The Knave and the Moon — Chapter no 9

CHAPTER NINE

I THINK I’LL CALL YOU RORY

Iwas a boy. A little boy, with dirt under my fingernails, a moth-eaten cloak on my back, and no shoes.

The memory was blurry. I must have been very young, and yet I was alone. There was no hearth, no home, no mother or father to walk with me through the cold city streets. The only true thing that stood out in the memory was discomfort. It came from my stomach and radiated outward: a

twisting, knotting pain.

Hunger.

I shoved my fingers in my pockets, fidgeting for lost crumbs. Then, in the market square, where the crowd was thickest, I dropped those fingers into a man’s coat, felt the familiar touch of coin, and grinned.

A minute later, I slapped two coppers on a stall counter I was barely tall enough to peer over. “A meat pie,” I said.

The baker leered down at me. His nose was red and mottled, and there was flour on his cheek. He looked at me like everyone else did. Like I was nothing. “Where’d you get that money, boy?”

My stomach squelched. “You a baker or a tax collector?”

“The cheek.” He slipped the coppers off his counter, looked up— whistled. “Guards! Thief.”

Two city guards pushed through the crowd, but I was gone by the time

they reached the baker’s stall.

The memories came quickly—some blurred, others clear—and almost all the same. I was cold, I was hungry, and I was alone. Even Pupil House II, where I’d occasionally stop when it snowed in the Seacht, was not a reprieve. The rooms were full of foundlings like me, and the mattresses had fleas, and there was no hoarding food, because the rats would see away with it. A girl died of a cough, her skin wet and pale, and when she passed her final breath I felt an ugly shame to be glad; I might manage a full night’s sleep without her hacking.

My milk teeth fell out, and new ones came in, and I grew taller and wore out all my clothes. When I asked the house mother for more, another wrinkle joined the thousands upon her face. “Haven’t got any.”

I called her a liar. Told her I’d seen a gargoyle from that faraway cathedral come and give her twenty gold pieces not two days ago. That earned me a slap on the cheek and a kick to the ass—I was on the other side of a slammed door in a minute flat. “You got two thieving hands,” she said

through the wood. “Use ’em.”

And I did.

I stole a blanket off a clothesline and slept in the stables. Then I stole a belt and wore that around the blanket until I found a cloak outside a tavern.

When I stole my first pair of socks—then boots—I nearly gave them all back. After so long being barefoot, my feet didn’t take to being confined.

Still. Blisters were better than frostbite. The boots wore me until I wore them, and I thought, That’s what life is. It wears you down until you get used to the discomfort. Even so, I walked through the alleys of the Seacht jaw out, fists clenched, ready to give a little pain back for all the world had dumped on me.

The first time I was caught stealing food, the guard slapped me. The second time earned me a clubbing over the back. The third time, it wasn’t a Seacht guard who caught me, but one of King Castor’s knights. I was stripped, flogged, and thrown into a cell at the back of the barracks, where I passed two days without food or water. “Want to behave like a grubbing thief?” the knight said on the third day as I hobbled back into daylight.

“Best try your hand in Coulson Faire.”

And so to Coulson Faire I went.

I went in spring, and the holloway road was in bloom. It felt like a sign,

a divine—What did those superstitious nobs call it? A portent. I had nothing to my name, and my name meant nothing besides; Rodrick Myndacious was no one. But the bloom of the gowan flowers that followed me along the road was like a promise, and for the first time in my life, I bloomed too, a strange kind of hope unfurling in my chest. Things would be different in Coulson Faire. I wouldn’t steal, wouldn’t starve. I would simply… live.

And for three whole days, I did. A merchant’s cart broke a wheel, and I helped him push it all the way to that brilliant field full of brightly bannered tents, and he gave me a full meal for it. Even patted my back when I choked for eating too quickly. Then he tossed a silver coin at me and told me, “By gods, find a bathhouse, you smell like the undercarriage of a mule.”

I took myself to the finest inn at the Faire, where the innkeeper immediately denied me entrance. Then I went to the second-best inn—got turned out there as well—but eventually the third inn, with peeling paint upon its squeaky door, let me in, and I took the first hot bath of my life, washing away a lifetime of coldness and grime. Then I took a pair of shears and cut all my hair off. When I looked in the mirror, I hardly recognized the boy I saw. He was just as thin, just as ugly, but there was a brightness to his eyes that hadn’t been there before.

I spent the rest of that silver coin on a tunic and new socks, on a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese, and sat the day through by a fountain in a square near Castle Luricht. I watched carriages go by—watched knights in shining armor and women in colorful dresses take the drawbridge into the castle—and for the first time in my life I felt a new kind of hunger. Like I wanted to make something of myself; like I finally had the energy to dream

now that my basic needs had been met.

