The Knave and the Moon — Chapter no 5

CHAPTER FIVE

MY QUEEN, THE LAST DIVINER

Five days earlier

Drink this, Diviner.”

A woman held out a silver cup. In it, a murky liquid sloshed, emitting a sharp, uninviting scent. I didn’t take it. I was looking at my wedding gown.

Grayish white, silken, entirely without flaw. It clung to my muscles, my breasts, my stomach, my hips, the effect like a sculpture—a meticulous marble bust. Then, as if it were water as well as marble, it fell in long, unrestrained waves down my arms and legs.

“Diviner?”

The woman was still holding the cup out to me.

Like stones scraped together, my voice came out a rasp. “What is it?”

“A tonic, my lady. From the king.”

I reached for the cup, sniffed it, and emptied its foul contents onto my wedding gown.

An ugly, rust-brown streak spread over pale silk, staining it the color of old blood. It was a child’s rebellion, sullying the white. A tiny bite upon an enormous, calloused hand. Still—it pleased me to have ruined something so perfect.

The woman gasped, then backed away, and so did the others who had dressed me, leaving me alone.

The room was large. Not so vast as the one I occupied at the top of the castle, but finer. Curtains covered the windows, velvet and drawn. There were shelves, laden with books and gold trinkets and finely carved busts. A massive painting hung on the wall and below it stood a table, books and maps sprawled upon it. I recognized one of them. An old book, its leather cover cracked and worn, its pages wrinkled.

Benji’s grandfather’s notebook.

It was splayed facedown upon the table. When I turned it over, the parchment was laden with slanted script, inky portraits of winged sprites

drawn in the margins.

I read the open page.

The tree sprite, most often seen in the glens near Coulson Faire, is thought to be the smallest variety of sprite in the land of Traum, with a diet consisting almost entirely of beech leaves. Small and winged and often iridescent, they are often mistaken for hummingbirds, but some can grow as large as crows, as vultures. If you stop to listen, you will hear the distinct sounds of their voices—which always ring on a trill. A strange type of giggle.

Once, I’d heard that giggle. Knights had escorted the Diviners and me from our cloister on the tor and delivered us to a sparkling night at Coulson Faire. Moonlight had flickered through treetops, and sprites had called from the boughs. The grass on the holloway road had taken the imprints of my bare feet and held them, as if welcoming me onto its walk, and I’d dared to dream, in that moment, that I was a free woman.

Like the rest of my dreams, it had been untrue.

I slammed the king’s notebook shut. The only part of the room I had yet to examine was the painting above the table.

What a painting it was. Opulent, fixed in a gilt frame. Ten feet tall, and just as wide, it was a mural of vibrant color: purples and blues and greens and white.

Upon a nocturnal backdrop, a creature was rendered. A great pallid beast —an ox, with long spiraling horns shooting from its skull. Its body was long and wide and pale. Bromegrass and slender trees and gowan flowers grew from its back. Its tail was that of a snake—it had claws as well as hooves. Its eyes, pale and entirely without pupil, were made of stone, just like mine.

The creature was on its hind legs, rearing up against a horde of hunters, who stood so much smaller than it. They wore crude breastplates and were armed with axes and swords—many of which were lodged in the creature’s blood-soaked chest. Its eyes were wide, and though it was only crafted of paint and canvas, I could feel this creature’s fear—its rage—to be so brutally attacked.

A door clicked behind me, footsteps sounding over creaking floorboards.

“My grandfather painted that.” Benji’s voice was more raspy than usual.

“Der ewige Mond, he called it. The Eternal Moon.” He drew closer. “A great, fearsome sprite, the first, and last, of its kind. A monster. Some claimed it could shape-shift. That it was large as a mountain or as small as a thimble. Most said it did not eat, did not sleep, and for a long time, everyone said it could not die.” His tone was almost longing. “Not so.”

I did not look back at him. “I wonder how your grandfather would paint you, Benji.”

