The Knave and the Moon — Chapter no 22

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

LIGHT, IN STONE

Gasping for air, I woke in a clammy sweat.

I was in a room I did not know, and the sky outside my window was not as I’d last seen it—the sun was out, and the sky was a hazy shade of orange.

The night had passed, and half a day. I was still in the dress I’d worn the evening prior, and it was damp with sweat.

When my memory found me, it came in pieces. The smell of meats and herbs in Eichel House. Smoking idleweed with Rory. Kissing him in the alcove, blood on my tongue. In the great hall there’d been actors and a minstrel. Tory had bid me come that I might speak to Edora Eichel, then— I jolted up.

There had been another dark alcove. Tory had pulled me into it. Poured ox-eye down my throat. I’d gotten a good kick in, knocked her down hard, but the draft had been strong. White splotches of light had eclipsed my vision. I remembered little after that, except pieces of a dream where I lay on my back upon the tor, looking up at the Omens.

Head pounding, I dragged myself off the bed, pulled at my chamber

door.

And found it locked.

I hit the wood. “Let me out!”

I shouted until my voice was raw. Then—footsteps, coming down the corridor. “Sybil?”

It was Maude. Relief clawed at my lungs. “I’m here!”

“Step back from the door.”

The grating knell of iron hitting iron sounded. The latch trembled, then jumped, then broke, and the door was kicked open.

Maude was on the other side, chest heaving, axe raised. Ten woodsmen stood behind her in leathers, and beside them, Samuel Eichel, whose mouth was hanging open. “That’s a two-hundred-year-old mahogany door, Bauer!”

“And a cheap lock.” Maude came into the room and grasped my

shoulder. “You all right?”

I nodded. “What happened?”

“I came back last night. No one knew where you were, not even Edora.”

She nodded at the foresters and her throat worked. “We haven’t been able to find Rory.”

The last I saw of him, he’d been standing with Benji.

Dread fell like a stone into my stomach.

Maude turned to Samuel. “I’ll ask you one last time. Where is the knave?”

Samuel was clutching the Faithful Forester’s chime, eyeing the woodsmen and their axes. “I’m not sure—”

“Where?” I screamed.

Of all the king’s knights, Samuel Eichel had proved the most superstitious, willing to see a sign in everything he beheld. “It would bode very poorly for you,” I said in a low voice, “if you did not tell us.”

He swallowed. “He’s in the servants’ quarters. First floor, just off the

larder.”

We ran.

Another feast was being prepared in the kitchens, but the smell of ham and spiced potatoes did nothing to me—there was another smell on the air.

We turned a corner, and it grew stronger: rotten flowers. By the time we reached the door next to the larder my tongue was heavy with saliva.

“Here,” I said. “I can smell the spring water.”

Maude’s axe fell, and another door was ruined. I kicked it open and let out a broken sound.

Rory was on the floor, unmoving. Beneath his head, pooled over stones,

was a puddle of blood.

Maude swore, both of us crouching over him. My hands shook, but then —his neck. There was a pulse. And his chest was rising, falling. He was breathing. I looked up at Maude. Said, choked, “He’s alive.”

She grasped Rory from beneath the arms. Hauled him upright.

Blood dripped down his face like tears. Rory stirred, waking with a gasp. “Sybil?”

“I’m here.” His armor looked intact. But the rest of him… “How badly

are you hurt?”

“Hardly at all.”

He was favoring his left arm. Wincing, to sit up. Rory’s bottom lip was split, his right eye already blackening. The blood on the floor had come from a cut in his cheek, nigh identical to the one Benji had dealt him the night Aisling fell. I could tell just by looking at it that it needed sutures.

I smoothed his hair out of his eyes. Ran my fingers in tender strokes up his neck. “Pith, Rory.”

He exhaled. “He knows. Drugged me with ox-eye. Had a vision. Lost my”—he coughed, winced—“mind.”

