The Knave and the Moon — Chapter no 26

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

THE UNKNIGHTING OF BENEDICT

CASTOR THE THIRD

Petula Hall, that great house that belonged to Maude’s mother and grandmother and all the Bauers before her, kept its doors wide open. Folk displaced by the fires came like lost sheep, seeking refuge.

Tory Bassett’s and Samuel Eichel’s bodies were found in the Wood, held together by their armor. Samuel, like Dedrick and Hamelin before him, was placed in his family tomb, and Tory’s remains were brought along with foresters and knights and Edora Eichel, all of whom journeyed from the Chiming Wood to the Cliffs of Bellidine. As for Benji— He rode with them, not resplendent but downcast, his head low, his blue eyes bleary, his fist locked around the Artful Brigand’s coin as he held tightly to what might very well be his final vestige of power.

He’d failed to deliver on his promises and return tournament gold to the nobles who’d spent it. He’d lost the inkwell, the oar, the chime—killed his own knights. In a kingdom of superstitions and portents, Benedict Castor the Third had become a bad omen.

Once, Benji and I had run past birches and brambles, wielding blunted swords, laughing and dueling, heeding Maude’s threatening calls only when

the sun had fallen over the trees. Now, those trees were ashes. And for what he had done to Sybil, trying to martyr her in the Wood two days ago—any remaining faith I had for him was in ashes, too. His time was at hand.

And I knew, just as I’d known with his grandfather, what came next.

“They await him in the Cliffs,” Maude said. She, Sybil, and I peered out a window on the top floor of Petula Hall. With so many trees burned down, we could see for miles. We watched together as the king’s caravan made its way west out of the Chiming Wood. “Edora and I have arranged it. Regius Ormsby and Otto Lange and Avice Fisher will meet us there.”

“You’ve done it, Maude,” Sybil murmured. “You took down the king of Traum.”

“There is work left to do, my girl.” Maude tapped the hammer in Sybil’s hand. “There’s the coin left.” Her face hardened. “And the nobles will want to replace him with a king that is most useful to each of them. The work is not over, I fear.”

She left to get Bartholomew, and Sybil and I began to put on armor.

“How’s the pain?” I asked her.

“I’m sore all over.”

My face went hot, and she laughed. “Not from that.” Her hand ghosted over her abdomen. “The pain isn’t sharp like before. More like… heavy and stiff and aching.”

Sybil saw the concern on my face. “Help me with my armor, Rory.”

Then she smiled, her face entirely without strain, hefting my apprehension away. “I want to wear all of it.”

An old habit, naming the pieces of armor. I dressed Sybil with slow, steadfast veneration. “Pauldron, rerebrace, vambrace, gauntlet, greave…”

Sybil’s veil and crown lay with her other belongings. “What about those?” I asked.

She glanced down. Bent low and retrieved the crown. Slowly, Sybil placed it on her own head. “One final spectacle,” she murmured.

I couldn’t help it. I always needed to kiss her. “And after?” I asked, pressing my lips against hers.

“Whatever you wish, Rory. The world is yours.” Color bloomed in Sybil’s cheeks, and my heart stuttered. “Ours.”

Ten minutes later, we were both armor-clad. Maude had failed to coax a snoring Bartholomew out of bed, and Sybil had taken up the task.

Maude and I bade farewell to Victor, who grunted, then suffocated us both in a crushing hug, and went to ready the horses. I ran a hand through Fig’s mane, and the old glutton lifted her head from the marigolds she’d been devouring and gave me a wet kiss, pressing her muzzle over my cheek.

Maude retrieved her own horse, and we moved onto the drive where a cart waited. She glanced once, then twice back at the house as if she’d

forgotten something.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Listen,” she said.

I heard the voices of the visitors echoing in the house, the irregular heartbeat of dozens of footsteps thumping through the corridors. Someone was laughing near an open window, and the gargoyle’s craggy voice echoed. “Mind your lecturing tone, Bartholomew! I am not to be truffled with.”