And then I saw him.

It was just before nightfall, and he was wearing a long velvet cloak, the exact purple hue as the king’s banners. Someone important. And damn me, I couldn’t help myself. Instinct is an incurable habit, and by then it was instinct for me to note who in a crowd had deep pockets.

I stalked him through the square. Waited for him to step into an alley between buildings. Stuck my hand in his pocket.

And felt a coin.

A single coin, large and strange and oblong—rough on one side, smooth on the other.

The man whirled. When he caught my wrist, I noted how pale his skin was. How gnarled his knuckles. “What,” he asked, in a voice that put shivers down my back, “do you think you’re doing?”

I flashed him a smile. “Begging your pardon, sir. Lost my footing.”

“And caught yourself in the depths of my pocket, did you?” His grip on

my wrist tightened. “Who are you?”

“Nobody, sir.”

That seemed to please him.

I couldn’t see his face. His hood was too low, the light in the alley too dim. I tried to take a step back. He didn’t let me go. “You have a wandering look about you,” he rasped. “Aimless and wanting. Diviners have that look, sometimes. You’re a foundling?”

I told him I was. And he seemed to like that, too, because he let go of my wrist. “Take a look,” he said, nodding at my hand in his pocket.

Hairs jumped along the base of my skull. I lifted my hand from his pocket and brought out the strange coin I’d felt there. It wasn’t like any coin I’d ever seen. I hadn’t expected it to be made of limestone.

“You want it?” the man asked, leaning closer. His voice was different now. Coaxing and low. “It’s one of a kind. Special. It’ll make you special, too.”

I turned the coin over in my palm, asking with a childlike wonderment I’d grow to resent, “You’d give it to me?”

A low, rumbling laugh slipped from beneath his hood, then he drew it

back.

I held in a scream.

His face was like a skull—hollow in the cheeks and eye sockets, sharp at the jaw and brow bones. His skin was gray—or perhaps thin—I couldn’t tell if I was looking at his skin or through it to the bones beneath. When he smiled, his teeth were long and narrow and cracked.

And his eyes. No pupil, no iris—pale as the limestone coin in my hand.

“Yes,” he said, like he’d come to a decision in that horrifying skull of his. “I’ll give it to you from time to time. After all, if she can pluck foundlings from the streets and train them to fill her coffers, why not I?”

He snatched the coin from my hand. Grasped my wrist once more.

Threw that coin like one throws a skipping stone over water— And the two of us vanished.

After that, my memories became bleary, like I’d lived through my youth with something over my eyes. And the things I did recall— Well. I wish I didn’t.

He, whose name I would not learn for a time yet, was a cruel master. His mistreatment began quickly, when he used this coin—a magic coin, that could transport its user through walls at whim—and brought us into the dark iron vault at the bottom of the castle. There, surrounded by cold, hard mountains of gold, he would leave me. Sometimes for days. No matter how I shouted, no one came, the iron walls of my dungeon taking the blows of my screams without incurring a single dent. It was cold, and the coins sucked all the heat out of my thin body, and my heart beat too fast too often, endeavoring to keep me alive despite fear and malnourishment.

Then he’d pull me out—that wretch. He’d use his coin, and we’d fly up staircases and through walls until we reached his chamber at the top of the castle. There, he’d have all manner of things waiting for me. Braised meats, buttered and spiced breads, flagons of cherry wine. I’d gorge myself like a pig and he’d watch, his gray tongue darting over his lips in terrible ecstasy.

He’d laugh as I’d throw it all up.

“You eat too fast,” he’d chuckle. “What a human thing to want something so badly you let it hurt you.”

“Fuck you,” I told him, but it had no effect. I was his toy; his source of sick rapture. I only prayed it would stay like this. That his abuse would

remain as it was, fixed upon my hunger.

It didn’t.

Months later, after all my attempts to run away had failed—after I’d been thrown out of the castle by guards only to be brought back inside by my captor—I caught sight of my reflection. My skin was gray, my cheeks hollow, my lips chapped. My dark hair had grown back brittle, and my fingernails were wrinkled and cracking. Gone was the boy who’d come to Coulson Faire on that blooming spring day, and gone was his belief in portents. This boy—the one who looked back at me now—was a ghost.

“I’ve got a job for you,” my captor told me one day. “It’ll earn you a good meal.”

He held out his coin. “Aisling Cathedral,” he murmured, the same ecstasy on his face as when he watched me eat. “There is a spring there, blooming from the heart of the chancel. The water…” He handed me a gold

flagon. “Take my coin. Go to the cathedral. Come back with the water.”