We yanked Rory to his feet. I helped Maude bear his weight, draping his left arm over my shoulder. His head slumped forward, blood from his cheek staining the silk at my breasts. “Time to go, knave,” I whispered.

The sound of rattling armor echoed in the corridor. When I looked up, the king was there.

Benji’s golden hair was tousled, his cheeks red, his eyes jumping from me to Maude, then lingering on Rory’s bruised and bloody face. His breath quickened, as if he were whetted by the notion that he could overcome his former heroes as assuredly as I’d conquered Traum’s gods.

“You’re finally awake,” he said. “For all the ways I imagined how you might get back at me, Rory, I never pictured that. You, lying on the ground, spewing holy garble and rousing the superstitious nobs like a Diviner—No offense, Six. But what I can’t understand is why.”

His fervor vanished. “Why should you say the same things Six said at our wedding? A strange game for a party of heretics to play. What. A.

Performance.”

He reached for his belt. Withdrew the Artful Brigand’s coin. “I’m sorry, Maude. I can’t have you take them from me. If the Bauers have taught me

anything, and surely they have, it’s that we are only as powerful as the creatures we conquer.”

Maude held tightly to Rory. “Throw that coin at me and folk of the Wood will not sit idly by. Nor the prominent families of Traum.” Her voice was as sharp as the edge of her blade. “We both know how precarious this tournament has left your standing with the nobles, don’t we, Benedict?”

He paled. “That’s your aim, then. You’d depose and deny me as you once did my grandfather.” His fist tightened around the Artful Brigand’s coin. “Would you cast the first stone, Maude?”

Edora Eichel, along with Samuel and Tory and five other knights—and Maude’s party of woodsman besides—shoved their way into the corridor.

“Goodness,” Edora said. “Is that blood? A terrible portent. What’s happened, King Castor?”

Benji’s eyes rolled back in his head. But he cared too viciously for his magnanimous repute, too embedded in the spectacle to let it go now. “Fear not,” he told Edora, putting on a toothy grin. “The knave bit off more than he could chew, challenging me to spar last night. Maude has been gracious and offered to bring him to her surgeon.”

“And I’ll be accompanying them,” I said, gripping Rory so tightly he wheezed.

“Indeed. Please—take my carriage to Petula Hall, Maude.” He slipped the Artful Brigand’s coin into his pocket. “I shall join you there soon.”

Folk lowered their gazed to Maude, to me, as we passed, and we hastened through Eichel House, drops of Rory’s blood left behind on woolen carpets as remembrance. Outside, dusk was fading, night pressing over the Chiming Wood.

“Don’t take his fucking carriage,” Rory said, keeping his weight on Maude’s and my shoulders, our footsteps in the dirt that of a chimera—not three travelers, but one with six legs. “I’d rather walk until my legs fall off than take a kindness from that little prick.”

I held him tightly. “Who’s the martyr now?”

The wind called, and the birch trees swayed. “This way,” Maude said, leading us off the road. “It’s quicker.”

Shadows moved in my periphery. I kept my gaze forward. “Birke,” I

whispered.

Rory nodded, wincing.

A twig snapped. When I looked to my left, a birke was there, its pale flesh sagging, dozens of black eyes watching me. I shivered, small and frightened against the dark, vast Wood. But then—light. I could see the moon and a clearing ahead, where there stood a house, tall and wide. Our steps dragged over gravel, up the stairs, and then we were there, hammering on the door that might have been the only place in Traum that felt remotely close to home.

Victor wrenched the door open. “What’s happened?”

“He took a beating—that cut on his cheek needs mending,” Maude said.

“The king won’t be far behind. I doubt he’s keen to have Sybil out of his grasp for long.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Rory devolved into profane mumblings, blood spilling from his lips, his cheek. “Kitchen,” Maude told Victor. “Sew him up. Pith—don’t be a baby. Go, Rory. I’ll get you when the king arrives.”

