew and the Diviner, the king and his knights, could not hear me.

“Run—and take heed! Not all that are lost are gone. A heretic can defend faith. The lowest creature can still reach the highest peak, and even death bears its flowers. A martyr might yet defeat a tyrant, but none shall overthrow a god without becoming one themselves.”

When the ceiling fell in on me, its weight was just as the cathedral’s had ever been—a great, terrible burden. I lay beneath it in total darkness, despair pressing down on me, certain now more than ever there was no hope left for me in this world.

And still I did what I’d learned to do in my time beneath the cathedral’s

stone ceiling.

I told myself a story.

“History may be hewn of stone, but the future grows in its cracks. To dream is not ever to drown. One day I will look up and see the sky: There are things yet to dream of. Light yet to touch. Things will change. They’ll

get better.

“They just have to.”

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