Maude smiled. “I don’t think anyone ever laughed behind those walls until you and Benji came. It was always such a quiet house.” Her grip on her axe was easy, a soft contentedness no one besides we few who had spent our lives looking into Maude Bauer’s face would recognize. “I like it better like this.”

We rode a mile behind the king’s caravan with layfolk and other such travelers.

The minstrel had hitched a ride in the wagon behind us and strummed his lute, his song echoing down the road. Actors and audience were gone; this time, he seemed to play for himself. “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.” He sighed.

“But what use are knights when the fish are all gone? What help are weapons to flame? No chime, ink, or oar ever swept my damn floor, and no dream gave a poor man his claim.”

One note, then another, he kept to his craft. “So wherever you ramble, if you ramble at all, take care to lend out your hand. No coin the king paid e’er lent me much aid, but a kindness is gold in this land.”

We rolled down the road, all of us bearing a heaviness that was not the crushing weight of resignation. Maude looked out on the gaps in the trees where the fire had blazed. “The Wood was so full of life barely a month

ago,” she said. “Now death has come.”

The gargoyle, whom Sybil had wrapped in an obscene amount of bandages, then blankets, sat propped up in the cart. There were cracks in his eyes now, and still he, too, looked out over the decimated Wood. “And who, I wonder,” he asked, “visits after death?”

I put my arm around Sybil, and she sighed against my neck. “Those of us who keep living, I imagine,” she murmured.

We reached the Cliffs of Bellidine at sunset, and it stopped my heart how beautiful the sun looked as it set over the Sighing Sea, painting the hamlet a far softer orange than the fires that had raged behind us.

But the pink thrift flowers that grew along the cliffs were not so vibrant as they should have been. They had faded, and the grass around them was dead. I did not see any speckled sheep, and none of the windows in the crofts along the road where lit.

Maude’s brow tightened. We carried on, turning down the road and into the humble town where the inn and several other stone buildings sat.

No one was there.

“Do you think they all went on holiday?” the gargoyle asked.

“There.” Sybil stood in the cart and pointed south. “Smoke, coming from the beach.”

We found folk of the Cliffs of Bellidine gathered around a pyre.

The earthquake had not spared a single hamlet—the bluff above the beach was uneven, pieces of the cliffside broken, roots dangling. There were giant fissures in the rocks. Some were so wide I could see the dark mouth of the cavern system within the caves where the Heartsore Weaver had once dwelled. Every time a wave came, knocking against rock, pieces fell into the sea.

We had to leave the cart and horses and travel down on foot.

Sybil and Maude and I lifted the gargoyle from the cart, supporting almost the entirety of his weight. He began to wiggle. “I am capable of walking, Bartholomew—”

He fell along a dune and ate a mouthful of sand. Maude hid her smile behind her arm, I choked on a laugh, and Sybil put her hands on her hips.

The gargoyle pouted, then sneezed, and we carried him down to the beach together.

The king’s caravan had already arrived. Benji stood, boots buried in the sand, near the pyre with his knights. The king had reached the final hamlet, but it wasn’t a tournament that awaited him. There were no purple banners or songs or jubilant calls. There were no adornments at all, save the pyre.

Benji seemed so small, pale and wretched, there upon the beach.

I looked away.

Next to the king, Edora Eichel held the hands of foresters. Nobles from the other hamlets had gathered as well. Regius Ormsby was there, wearing a vibrant orange robe and standing with five other noble merchants. Otto Lange was with a handful of scribes, and Avice Fischer with four accompanying oarsmen. Nearest to the flames, holding a singed breastplate and weeping, was Tory’s mother, Brenna Bassett.

One by one, the nobles put a piece of armor onto the pyre. Breastplate for Tory, pauldron for Samuel, gauntlet for Hamelin, and helmet for

Dedrick. I realized then what it was.