“Go,” I muttered, knuckles grazing his. “Please.”

His concession was hard earned. He hadn’t yet dragged his eyes off me when Maude took my arm and pulled me up the stairs. “Come on, Diviner.

Let’s take a look at you, too.”

She brought me to the third floor, where her and Rory’s and Benji’s rooms stood in a row, then turned a corner. We entered a wide washroom. A hearth boasted a fire; there were sheepskin rugs strewn on the floor in front of a great wooden tub.

Maude took a kettle from the hearth and poured boiling water into a bowl, then pulled a chair from the wall. I thought she’d command me to sit.

She lowered herself into the chair instead. “Hurts to stand after a while,” she said, wincing as she sat. “Never did quite recover after the birke fell on me. Walking, riding—everything seems to sit in my body more than it used

to. Everything feels heavier.”

I pressed my lips together.

“Now.” Maude laced her fingers and peered up at me with insistent green eyes. “If I asked you about your injuries, would you tell me?”

The muscles in my abdomen bunched. “You know I was punctured by a

spear.”

She nodded.

“There’s nothing else.”

“You haven’t had spring water in a long while.” When I said nothing,

she pressed. “Does it cause you pain?”

“Yes.”

“How much does Rory’s blood help?”

“Plenty.”

“How long does the relief last?”

Not long enough. Even now, a day since I’d tasted it, a biting stiffness sat in my abdomen, pushing up into my chest. “I’m not an Omen. I have no intention of taking more blood from him than I was ever offered for a Divination.”

“We could always go back to the tor. Dig up the spring. From what I understand, for their own strange reasons, the sprites are doing that themselves.”

I fixed her with a hard look. “Like I said. I’m not an Omen.”

Her brows rose. “You’re resigned to it, then. To the pain.”

“It took Bartholomew ten years to turn into a gargoyle.”

“You’d spend a decade in agony?” Understanding deepened the lines in her face. “Or you do not expect to live that long?”

I said nothing.

Maude leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees. “Can I tell

you a story, Sybil?”

“It won’t change my mind.”

“That’s not always what stories are for.” She did not ask why I had not yet removed my veil. She simply looked upon it like she could already see my face, and said, “When Benedict Castor the First was named a heretic and thrown down in the gravel of the cathedral courtyard, he’d told me to denounce him. He wanted me to go on, searching for the Omens, to protect Rory and Benji, and I could not do that if I was in the gravel next to him. So I threw the first stone. And for nearly a year after, I slept no more than a few hours a night.

“I’d stay up, pacing this house, sharpening my axe—anything to keep from dreaming. Because when I did manage to sleep, I’d see his face. And even when I was awake, it took me a long, long time to look Benji in the

eye.”

“You had nightmares,” I murmured.

“Not at all. I’d dream of the good things. Of when I was a child and

Benedict was my mentor, playing swords with me or stacking books beneath my nose. I can still smell those pages. But he was dead, and I’d helped kill him. I couldn’t bear to look back on memories that would hurt me. And when I’d look at Benji—”

Maude almost smiled. “Those blue Castor eyes always did get to me.

For all his faults and uncertainties, there was never a time I did not see a brighter future when I’d look into Benji’s eyes. But because I could not look back, I couldn’t look forward—I stopped looking Benji in the eyes altogether.”

She sighed. “Love is a knightly tenet, same as war, and while I’d spent my life building muscle and wielding my axe, no one told me to love is always in some way to mourn—you can never truly love anything unless you allow yourself to see it clearly. Even when the looking breaks your heart.”

Maude blinked rapidly, running a finger beneath her nose. “Eventually I slept. Dreamed of my old friend. Woke, and looked once more into Benji’s blue eyes. Even when he broke my heart, I looked, just as I looked into Rory’s eyes when the light faded from them.”

She reached out. Took my hand. “If you are determined to go, I will not look away. For whatever time we have left together, I will look you in the eyes, Sybil Delling, and you will know that I love you.”

