The Knave and the Moon — Chapter no 3

CHAPTER THREE

SHE WHOM I HAVE KNOWN

Maude Bauer and the stone bat took me away with a frantic kind of haste, peering over their shoulders and flinching like the landscape behind us bore a whip. We hurried over rocks and through brambles, running and panting and tripping until finally the looming shadow of the tor was gone, and nothing stood before us but a great open moorland.

I fell onto cold ground and coughed up bile. I must have fallen asleep like that—keeled over, fisting the ground like it was the only thing keeping me from falling off the earth—because when I woke there were clumps of grass in my hands.

“It’s the spring water,” Maude told me, touching a silver flask on her belt. “It’s made you sick.”

“How?” I rasped, though I might have asked what or why or when, such was my bewilderment. “How am I dead?”

Maude put up her hand, silencing me. A moment later she was prone on the ground next to me, and so was the gargoyle. There was a sound like thunder, a heaving rumble, then several sharp shrieks. When I peered through grass, my heart caught in my throat.

A herd of creatures moved over the moorland, fifty paces away. Dozens of them. Some looked like animals, deer or bovine, but there was always something uncanny in their slender limbs, their limping gaits, their

hollowed cheeks and eyes that made them unmistakably other. Some walked on all fours while others traveled on two legs or with none at all— there were treelike creatures who had nothing but roots to travel on—while others flew on feather-less wings. Some were small as rodents, others the size of bears.

But none was as great as the boar with rocks and grass growing from its back that led them along.

“Sprites,” Maude murmured. “A whole lot of them.” Her brow knit.

“Strange for them to travel together.”

“Stranger still that they should travel at all,” the gargoyle said. “Where do creatures go when nowhere is safe enough to call home?”

Maude didn’t answer. When the thundering and shrieking stopped, the earth and the sky clear of sprites, she helped both the gargoyle and me to our feet and carried on. We passed over windswept hills, the breeze wet, the clouds dark, but it never rained. Beyond, the moorland seemed endless, no trees, no road, just rocks and grass that slithered over my greaves.

That evening, when we stopped to sleep after hours of walking, Maude took to her axe, sharpening it to perfection, then staring down at its blade like she was swearing some kind of fealty to it. And the gargoyle… I didn’t understand exactly what he was doing, but he went off to his own little corner of our rock and dirt and grass camp and simply cried.

The whole world unnerved me, his sadness most of all. “What’s wrong

with him?”

Maude did not look up from her axe.

“He doesn’t even have real eyes,” I muttered. “How can he weep?”

“He has his reasons.”

The next morning, I jolted awake from a dream that left no imprint upon my mind. But my eyes were full of tears, and I was panting and shivering and curled in on myself, both hands pressing against the left side of my waist, where old blood upon my chainmail had turned brown and dried and begun to flake away.

The gargoyle sat beside me. “Hush, Bartholomew.” He patted my shoulder. “There is no pain now.”

We walked in silence, stopping occasionally to eat meager berries and other flora that did nothing to sate me. On the morning of the fourth day, I heard a rushing sound. An hour later, a large river came into view. When

Maude saw it, the strain in her shoulders eased a whit.

“I suppose you’re not going to tell me where we are or where we’re going,” I said, kneeling, my stomach rumbling as I shoveled river water into my dried-out mouth.

“We’re between the Fervent Peaks and the Chiming Wood,” Maude said.

“That there is the Tenor River.”

She moved upstream and crouched by the water, dropping her hand into its depths in quick intervals, trying to catch a fish, the rest of her answer as clipped as it had been the ten times she’d previously given it. “We’re going to my house, Petula Hall, where it’s safe. After that—” Her hand darted into the river with a splash and returned empty. “There’s a stone object. A magical loom stone. It will bring your memory back. I’ll find a way to get it. Everything will make sense after that.” Not even the steady rush of water could mask the tremor in her voice. “No need to tell you the whole bitter story twice.”

My stomach rumbled. “Difficult to have faith in a knight who can’t even catch her own lunch.”

Maude flinched, and the gargoyle slapped his foot against the river like a petulant child, making an enormous splash. “Don’t be a donkey! Can’t you see she’s in anguish, puzzled with guilt?”

Maude kept her eyes on the river. She did not look like how I imagined a knight would—weapon down, kneeling by the water, cheeks red with shame. “He means riddled,” she murmured. “I’m riddled with guilt.”

“Why?”

“Really, Bartholomew. I’ve explained this already.” The gargoyle sat near me at the river’s edge, patting my head with exaggerated slowness like I was his dim-witted pet. “We are running away from that boy in his big gold crown, because he broke my wing and killed you and stole our beloved Bartholomew from us.”