“Like every other sovereign in the history of the Stonewater Kingdom, I imagine. A man in a crown, small against Aisling Cathedral, her abbess, her Omens, her Diviners.” He paused. “Though perhaps my portrait might look different had my grandfather seen me last night.”

“You’ll always be small to me, boy-king.” I stared at the painting. “Do you truly think folk will believe sprites destroyed the cathedral?”

“They’ve believed stranger lies than that.” He spoke slowly. “Do not suppose I have not been purposeful in my actions, Six. All that has happened is the product of meticulous preparations.”

“No doubt.” I looked down at the stain on my dress. “How else might you have arranged for a wedding in less than a day?”

“It’s merely a ceremony. The rest comes after. As for the marital side of things… I don’t ask anything of you. Only that you join me on a pilgrimage once more through the hamlets. There’s to be a tournament in our honor.”

Still I would not look at him. “A pilgrimage for heretics,” I murmured.

“My grandfather always did say that faith requires a display. The greater the spectacle, the greater the illusion.” His voice caught in his throat. “It doesn’t matter what we personally believe, Six, only that Aisling Cathedral no longer controls the spectacle. We do. The illusion will take care of itself.”

The floorboards kept creaking. When Benji spoke again, his tone was

harder. “They told me you would not drink the tonic.”

I opened my mouth, but hands caught me from behind. My arms were pinned to my sides and my head pulled back. My mouth was forced open, the same sharp, uninviting scent I’d smelled in the cup filling my senses, then my mouth.

The tonic tasted like sour wine. Like molding berries. The aromatic dregs of something that might have once been a lavish brew, but had been

left too long to fester—bitter as rot.

I choked. Swallowed. Coughed.

The hands released me. I swayed, unmoored, the thrum of a headache already beginning.

“Ox-eye,” Benji explained. “It dulls the body considerably.”

“A sedative?” A laugh tore out of me. “You’d marry an unconscious woman?”

“Diviners are useful when asleep, are they not?”

When I finally turned to look at him, twenty men and women watched me, bearing weapons and armor, as if I were the creature they hunted— No. I was seeing double. Worse than double. There were only five bodies behind me. The king’s favorites—Hamelin, Tory, Dedrick, Samuel.

They’d been the ones to shove the tonic down my throat. Beside them, resplendent, was the king himself. Benedict Castor the Third, his hair, his crown, both incandescently bright as he stood before me. He wore full armor, the gorget around his neck hiding his throat—and the bruises I’d assuredly left—from view.

“Just a precaution, same as this.” Benji clasped his hands in front of him, then reached into his left gauntlet. He withdrew a small knife, grinned at me, then put it back. “The dose of ox-eye won’t make you sleep. But you’ll be less… spirited.”

“Less murderous, he means.” Hamelin stepped forward, and so did Tory.

They each held a sash as pale as the silk of my gown. “Which do you want?” Tory asked Hamelin. “Arms or legs?”

Hamelin looked me up and down. “Legs.”

Tory clasped my left hand, then my right. “Put your wrists together, Diviner.”

I didn’t, so she pressed them together on her own, then set to binding them with the silk sash in her hand.

“Knot it well,” Benji murmured.

Meanwhile, Hamelin had gone down to a crouch. His hand struck out bluntly, pushing my dress up, revealing my bare feet, my ankles, my shins and calves. He knotted the silk around one ankle, then drew it over the floor and tied the other end to my opposite leg. I’d still be able to walk—but my gait would be stifled. There would be no running.

“You’re wrinkling my dress.” I nudged my knee forward, breaking Hamelin’s balance. He fell from his crouch, the sound of his ass hitting the floor so loud it made Benji jump.

It was a colorful room, and Hamelin’s cheeks were the reddest things in it.

Dedrick Lange stepped forward. Middling in every way, neither short nor tall, fair nor dark, burly nor slender, I’d taken Dedrick to be no more than a knightly decoration. Yet he was clearly the most trusted of the king’s new favorites. In his hands, like an altar, there rested a long velvet cushion.

And upon that altar, stone objects.