Slowly, I reached for the crown atop my head, fingers curling around the moldings. It wasn’t a heavy thing, but it had held gossamer in place, protecting me as well as any helm.

When it fell, taking my veil with it, Maude Bauer looked into my eyes, tears in her own. “But that does not mean I will not do everything in my power to get you to stay.”

We said very little after that. Fresh clothes were brought to the washroom, and Maude helped me strip away my yellow dress. When I stood naked before her, she took a cloth and dipped it in the bowl of hot water. “May I?”

I nodded, and Maude wiped sweat and Rory’s blood from my hands, my neck. She took the fresh clothes—braies and a padded shirt and wool trousers—and helped me dress. Then she brought a comb from a low shelf, glancing at my tangled, stringy hair like it would defeat her.

And got to work.

Maude did not brush my hair like the abbess did, soothing it away from my eyes. No. She combed it from the bottom up, getting out the knots while inflicting the least amount of pain, just like the Diviners used to. Like caring for me was a craft, and it was a pleasure to do it well.

After, she brought me to the room I’d slept in last time I was here.

The gargoyle was there, wrapped in blankets, sitting on a bench in front of a tall lancet window. When I entered, he smiled. “Hello, Bartholomew.”

There were more cracks in his body. New fissures, up his neck.

I went to sit with him, and Maude shut the door.

We gazed out the window at the night sky. “Something is wrong, Bartholomew?” The gargoyle looked me over. “The light in your eyes is dimmer now more than ever.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” I said quietly.

“I love secrets.”

“I don’t think you’ll like this one.” I hauled in a breath. “The night Aisling fell, I lay very still in the highest room in Castle Luricht, thinking you and Maude and Rory were gone, just like my Diviners—that the world had come to an end. I vowed to myself I would kill the king. And after—”

I looked out the window. “There is a beautiful place. A clifftop, covered in thrift flowers. You know the one. I thought I might return there when the tournament was done, when I’d destroyed the stone objects and Benji was dead. I would climb to that cliff at sunrise. Shout loud and long until my voice echoed behind me. I’d wear my armor. Look out over the dawn and— well.”

I swallowed, voice breaking. “I was always good at drowning, wasn’t I?”

The gargoyle’s bottom lip trembled. It took him a long while to speak.

“You are right. I do not like that secret.”

“I felt a sick kind of righteousness, knowing that the Stonewater Kingdom would be doomed to remake itself without its stone objects. That perhaps without its coin, its inkwell, its oar, its chime, its loom stone— without Aisling Cathedral—and without me, Traum might face its own kind of death and wake anew. Even now that you and Rory and Maude are here… I cannot stop thinking it.” I shook my head. “I can’t let it go.”

He did not like that, either. His brow fell low. “Do not make yourself into an object, Bartholomew, and do not judge in perhapses. They are as a

dream—they cannot dictate your life unless you put your faith in them.”

How softly and thoroughly he shamed me. I nodded, forlorn, and the gargoyle wrapped one of his blankets over my shoulder. “Oh, Bartholomew,” he said. “You must search the world for hope like you once

searched it for your Diviners.”

“I never found them.”

“But you kept looking.” He took my hand. “Do not let the light go out of your eyes.”

A tear fell down my cheek. “There’s no light in stone, Bartholomew.”

“That is true.” He peered out the window and nodded at the moon above. “And yet.”

We stayed by the window for a long time, looking up at the night sky.

Two hours later, a banging knock sounded on the castle door. I took the gargoyle’s hand, lent him my shoulder for support, and we hobbled through corridors and down stairs, following the hum of voices that came from somewhere in the house.

I turned a corner and ran headlong into Victor.

“Library,” he blurted, then kept on about his business.

The gargoyle sighed. “I love a man of few words. Leaves the rest for me.”

We trailed down a corridor into the western side of the hall and found the library door open. Stationed across from each other like opponents, Benji and Maude sat at a table, their hands visible, showing they bore no weapons—nothing to hide. Behind them, however, were weapons aplenty.