A funeral pyre.

Maude hurried through the sand toward Brenna Bassett. “I’m so sorry, Brenna.”

The older woman reached out and clutched Maude’s hands tightly.

“Thank you.”

“How does your hamlet fare?”

“We’ve retreated to the beaches until we can assess how deep the damage goes into the caves beneath the Cliffs. Several crofts were destroyed in the quake. The roots of our thrift flowers were disturbed, severed, and all our sheep have scattered.” Brenna Bassett sighed. “It will take more than our hardiest tapestries to weave this hamlet back together.”

“Tell us, Diviner,” a weaver called, wringing her hands together. She searched Sybil’s eyes. “What say the Omens of this disaster? What portents does the Heartsore Weaver lend?”

Folk of the Cliffs came forth to listen, and the nobles on the beach held Sybil so tightly in their gazes I worried she might begin to miss her veil.

Sybil faced them instead, looking common folk and nobles alike in the

eye. “Disasters have befallen each of your hamlets, and disaster is not a spectacle—it has nothing to prove. It would not be honest to turn your loss into a tale of my own foresight, and it would be false besides. There is stone in my body, and my eyes are touched by magic—but I saw none of this coming. I do not know what will happen next.”

She drew in a breath and waited. Folk leaned closer, as desperate to listen to the words coming out of Sybil’s mouth as they’d been to look into her eyes or watch her drown.

Slowly, her voice grew louder. “But I’ve heard it said: History may be hewn of stone, but the future grows in its cracks. If this tournament has taught me anything, it’s that the Stonewater Kingdom can change—will change—if we are brave enough to see it clearly. So I bid you: Look. Look for signs among yourselves, your crafts, the folk around you. Look to those large or small or otherwise forgotten, pious or impious”—she smiled at me —“knight or knave. Look into all of Traum’s cracks, and maybe you will find the sign even my stone eyes long to see.”

Sybil’s gaze was not cast out to the Sighing Sea, but back at the land of Traum and all its broken pieces, gazing upon it with a kind of wonderment.

“That things can be better than they’ve been.”

I smiled, heart bursting for love.

“Bravo, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle called. “Bravo indeed.”

Maude nodded, searching the faces of the nobles. “That is exactly why

we’ve all come, isn’t it?”

One by one, the nobles nodded.

One by one, they turned from Sybil and faced the king of Traum.

“Benedict Castor the Third.” The lines of Brenna Bassett’s face did not shift. Steadfast, she told the king, “We of the noble families have come together in accordance, and have decided we no longer wish for you to be our sovereign.”

There was nothing at first—no movement or sound, save the gargoyle’s mirthful giggle and the constant hush of the waves upon the shore. Benji, who held the Artful Brigand’s coin so tightly his knuckles cracked, was as unmoving as a statue. Then, blue eyes darting from face to face, he let out a fractured laugh. “You can’t be serious.”

“But we are,” said Edora Eichel. “Your tournament has cost us all a great deal, and though it is not your fault that an earthquake has plagued the

kingdom, leading to death and displacement”—she shook her head—“it is a very bad sign.”

“Don’t be a superstitious crow,” Benji spat. He looked to Sybil and the gargoyle—to me and Maude. “Listen—it’s the sprites. They destroyed the cathedral, attacked Castle Luricht! They are responsible for the terrible things that have occurred, they who have caused the earthquake—”

“Sprites did not kill my son,” Avice Fischer said.

“Nor, I suspect,” Otto Lange added, eyeing Benji, “did they kill my nephew.”

“Sprites did not lose the abbess’s stone objects or risk our wealth in self- aggrandizing tournaments,” Regius said, “and they did not burn down the homes of so many in the Wood. Fortunately, King Castor, your champions do not share your recklessness with coin. They have returned our investments to us with interest.”

Benji’s mouth fell open. “What are you talking about?”