An oar, taking up the width of the cushion, and in front of it—

A coin.

An inkwell.

A chime.

A loom stone.

One by one, the knights drew close. Hamelin took the oar, Tory the loom stone, Samuel the chime, Benji the coin, leaving the inkwell, which Dedrick took. The cushion fell, the altar discarded. I turned to the king. “What is this?”

His brow lifted. “All that power had to go somewhere, Six.”

Light shone over the knights. They were not as Traum’s false gods had been: grotesque, corrupted by time and a false notion of divinity, and yet as they stood there, clutching the stone objects, all I could think of were the Omens.

Your king is full of falsehoods, I wanted to scream. He made a fool, a mule, of me. He took away my faith, my love, my life. In the end, he will take away yours, too. But then I glanced once more at the stone objects in their hands. They’d been paid in magic, Traum’s most precious resource.

Why would they believe me when I had nothing to give them?

“Traum is a dangerous place, Diviner,” the king told me. “There are

terrible sprites. Terrible folk, too. But my knights will keep you safe.” He grinned at his knights. “Think of them as your new gargoyles.”

Hamelin scoffed. “I’m ten times better than an ancient ruddy sprite.”

When I said nothing, Benji’s voice went eerily gentle, like I was a thrashing animal he wanted to soothe well enough to leash. “I know it’s been difficult. That you’ve lost things. Your Diviners, your gargoyle.” He swallowed. “Rory. Maude. Would you believe me if I told you I was as heartbroken about it all as you are?”

“I don’t believe in anything anymore, Benji. Least of all you.”

Benji withdrew to the shelves along the wall. From a box, he took two objects, handling them with delicate care. A large square of white gossamer,

and something gold. A veil— And a crown.

He approached and held them out. Slowly, he draped the veil over my head, the fabric whispering as it fell just below my chin. Then Benji held out the crown. Like his, it was gold but not gaudy. Only his, nestled in his hair, had five gilt peaks designed to represent the five hamlets, and mine had none. It was but a thick gold band, with textured moldings that made it appear like two large horns had sprouted from my ears and had been made to grow against my head.

“My grandfather fashioned it,” Benji explained. “He had a great fondness for otherworldly things. So do I, in my own way.” He placed the crown over my head, holding the veil in place and whispering, “And you are otherworldly, Six.”

When we stood face to face, I was Der ewige Mond, the great pallid sprite, and Benedict Castor the Third was the inferior hunter who’d put a blade in my body.

“My grandfather also said, ‘Everyone deserves two chances in this life: the first to err, the second to rectify.’ And if I have erred, let me now rectify.

Together, we can show folk that there are holy things to believe in yet. Me, chosen by the nobility.” Benji nodded at the knights. “Us, with our magical stone objects.” He looked into my face. “And you, the last Diviner— fearsome and righteous, with eyes so strange—you are the new Aisling Cathedral.”

My voice was shaking. “Folk could spend lifetimes searching my fallow gaze and reap nothing. There are no gods behind my eyes, you fool. There

is nothing but stone.”

“And yet they will look.” My colorless reflection drowned in the blueness of Benedict Castor’s gaze. “Your abbess planned it well when she robbed you of your name—Sybil Delling’s faithlessness and despair will never touch the hamlets, because Sybil Delling does not exist. No matter what you do, the only things people see when they look at you are their own beliefs.”

But then his eyes fell to my dress and the stain upon it. He saw it for exactly what it was. Flaw. Distortion. “No. She can’t wear that.”

“Agreed,” said Samuel Eichel. “A terrible portent.”

“S’ppose we could just cover it,” Tory offered.

The king chewed his bottom lip. “Dedrick.”

“Sire?”

“When you and the others scoured the tor last night, did you search the

outbuildings?”

“Yes, sire.”

“Tell me: Did you find any robes?” His eyes rose to mine. “Silk ones?”

“We did. Six of them, each with a number embroidered in the sleeve.”

Daylight caught in Benji’s hair, painting it gold. “Fetch the sixth.”