He hadn’t explained that. Neither of them had. “And in this scenario, Bartholomew is… who, exactly? Me? You? That stump over there?”

The gargoyle stuck his nose up and made a hmpf sound. “Bartholomew is Bartholomew and I am her squire.” He reached up as he spoke, idly petting the crumbling root of his left wing. A chunk of limestone the size of my fist fell from his back. “I don’t see how I can be any more clear.”

Perhaps his injury had addled his mind. I waved at the cracks in his

body. “Do they hurt?”

He faced me. Said, in a wistful voice, “No. And also, terribly.”

Maude called from upriver. “We’re not catching anything today.” She picked up her axe. “Let’s go.”

On we walked, three tiny specks in a vast, windy land.

Hills dropped into valleys, and both were covered in clumps of granite.

We strayed back into the moorland, never far enough that we couldn’t hear the song of the roaring river, never near enough to anything that might be remotely mistaken for a road. Up and down we went, Maude ever at the lead. Then, upon the grassy crest of a knoll, she stopped mid-step.

The gargoyle came to stand next to her, and I followed. We looked down into a valley, and for a moment I didn’t know what we were looking at.

There were rocks and bromegrass and a few patches of pale gowan flowers.

But then I looked harder— And saw a face.

An enormous animal face. It looked like a boar, only it was made of the earth itself. Rocks and grass grew from its back, and its tusks were giant pieces of granite. It blended into the landscape, lying so utterly still there was no mistaking the creature for anything but what it was.

Dead.

Slowly, Maude began to walk again. And while I was certain she, too, understood the creature had departed this life for the next, she walked on tender feet, tiptoeing through grass, as if not to wake it.

We stood before its snout. “A sprite?” I asked.

“A mountain sprite,” Maude answered. “Killed weeks ago.”

I had no memory. Still, there were things that, deep down, I knew. That dead things rotted, for instance. That they stank and bloated—if they were not made into carrion for crows and other hungry creatures first. But this enormous grassy boar had no stench. No bloat, not even any rot.

Its only sign of decomposition was the newly budded gowan flowers growing from its body.

Awestruck, I circled the beast, swearing under my breath as I admired the sprite’s size, its composition—the power it must have held in life. But then I saw protruding ribs, the telltale mark of hunger. Far worse, there were dozens of open wounds. Lesions. Deep punctures.

“Who did this?” My disgust had an acrid taste. “Another sprite?”

“Murder is a human enterprise,” said the gargoyle. “This is the

knighthood’s work.”

I looked down at my own armor. “Why?”

Distant, Maude’s voice. “To protect the hamlets.” The same wind that moved her dark hair moved the petals of gowan flowers. “I’ve never seen a sprite left to lie. They’re almost always burned. I didn’t know they bloomed…”

A hush fell over us, and for a long moment we were as silent and unmoving as the dead sprite before us. Then Maude reached for her right gauntlet. Removed it, then her glove. Her steps grew labored, like she was more weighted, more pained, and when she came to stand before the creature, the fierceness in her eyes was gone.

“I am a knight like my mother and her mother and her mother, too,” she said. “Kings and craftsmen put their faith in me. I took up the mantle.

Killed Omens and erased false portents and bloodied my axe shattering Aisling Cathedral’s corruption. I changed the Stonewater Kingdom, even if no one realizes it.”

She looked up at the sprite, her voice quieting. “But in how many ways have I kept it the same?”

A tear fell from her painted eye, leaving a path of wet charcoal down her cheek. “It’s my fault.” Maude turned to me. “I should have seen it coming.

Only I didn’t think him capable—” She was wan, her words rough. “The sword cut into your intestine. Without a surgeon, there was no stopping the bleeding. You were gone in minutes, and suddenly nothing I had fought for mattered, because I had not seen the danger right in front of me.” Again, she said, “I should have seen it coming.”

“Some signs cannot be read,” whispered the gargoyle.

Maude’s hand fell to the silver flask on her belt. “This brought you back,” she said. “It was meant to lure out the Heartsore Weaver. Only a few of us know what the tor’s spring water can do for the dead.” She glanced down at the gargoyle, more tears falling as she measured the cracks in his body. “Only I’ve seen the kind of pain that befalls those who live past their time, and, well…”

The breeze, a woeful hum, found a harmony with Maude’s pained voice.

“I don’t think we’re meant to come back, Rory. Death is the only thing we all truly have in common. Human or sprite—we have but one life. There are

no gods, but perhaps, perhaps, there is sacrality in our impermanence.”