Samuel and Tory stood behind their king, hands locked around the hilts of their swords.

Rory was behind Maude, wearing a green tunic and black leathers. The gash on his cheek had been sutured, red against his olive skin. He stood in a lazy slouch, the marks of boredom upon him, but I knew better. His hands were fidgeting. They caught Benji’s eye, and when the king looked upon him, Rory grinned. Raised his middle finger.

The king flushed and turned to Maude. “What has become of my knights that were here? Rothspar and the others I sent weeks ago?”

“The ones you sent to pillage my house?” Maude’s eyes drifted to the window, and the swaying birch trees beyond. “They’re gone. Tragically

eaten by birke.”

The king’s jaw jumped.

I cleared my throat.

All eyes turned to the gargoyle and me, lingering in shadow by the door.

For a moment, time was nothing; I was standing exactly where I’d been the last time I’d stepped into this room wearing armor. Then, the king had lowered his sword to my shoulders, swearing me to his knighthood, heartened to hear me take vows.

Now, I walked to him without armor or crown or veil, treading over the fractured pieces of those same vows.

The gargoyle came beside me, and we stood next to the others, my back pressing against Rory’s chest. He touched the sleeve of my shirt, fingers tracing the contoured muscles of my arm.

Benji watched us, the lines of his face sharpening. He raised a hand, signaling Samuel and Tory. Maude reached for her axe.

But the king merely waved his knights away. “Wait outside,” he told them. “Shut the door behind you.”

It seemed their lot to exchange looks every time their king issued a dubious command. Samuel and Tory made twin faces of skepticism.

“It will be all right,” Benji assured them. “I only need a moment.”

The knights did as they were bidden, armor rattling as they quit the library and shut the door behind them. Benji withdrew from the table, pacing. “It’s true what they say—waiting for the blow hurts more than the blow itself. I have lost hours, days, weeks of rest, wondering if I should have killed you, too, Maude. I thought surely you would come for me as Six did that first night—an indomitable assassin in the dark. I trained tirelessly, expecting you’d come for me and close the loop: my mentor, my maker, and finally my killer.”

He rubbed the Artful Brigand’s coin possessively and looked at the four of us, Rory, Maude, the gargoyle, and me. “But now I see you all clearly.

Maude, stiff with age and bones not mended; Rory, so easy to kill, so easy to bleed; a gargoyle, crumbling.” His eyes met mine. “And a queen meant

to be as fearsome as a god, reduced to a hopeless, broken thing. None of you are indomitable. That was simply how I kept you in my mind.”

A sneer slid over his face. “I have come to tell you I have outgrown you.

No matter your schemes with the nobility, Maude, I will outdo you, outthink you, just as I have before.” His throat caught. “But I must know.”

His gaze jumped to Rory. “Last night. The entire Wood is in an uproar about your little Divination, knave.”

“I told you, Benji.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “It’s not a Divination. There’s something in the ox-eye. That draft your grandfather made—the one that comes from the gowans that grow along the tor. It’s special.”

“Ox-eye.” Benji looked from face to face as if he expected one of us to laugh.

“Here.” Rory moved to a shelf. Retrieved an old leather-bound notebook. Flung it and hit the king on the head. “The page is marked.”

Benji stared down at his grandfather’s notebook. “Where’d you get this?”

“I stole it,” said the gargoyle cheerily.

Aged yellow pages turned, Benji’s finger stopping where a thin strip of leather had been placed. He read to himself, muttering. “This proves

nothing.”

“Pith, you idiot,” I snapped. “Read.”

“Yes,” the gargoyle said, nodding. “Call him an idiot. He likes that.”

Steam practically pluming from his ears, Benji read aloud. “‘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.’”

He snapped the book shut. “What care I for stones or gowan flowers?

The only worth a sprite ever had in the Stonewater Kingdom is in death.”