Castle Luricht’s stomach was a great hall, wide and reaching enough to rival Aisling Cathedral’s sanctuary. There were even chairs lined in rows like long wooden pews. Windows high in the gallery that caught the light.

The hall smelled hot, like autumn leaves held near a flame. Not burnt, but on the cusp of it. There were sprigs everywhere—beech boughs with dead orange leaves—draped over chairs, over banisters.

I could still taste the ox-eye as we made our way to a dark corridor just outside the great hall. My head was pounding, my breath shaking, my vision stretching and shrinking. Tory had to catch my arm several times.

Light winked before my eyes and shadows danced in my periphery, but when I whirled to face them, there was nothing there. Beyond, the seats in the great hall were full, the perfectly lined chairs brimming with at least a

hundred visitors, all facing forward, waiting.

Benji stood upon the dais. Behind him, twenty knights, helmeted and armed, lingered in a silent, polished display.

My vision kept winking. An abrupt light burst behind my eyes, the great hall and everyone in it eclipsed in a white, liminal haze. Suddenly I was not standing but lying on my back, so rigid I couldn’t even peer down at my own body. All I could do was look up, and I saw that the pale light was moonlight.

Castle Luricht had vanished. I was alone, lying beneath the moon, and the moon was rippling, as if all the sky was underwater.

I smelled it then. That familiar smell, dank and sickly sweet. And I knew, without a shadow of doubt, where I was.

The tor.

Then, a sound. It echoed hither and yon, brushing up against me and calling from afar. Strange and mournful, this sound. A minor tune.

A child, crying.

“Hello?” Was that my voice? That low, ugly rasp? “Is someone there?”

No one answered.

Like a flame snuffed out, everything vanished. I blinked and the undulating moon, its pale light, was gone. I was back in Castle Luricht, standing in the corridor, waiting in my wedding dress to get married.

What was in that ox-eye?

“Who are you talking to?” Tory, who waited at my side, was frowning.

My throat constricted. “Do you hear that? The child?”

Tory’s face was round. Her eyes small and dark. A permanent line had been etched between her brows, giving her the appearance of ceaseless consternation. “I didn’t hear anything.” In her hands was the silk robe, a VI embroidered upon the sleeve. My old Divination robe. “Shall I put it on you?”

She draped the robe over my shoulders, fastening it around me like a cocoon, hiding the blemish upon my dress, a slight tremor in her touch.

“Another moment, then we go forward.”

“I hope the ceremony lives up to your standards, Diviner,” someone said behind me.

I turned. Several castle guards bearing spears lined the corridor. Ahead of them was a man. He was lean, with thinning black hair and ears full of

gold bands. His robes were bright orange, and his wrists were covered in jeweled bangles. When he smiled, several of his teeth were silver.

“Who are you supposed to be? The Artful Brigand?”

The man’s laugh sounded like a steaming kettle. “If only. I’m Regius Ormsby, here to preside.” He gave a sweeping bow. “My family has the longest lineage in Coulson Faire—besides the Castors, that is. You’ll forgive the size of the crowd. Most everyone in attendance is my family. It was the best I could do for a wedding with such limited time to prepare.”

His smile widened. “Happily, the young king has been most instructive in what he desires. We were up all night stripping the glen of beech boughs.”

A trumpet sounded beyond. Tory’s grip on my elbow tightened. “It’s time.”

When we stepped into the great hall, a hush fell, a hungry silence that wore the sheepskin of reverence. Ahead, Benji stood, waiting for me upon the dais just like I had once waited for him in the spring upon Aisling

Cathedral’s chancel.

It was almost time.

Regius Ormsby joined us, standing behind Benji and me, taking a moment to flourish his robe and set the jangling bracelets on his wrists just so. He smiled at the audience, opened his mouth to speak— Benji put up a finger. “I know it’s tradition for the noble families of the Stonewater Kingdom to have a hand in the making of their king,” he said to the great hall. “Including when and to whom he marries. Indeed, I have obeyed many rules thrust upon those of my position. I have endured a Divination. Been subjected to prostration in the name of the Omens. Fallen on my knees in all five hamlets. Proven, again and again, that a king is but a supplicant.”