Regius glanced at Maude. “She gifted me her winnings.”

Otto turned to me. “The knave returned his winnings an hour after the earthquake.”

Avice had a hard time looking at the gargoyle. Perhaps because he’d gotten sand in his nose and was making a horrifying face, trying to hold in a sneeze. “The feats of strength winnings were delivered back as well,” she muttered.

“Petula Hall has been offered as shelter, not just to my family,” Edora said, “but to any who lost their homes in the fire.”

Benji’s mouth was still open, but he didn’t speak. For fury or fear, the king could not grapple with what lay before him. Suddenly, like his body did not know what to do, he laughed. “Then all is well, you imbeciles. All that was spent was returned, with interest.”

“Can you return our children?” Avice said, her voice so cold it put a chill in the air. “His nephew, her grandson? I know you are a man of Coulson Faire, but there are more important things in this world than coin, Benedict.”

The knights stirred behind their king. They’d sworn vows to him, but I knew as well as everyone on that beach what noble vows were worth in the Stonewater Kingdom. They were as the tournament—nothing but a spectacle. One by one, the king’s knights withdrew from him until there

was nothing and no one guarding Benji’s back save the unforgiving waves of the Sighing Sea. I watched my former friend’s cheeks go pale, my own aflame with righteousness and my stomach sick with pity.

Maude came up first. She held out her hand. Pressed it on Benji’s shoulder so hard he flinched. Beneath her iron strength, the king fell to his knees. Then Maude caught his wrist and, like a scolding mother removing something unsafe from a child’s hand, ripped the Artful Brigand’s coin away.

Benji let out a choked sound. But the nobles were there, and he’d held so tightly to the notion of his own magnanimity that he did not fight Maude.

He went still, and the nobles stood like adjudicators, ready to seal his fate.

“Have you been a witness, pupil, and visitor to the kingdom’s peoples and kept peace within the hamlets?” Avice asked.

“Have you rejected pecuniary reward and all mercenary endeavors?” said Otto.

Brenna’s voice was firm. “Have you acted only upon charity and what best suits the kingdom?”

Benji’s face was like the flames of the pyre: bright red. “Have any of you? Of course not. No one in the Stonewater Kingdom sees the importance, the virtue, of noble vows.”

“Perhaps that is a sign they should no longer be said,” the gargoyle pondered, scratching limestone dust from his chin. Sybil stilled his hand, then held it tenderly.

“The title of king no longer fits you, Benedict Castor the Third,” Brenna said with slow, biting clarity. “You need no longer wear it.”

Benji’s eyes were bloodshot, his mouth a severe line. “And so you would oust me, just as the world falls apart? Who will replace me?”

The nobles turned to Maude. I could tell just by the way they stood that the disloyalty they’d flung at the king was spent—when they looked upon her, there was hope in their eyes. “Maude Bauer,” Brenna Bassett said simply, “shall be our new king.”

Sybil gripped my arm, a smile unraveling over her face, and the gargoyle let out a triumphant cheer. Maude looked over her shoulders at us, at the nobles and folk of the hamlets—and she was just as she’d been that night I’d woken on the tor. Severe and fearsome and braver than all the world.

“But first.” Otto reached down. Snatched the crown from Benji’s head.

“We must depose the last.”

Benji stared up at Maude, tears in his blue eyes. “Will you cast the first stone, Maude?”

“There will be no stoning,” Brenna Bassett said. “Tory was a hard girl to know, Benedict Castor, but she was my daughter; I could tell just how wont she was to please you. Perhaps that is why she allowed you to think we of the Cliffs, who abhor violence, would suffer a duel to finalize this tournament of yours.”

Brenna’s gaze dropped to the arming sword on Benji’s belt. The one he’d killed me with. “But now I find myself inclined to give you what you wanted. The duel shall commence. Let your sword be your final weapon, King Castor.” Her breaths came rapidly, tears pooling in her eyes. “May it be a quicker death than the one my daughter endured.”