“In a strange, terrible way you are right.”

We all turned to the gargoyle. He was standing with his hands behind his back, shifting weight between his feet. “Indeed, folk of Traum have always

killed sprites. Even hundreds of years ago, before I was born. And I wonder, as I so often do, how did it begin?”

Maude’s voice distant. “The Bauer women drew their axes against Der ewige Mond. Sprites have been hunted ever since.”

He pondered that. “The tor has always been a place of wonderment. The spring and the limestone it leaches from is the source of our magic, our history, the pinnacle of our beliefs, built upon stones and gowans. How terribly, perfectly put that, in death, the sprite wields its greatest power.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. Felt the cracks in his body against the flesh of my palm. “What are you saying, Bartholomew?

“Oh. Can you not hear me?” He began to shout. “The tor is a dead sprite!”

He might as well have bludgeoned us each over the head. We stared at him, our stupor thicker than smoke.

The gargoyle pointed at the notebook and continued. “The old pervert king laid it out for us. I suppose we should give him the credit he is due—I do not think anyone before him ever paid so great attention to sprites.”

Rory made a face and mouthed, Pervert?

“He must have guessed, from its limestone, its gowans, that the tor was a great, vanquished sprite. Had his life not been cut short, he might have realized his ox-eye concoction was not a failure at all, and that those hewn of limestone like Bartholomew would be granted visions from it.”

Benji’s voice was thin. “You believe that the limestone on the tor, the spring that leaches from it, the stone objects… they all come from a sprite?”

“It is one of life’s strange contradictions, isn’t it?” the gargoyle mused.

“That the lowest creature in the world should firstly be the highest.”

Benji’s gaze darted back and forth—I could practically hear the cogs of his mind turning. “The earthquake. Its first rumble began that night when the sprites were digging at the tor. They’re doing something to the spring.

Dirty fucking sprites.”

He turned from us and began to walk away.

“Where are you going?” I shouted after him.

“If the tor is truly a sprite, then I will see it remains buried beneath the prison of Aisling’s remains. Any wretched creatures that come to dig it up will be slaughtered. You four have done your best to cast a pall over my

spectacle, but the tournament continues. I am, as ever, a king who gives his people something to believe in, even if it is but a common enemy.”

Rory stalked him through the room. “What the hell do you imagine you’ll do? Kill every last sprite until Traum is a wasteland of gowan?

Brutality isn’t coin, Benji. You can’t buy everyone.”

“Yes, I can.” The king’s turned, his grin all teeth. “I bought your woman

with your blood, didn’t I?”

Rory exploded.

Rushing forward with such ungodly speed I hardly saw him, he slammed his body against Benji’s, the crash echoing through the library.

Benji cried out, and Tory and Samuel burst through the door, all of us witnessing the staggering moment the knave finally stopped holding himself back.

Rory threw Benji on the floor, then climbed over him, fists, elbows, knees, swinging with brutal force. Benji took a hit to the jaw and grunted, then delivered a blow to Rory’s wounded cheek, opening the sutures. The sound of a scream came from behind Rory’s clenched teeth.

“Motherfucker.” He raised his fist, unbridled and terrifying— And hit Benji so hard in the jaw the king’s teeth broke.

Benji howled, Samuel and Tory and Maude and me tangling in a knot above him. And Rory—he was shouting so loudly in the king’s face I couldn’t make out the words, only the fury, the pain, trapped within them.

In the end it took my and Maude’s strength to wrench him off the king.

When Benji stumbled back, his mouth was dripping blood.

Tory lowered her arm to help him, but the king scorned her, hissing as he staggered from the room, his gaze finding mine when he reached the library door. “You want to best me and my knights in a tournament, Six?

Now’s your chance. I won’t stop you this time—the hunt begins at dawn.”

He coughed blood, then spat it upon the carpet. “We’ll be hunting a sprite.”

OceanofPDF.com