My fingers began to fidget. “If it was so wrong to bring me back, why’d you do it?”

Finally, a smile on Maude’s stoic mouth. Small, forlorn. “Because you asked me to.”

We left the mountain sprite where it lay, until the great beast in the distance was but another hill upon the world’s grassy body.

Every second I was awake I seemed to know less than I had when I slept; there were moments when I asked myself if I was alive at all. To walk through a great, windswept world with no one save a forlorn knight and a strange, fissuring gargoyle seemed the sort of hazy dream afterlives were made of.

But then, just before sundown, a rabbit wandered across our path.

“Look, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle cried. “Hair!”

I yawned. “A hare?”

“Not one hair, a great many, and all upon an adorable little creature.”

His fingers trilled excitedly. “I want to catch it and put it in my mouth and let it build a nest there.”

Maude and I shared a glance. She shrugged. “Dinner?”

“Adorable dinner.”

The gargoyle gasped, then began to run after the rabbit. “Don’t worry, Bartholomew, I will save you from these heathens!”

I chased after him, and he after the terrified rabbit, Maude limping behind. We ran through a valley and up a knoll, then down again to a small wood where a road and a bridge stretched over the Tenor River.

Three elderly women in brightly dyed gowns stepped onto the road.

When they saw the gargoyle sprinting toward them, and I behind him, all three opened their mouths and shrieked.

The hare, the smartest of the bunch, heard the clamor and pivoted, darting into a deep bramble. The gargoyle followed, screaming as he plowed through vines and underbrush, and, damn me, I should have gone

after him, but I was in armor, a knight in appearance, and wasn’t it a knight’s duty to be civil? I dug my heels into the dirt road and skidded to a halt. “Erm, begging your pardon, we were just—”

The first woman broke a basket over my head, the second kneed me in the groin, and the third shoved me. I hit the ground and let out a burst of language so obscene it caused the women to shriek anew before all three took off running, leaving me writhing and swearing upon the road.

A minute later, Maude was standing over me. “Good thing you’re already dead. That basket might have killed you.” She was hiding a smile.

“What was it you called them? ‘Toady fucking twats’?”

I coughed. Groaned. “I was trying to be nice.”

“Out of your depth, my boy.”

She handed me off the ground, and together we found the gargoyle twenty paces away, balanced on his heels, ass in the air, peering into a dark rabbit hole. “Bartholomew! Can you hear me? Barthoooolomewww—”

“Shh.” Maude waved her hands in our faces, signaling silence, her green eyes wide as she gestured at the wood beyond.

Voices echoed. More than three.

“They came from the road,” a woman called. “Dorothea and Elda saw them, too! A strange squat sprite and a foul man in armor, weren’t they?”

Foul? I mouthed.

Maude shook her head and the gargoyle nodded.

More voices came. “I don’t see anyone. You likely scared them worse than they did you.”

“And broke my best basket in the process.”

“A bad portent, if you ask me. I’m never leaving the Cliffs again.”

One of the voices was sharper than the others. “A bad portent? Are you two mad? Did you not see his eyes?”

Maude inhaled, and so did the gargoyle, a grating silence taking hold of the wood. When the woman spoke again, her voice was no longer sharp but weighted with reverence. “They looked just like the Diviner’s eyes when she came with the knights for the king’s ceremony. Pale, inhuman; touched

by some holy magic.”

More silence. Then— “Oh dear. Does assault count as sacrilege?”

“We should search for him.” There was a rustling of hurried steps. “He

may know things. Of the Omens, of our futures! He can’t have gotten far.”

Their outcries blended after that, too eager to make out except that they were getting quieter. The group of women were headed in the wrong direction. When the noise of them was barely a murmur, Maude led us out of the bramble. There were thorny vines stuck in her greaves. Berry stains on her boots. Dead leaves in her hair.

She didn’t notice any of them. Her green eyes were near and far, narrow and focused on nothing. “Come on,” she said in a slow voice. “Let’s go.”

The sun went down. We sat in the hills near the river and had no fire, just the blue-violet sky and its stars and mother moon for light.

The gargoyle snored, murmuring in his sleep. “Mutton makes a lovely summer hat.”

I sat next to Maude. “Those women spoke of Omens.” Every thought was a lonely candle in the hollow of what I’d once known. “What’s an Omen?”

Maude was looking up at the sky with the same oddly focused intensity she’d worn hours ago. “Six gods. One of coin, one of knowledge, one of strength, one of intuition, one of love, and one of death. But that story is a lie—they were not gods. They were just folk of the hamlets, sustained by magic, made strange and perverse by time and the notion that they were the only sacred things in an unholy world.” She ran her thumb over the handle of her axe. “We killed them. It should have been over after that. But power

always has to go somewhere…”

A prickle climbed up my back.