His blue eyes narrowed. “But the Stonewater Kingdom is changing.

You’ve heard the rumors. Last night, Aisling Cathedral fell.”

Gasps tore through the great hall, aromatic air pulled taut.

Benji said the word with slow, poignant abhorrence. “Sprites. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. A horde of mountain sprites, bound to their own horrid nature, tore down the epicenter of our faith and thundered off. The abbess, the gargoyles, the Diviners, and my—”

His voice wavered. For a moment, I thought it was guilt, choking him.

But his mouth was even—his eyes unclouded. The little shit was playing at

sorrow, just as he played at reverence during his ceremonies in the hamlets.

“And my friends, were killed.”

Echoes of shock turned to murmurs of condolence.

“But not all is lost,” the king told his captive audience, opening his arms, beckoning all of Coulson Faire into his embrace. “Our system of beliefs will not shatter. Just before she perished, the abbess granted me five stone objects. Gifts from the Omens for me to steward.”

Dedrick, Hamelin, Samuel, and Tory held out their hands, and the stone objects within them. Benji did the same, holding out the Artful Brigand’s coin, which sat smooth side up in his palm. He took it. Held it out like one

holds a skipping stone, tossed it— And disappeared.

The crowd called out in awe. When the king was visible once more, reappearing in the center of the aisle, folk pushed from their seats to see him. There was applause. Prayers to all six Omens. Complete and utter amazement.

Benji flushed, then grinned. “So you see, you are in resolute hands. Do not grow anxious about that fallen cathedral, and do not look for signs in the rubble upon the tor. Now, you must look to me, my knights, my stone objects—”

He turned. “And to my queen, the last Diviner.”

Finally, the king turned to Regius Ormsby, who was watching us with thin lips and an expression sewn of two distinct threads—interest and irritation. “If you would say the words, Regius.”

“Of course, Majesty. Take your bride’s hands.”

Benji’s gaze flickered to my hands, tethered beneath my sleeves and wrapped in my Divination robe. “That won’t be necessary.”

“Neither, it seems,” Regius muttered beneath his breath, “is my presence.” He ran a hand over his brow, smoothing oily strands of hair into place, and looked up, smiling. “Wine, then.”

A woman with a tray holding two silver goblets stepped forward. She placed one cup to Benji’s mouth and the next to mine. When the wine touched my lips, it was bitter.

“Repeat after me,” Regius told the king. “I vow to be your king, your ruling hand, but to also keep my knightly virtues. To be a witness, pupil, visitor…”

His words began to bleed together. It was the wine. I knew it the moment it slid over my tongue, sharp and acrid; it had been laced with the same draft forced upon me an hour ago. Ox-eye.

My stomach rolled.

Benji finished speaking, the silence in the great hall thick as wool. Then, on impulse, the king reached up. Took me by the shoulders and turned me toward the audience. Caught my veil in his uncalloused palm, and lifted it.

Cries echoed in the hall. Folk looked upon my uncovered eyes, ensorcelled by amazement. Rapt—wanting a good show. It was the same way they’d looked at me since I was a girl, always wanting a peek beneath my Diviner shroud.

At last they’d been offered a glimpse at what lay behind it.

“Stone eyes,” Benji called above the noise. “Perhaps you glimpsed them uncovered when she was my knight. Look into them long enough, and you may see your future. Together, the queen and I will protect the hamlets, banishing sprites and reading portents. In time, Traum’s most sacred story will not merely be one of a spring upon a tor”—Benji’s voice perforated the great hall—“but of a king from Coulson Faire, and his holy, Diviner queen.”

Applause swelled through the hall—but it did not reach me.

I was suddenly far away.