I reached for the coin, but his gnarled hand closed around my throat. “If you run, I will hunt you. Cut out your heart. Eat it. Then I’ll rip a new foundling off the street to replace you.” He threw me down onto the floor and tossed his coin—with far more delicacy—down beside me. “Watch out for the gargoyles.”

And so I made my first journey to the tor.

It was night, the moon a mere sliver. The road steepened, and my underfed muscles ached, and then I was there. Standing before a towering stone cathedral.

I wrapped my fingers against the closed iron gates and looked into the courtyard at the five hooded statues that waited there. I knew who they were supposed to be. Gods. Omens. Masters of the future, of fate—of

portents and promises.

But all I saw was stone.

I tossed the coin, smooth side up, like I’d seen my master do hundreds of times. The first toss got me into the courtyard. The second, into the cathedral.

I landed in the aisle, and my mouth fell open. How tall the sanctuary walls reached. How brilliant the stained-glass windows shone in the moonlight. Small and tired and hungry as I was, I had the sudden clarity that this was why people believed in gods. They felt small against beautiful greatness; a tiny speck in a much larger design.

This is what power is, I decided then and there. To incite wonderment— and fear.

I tiptoed past pews and down the nave, but no matter how tender my feet, Aisling’s wide, cavernous mouth spat my echo back at me.

There, where I knew it would be upon the chancel, a limestone rock rested. From it, a spring leached. The water was dark, like swirling black paint. When I dipped the flagon into it, some splashed upon my bare hand.

It smelled of rotten flowers. Viscous, like oil. Like blood.

I left the cathedral emboldened. Delirious from hunger and lack of sleep, I imagined returning to my master’s room and spilling the spring water upon the floor, then turning his coin over—rough side up—and tossing it straight at him.

But when I got back to the Artful Brigand’s room, I did not use his stone

coin to kill him. I just handed him the spring water he asked for, returned

his stone coin.

And ate.

Every time after that, it was the same. He’d tell me, “If you run, I will hunt you. Cut out your heart. Eat it.” He’d always laugh at that part. Every time, I’d take the coin, walk by moonlight to the tor. Sneak into the cathedral, steal water, and bring it back to Castle Luricht. And every time, I was sure this would be the time that I killed him. That I’d turn his own coin against him and obliterate the motherfucker.

But I didn’t. I was always too hungry for the meal he had waiting for me.

I was his puppet for years. Stole spring water, starved and gorged myself and was sick over and over. I did as he told me. I would have died, doing

exactly as I was told— If I hadn’t met the king.

It was one of those rare days my master gave me free rein of the castle grounds. I didn’t have the coin, just empty hands, when a man stepped into my path. I didn’t know he was the king. I’d stopped looking at faces a while ago. Admittedly, the crown and the purple sash should have given him away, but he was lurking in an alley and scribbling madly in a notebook, and that is not a very kingly thing to do.

“Lost, scribe?” I sneered, hitting his shoulder with mine.

The man looked at me with piercing blue eyes over the lip of his notebook, cleared his throat, and said, “As a matter of fact, I am. Not locationally, understand.” He tapped his graphite stylus over the page.

“Philosophically. Conscientiously.”

Drunk, I decided. “And you’re looking for answers here? In Piss Alley?”

“Is that what you call it? Piss Alley?” He eyed the stone walls. “I’ll have the official map labeled accordingly.”

I took him in. Especially that gaudy gold crown. “Who are you?”

“King Benedict Castor.” He grinned, like he’d delivered the punchline to a joke with perfect timing.

I felt what little blood I had left in my cheeks drain into my too-small boots.

The king merely smiled. “Ease up, my boy. Everyone deserves two chances in this life: the first to err, the second to rectify. Tell me, what’s

your name?”

“I’m nobody,” I said without thinking.

“Everybody is somebody.” He wrinkled his brow and scrutinized me.

“Haven’t I seen you scurrying about the castle?”

“I work for the cook,” I lied.

“A skinny boy like you? I don’t think so.”

“I… I do odd jobs.”

He nodded, his gaze returning to his notebook. “For the man in the upmost room?”

I froze. But the king remained idle, turning the pages of his notebook unhurriedly. “I’ve suspected someone was living up there for some time, and that he had help getting whatever little thing he needed. But whenever I unlocked the door to the chamber, the room was empty. There have been rumors since before I was born, mind, that the castle is haunted.” He looked up at me again. “But I rarely believe in things I can’t see with my own eyes.

What do you do for him—this figure?”

My throat closed.