“Your eyes are like theirs. Like a Diviner’s. Touched by death.”

I reached up and touched my cheek, just below my eye. “And what’s a

Diviner?”

She gave a low chuckle.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just… you never asked me questions. Even when you were a boy. You’ve had a clear disdain for how things worked in the

Stonewater Kingdom for as long as I’ve known you.”

“And how long is that?”

“A great many years.”

I scrutinized her in the dim light. “You’re not my mother, are you?”

“Take it easy, you shit. I’m not that old.”

“Sorry.”

Maude reached out. Patted my shoulder. “Family is what you make it.”

“And I’ve got you?” I nodded at the snoring gargoyle. “And him?”

She nodded, then unfolded, lying down on the grass with her hands beneath her head. “And you have a woman.”

My back went straight.

“She’s fearless. Valiant and prideful and full of heart. Strong as an ox, too.” I heard a smile in her voice. “Strong enough to knock you down, anyway.”

Fuck me if my face didn’t go hot. “What’s her name?”

“Sybil Delling.”

My lips parted. Sybil Delling. The name tasted smooth, sweet. “And she

knows me? She remembers me?”

“Very well, I imagine.”

Then it dawned on me. “So where is she?”

Maude was silent a long moment. “She doesn’t know that you’ve

woken.”

“That’s not an answer.”

More silence.

“Maude.”

“She’s with the king.”

Maude rolled over, and I pressed my body down into the grass and shut my eyes. For the first time since I’d woken on the tor, I did not readily succumb to sleep. When I did, it was fitful, and I woke as I did before— hands fisting the grass. Only now I wasn’t curled in on myself, shaking. I was on my back, heart kicking, teeth pressed into my bottom lip, painfully hard in my pants. I looked into my mind, desperate for whatever dream or memory I’d lost, certain it was of her, Sybil Delling, she whom I knew—

had known—and found… Nothing.

My voice eviscerated the morning solemnity, splitting the gray, damp

hour before dawn wide open. “You said we’re running away from a little boy in his big gold crown. That’s the king, yes?”

Maude startled awake, and so did the gargoyle, who put a hand to his chest and shrieked so loudly a dozen mourning doves took flight from a gorse bush. “Prithee, Bartholomew, do not shout! We’re in a church.”

Maude gripped her axe. Looked around. Saw no threat—save the expression twisting over my brow. “Pith, Rory.”

“This king.” I pointed to the gargoyle’s missing wing. “He did that.” I jabbed a finger into my left side, where the faintest stain of blood still remained. “And this—yes? He’s the one who killed me?”

Maude’s eyes dropped to my side. She turned to the gargoyle, and they shared a look I did not understand, only that it made the corners of Maude’s mouth drop. “Yes.”

“And she’s with him now. She’s with the king.” I didn’t know my voice could do that. Fall so low it scraped and rasped. “Sybil Delling.” My woman. “With my killer.”

It felt like an age before Maude spoke again. “There is a long gold chain in Traum, encircling the hamlets, tethering them to the Omens, to Aisling Cathedral. Once, that chain was held by the abbess of that cathedral. Now, it rests in the king’s hands. Only he has replaced the cathedral with Sybil, and tethered her to himself.” Her throat worked. “Sybil’s the Diviner. A dreamer who once told the tale of false gods so that the Stonewater Kingdom might have something to believe in. A holy symbol. Kings come and go, crowned and uncrowned by the nobility—but symbols live forever. With Sybil, captive at his side, along with the support he bought from the powerful families of Traum, the king’s wealth and legacy and authority will be absolute. The only thing that ever stood in his way—”

She looked at the gargoyle. At me. “Were his friends.”

My hands began to shake at my sides.

“We will find a way to come up against him,” Maude said. “The name Bauer means something yet. I’ll wield it against the king—I’ll find a way to lower his estimation among the nobles. As for you… you heard those women; Traum is a place of portents, of superstitions, of dreams. And with you, your eyes just like Sybil’s…”

Maude put a hand on the gargoyle’s shoulder, her other on mine. “Let death be a rebirth. We’ll return to Coulson Faire. Find a way to get the loom

stone, get your memory back. We’ll help Sybil. Put her back in armor and place a hammer in her hand once more.”

When dawn broke over the moors, it painted Maude Bauer a violent orange hue. “And the four of us will bring Benedict Castor the Third to his knees. One. Last. Time.”

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