Ox-eye burning the inside of my mouth, my eyes rolled back in my head. Images flashed across my mind—I saw water sprites splashing through the rushing waters of the Tenor River, passing into dozens of streams and canals as they swam beneath the bridges of the Seacht. Next, the scraping rock faces and the enormous mountain sprites of the Fervent Peaks—the vibrant yellow tops of the Chiming Wood’s birch trees, and the birke that tarried between them. There were pink thrift flowers that grew along the Cliffs of Bellidine, then I dropped through the earth, following their roots into darkness, into the dank, intricate cave system beneath the ocean cliffs.

Every hair on my body was a needle, every pump of blood a torrid rush.

I soared above the Stonewater Kingdom like I was a bird, my vision stretched a thousand miles wide, the weight of my mind as immovable as a mountain, as inconsequential as an insect.

My vision tilted. I was lying on my back, looking up at Aisling

Cathedral’s reaching cloisters, unable to move, despair an anvil upon me, the stone ceiling a lid to my coffin.

My jaw fell open, a low, terrible rasp ripping up my throat. “You look upon me,” I called, “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.”

The clamor in the great hall snuffed out. I could feel Benji’s piercing gaze. “What are you doing, Six?”

“What happened before will happen again,” I said in that awful, rasping 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.”

Breath spilled from my mouth in hot, raging pants. “The cathedral falls,” I gasped. “Run—and take heed! History may be hewn of stone, but the future grows in its cracks. 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.”

The great hall was silent, its tongue in my fist. Color had fled Benji’s cheeks, a watery sheen coating his eyes. He opened his mouth, a choked

voice coming out— But no one heard him.

A whistling gale was coming from outside, growing louder by the second. Castle Luricht’s windows began to shake, and the knell grew louder, like a storm. Some of the guests put their palms to their ears, but the noise kept coming, kept raising.

Then the wind was not like a gale at all but a shrieking cry. It pressed over the castle like an iron helmet, echoing so loudly the walls trembled, the air vibrated— The windows of the great hall shattered and hundreds of winged

creatures soared into its depths.

The scream began.

“Sprites!”

Hamelin was shouting, hailing the knights. “Take up weapons!”

Regius Ormsby fled the dais, the ceremony reduced to bedlam as the guests ran for the entryway. Above them, the sprites—winged, like the ones I’d once seen in the trees in the holloway road—soared and swooped, taking bites out of clothes, hair, anything they could.

I stood leaden, watching it all.

Not all the sprites were small. Some were the size of eagles. Like birds of prey, they maneuvered in quick, violent bursts, dropping teeth and talons and strange hooked hands into Castle Luricht’s arches and down upon its wooden chairs, grasping at the beech boughs and leaves, snagging guests and knights in the process.

Arrows began to fly. The knights, abandoning swords, which proved useless against their winged enemies, had taken up bows. They moved to every corner of the great hall, aiming, then shooting in dreadful volleys, taking down dozens of sprites at once.

“Fucking vermin.” It was Hamelin. He caught Benji’s arm. “Come, Your Majesties. Let us—”

A sprite soared by, knocking Hamelin off his feet. He shouted, stumbled, jerking Benji along with him; the king dropped his coin. And I was tethered.

Sedated. Still, with uncanny speed, I lowered to my knees.

And picked up the Artful Brigand’s coin. When I rose to full height, arrows humming all around me, it didn’t matter that my hands were tied.

The coin was small, the opportunity perfect: the time had come. When Benji looked up and saw the coin in my hand, rough side turned up, the king’s eyes went wide.

And there was nothing else to do than what I’d set out to. Nothing more to add to the ceremony and nothing more to give, no choice left.

But to end it.

The coin sang through the air. When it hit the dais, it did what it always did when thrown rough side up: wreaked utter havoc.

The dais exploded. Benji and Hamelin flew off their feet and I stumbled back, debris shooting in every direction— A brutal pressure bloomed near my pelvis. I looked down.

I thought I’d been struck by a sprite or a wooden piece of the dais. No. It was a spear. A spear, protruding from my abdomen, just below my navel.

My Diviner robe and the wedding gown beneath it went a dark, crimson red. I teetered. Stumbled.

Fell.

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