The whites of Benji’s eyes were red. “Against whom will I fight?”

My hands began to fidget. “I’ll do it,” I told Sybil. “I’m already the bad knight, the knave.” My throat felt too tight. “I should be the one to kill him.

I can do it.”

Sybil looked into my eyes. “I know you can. But for fuck’s sake, Rory.”

She dropped a delicate finger over the gargoyle’s shoulder. Stood on her toes. Looked into my eyes, then kissed me. “Permit me.”

Sybil stepped forward and the crowd parted. “Me,” she called out over the beach. “He’ll be fighting me.”

There was no dais, no elevated box, no arena. Knights and nobles, merchants, scribes, oarsmen, foresters, and weavers of the Cliffs climbed to the bluff above that they might get a clear view of the beach. No coin was paid, there were no purple banners, no cheering crowd or beating drum.

Folk were solemn. Here, in the Cliffs of Bellidine, where love and heartbreak were revered, there was no pretending the spectacle would be a balm over the calamity that had befallen them.

The duel was precisely what Benji had wanted: fixed combatants and a

fixed outcome. He stood alone now upon tracks in the sand in the center of the beach, waiting for that outcome. Brenna Bassett, Sybil, Maude, the gargoyle, and I remained in the sand with him. Not in solidarity— But to make sure that outcome was delivered.

Back straight, wind in her hair, Sybil clutched her hammer, an unmitigated symbol of power, a portent—or promise—of violence. She traded final words with Brenna Bassett.

I stood with Maude and the gargoyle near the king. Benji didn’t look at us. He was peering at the sea.

I tried to keep an even voice. “Do you remember the day your grandfather died?”

“Pith, Rory. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Do you remember?”

I could barely hear his voice over the waves. “Yes.”

“I told you not to look back, Benji. And you haven’t.” It didn’t matter how tightly I leashed it—sorrow broke through and my voice cracked.

“You’ve never looked back. You march forward, never noting who you trod upon. And even when the world crumbles in your wake, still you do not look back.”

“What would you have me do? Stop and smell the fucking flowers?”

The king’s laugh was small. “You never understood, either of you, what it was like growing up, knowing everything I did was for show. I had to be malleable, pious, virtuous. I did everything I could to make the noble families like me, because it was they who would make me king, and we couldn’t take up the mantle and kill the Omens and change Traum unless they looked at me and saw exactly what they wanted to see.”

He turned, his blue eyes finding me over his shoulder. “What of myself did I ever have to look back on when I spent my whole life trying to be everything to everyone?”

Salt air pushed my hair, my tears, from my face. Time meant nothing. I was still a foundling nobody, and Benji was a child, and I would carry him away from all the things that might hurt him. But then I saw Sybil standing ahead of me and remembered: I was not a nobody, and though he still looked it from time to time, Benedict Castor the Third was not a boy. He had not been in some while.

“Would that things were different,” the gargoyle murmured.

“If it means anything,” Benji whispered, “I never dreamed it would end like this.”

Maude was still holding the Artful Brigand’s coin. She did not offer Benji her hand or her words, but she did look him in the eye, love—and heartbreak—written in the lines of her face.

Brenna Bassett called up to folk on the bluff, her voice catching the wind and echoing along the beach. “The Diviner’s weapon of choice is a hammer. The king shall bear his arming sword. Here on the beach, they shall fight.”

“Until I am dead.” Benji’s breath shook. “She’s a coward not to say so.”

Except no one, not even Maude, was brave enough to say it.

Sybil came forward, facing Benji head-on like she once had the Omens, her spine straightened by resolve. Slowly, feet dragging, Benji did the same.

The sun set over the Sighing Sea, its final rays of light hitting Sybil’s armor, her crown, her visage so bright she was a beacon, astounding and terrifying.

Hammer in hand, the queen of Traum stepped forward to kill the king.

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