“Oh, don’t be frightened.” The king spoke to me with the chipper softness I’d heard grooms use to coax their horses. “You’re not in any trouble. I make it a habit to ask questions. It’s folk of the field or kitchen or beggars on the street who know how to read the signs of life—not those heavy-pocketed nobs who go to Aisling for a Divination.”

“Says the king with pockets full of gold.”

That made him laugh. “How right you are.” He reached into the pocket of his wool cloak and extracted three gold rings. “I just picked these up from a merchant I’m fond of. I was going to give them to my grandson, but Maude tells me little boys prefer things like wooden swords over trinkets.”

He held out his hand. “So now, they’re for you.”

I stared stupidly at his open palm. Said, sharp as a knife, “What do you

expect me to give you in return?”

“Your name will do.”

I looked up at him, then. Really looked at him. He was aged. Someone’s grandfather. And yet there was a brightness in his eyes that might have belonged to a boy. A youthful shimmer of curiosity, of wonderment. And while he stood opposite me, tall and stoic in his armor, looking so much like a conqueror and I like the conquered, I did not feel an ounce of fear in his

presence. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, there is power in kindness, too.

“My name…” What a shithead. There were tears in my eyes. “My name is Rodrick Myndacious.”

“That’s a fine name,” the king said. “You’ll grow into it nicely.” He took my hand. Dropped the three rings into my palm. “But for now, I think I’ll call you Rory.”

I told the king right there in Piss Alley what I knew about my master.

About his stone eyes, his strange, magical stone—about his desire for Aisling’s spring water, and how I’d stolen it for him. The king listened.

Summoned a carriage five minutes later.

And took me away.

That was how I came to know the truth about the Omens, and the name of the man—the Artful Brigand—whom I’d served. It was also how I came to the Chiming Wood. Where, at Petula Hall, I met the knight Maude Bauer and the king’s grandson, Benedict Castor the Third, who had the same blue eyes as his grandfather. Maude was over ten years my senior, and Benji nearly ten my junior, but we fit together in the crooked sort of way groups of three often do. With them, I ate without gorging myself. Slept in a bed of my own. Muscle grew over bones, and the sallowness in my face disappeared. When I peered into a looking glass, the helpless, hungry boy was gone. There wasn’t hope in his eyes—not yet. But it would come.

I had to believe it would come.

And just as it was about to, just when my savior King Benedict Castor had collected enough proof of the Omens and their stone objects—of the conspiracy of Aisling Cathedral—just when he had taken up the mantle, the word heretic echoed through the knighthood.

I was sixteen the day the knights brought the king to the tor at the edge of their swords. Gargoyles surrounded him, and the abbess, all in white, forced him to endure a Divination. A Diviner was brought forth—a girl in a gossamer shroud, and she lay down and drowned in the water I’d once stolen for the Artful Brigand.

Five ill portents were named. When the gargoyles dragged the king to the courtyard, tossing him into the shadows of the five statues that lingered there, I ran to him. Put my arms, no longer thin for starvation, around his shoulders. “Fight,” I told him, knowing I was telling him to fight against the world. “Don’t be such a fucking martyr—fight back.”

“My death is not my surrender.” He looked up at me with those clear blue eyes. Reached into his cloak. “It’s all here, my boy.” He handed me his beaten leather notebook. “Everything I know.” He looked back at the dark mouth of the cathedral. “It begins and ends with that stone and the water that springs from it—I know it does. Look back,” he said, sharp and quick.

“Past Diviners, past Omens. Look all the way back, and maybe you can do what I couldn’t: change the future.”

The knights closed in around him. Maude took my collar. “Go.” She knew, just as I did, what came next. “Be with Benji.”

I found him nearby, sitting among gowan flowers, crying. “Don’t look, Benji,” I said when they began to throw the stones. I took him in my arms —that blue-eyed boy—and fled the tor. He’s wrong, I thought. There’s nothing worth looking back on. There’s nothing behind us, or in front of us, but pain. “Don’t look back.”

A new king was chosen by the nobility. King Augur, and he was as dull as wood, but he garnered five good portents from his Divination at Aisling Cathedral—played his part well during his ceremonies in all five hamlets— touted the divinity of Omens. Maude put me in armor, and I recited the names of the protective pieces for weeks to keep myself from feeling like a pretender when I wore them. “Pauldron, rerebrace, vambrace, gauntlet, greave…”

Then I painted charcoal around my eyes like they did in the Chiming Wood and pierced the three gold bands King Castor had gifted me into my right ear. I became a knight of Traum. Years later, though he never did know how to hold his drink whenever someone mentioned his grandfather, Benji did, too.

That time was as blurry to me as chapters of my childhood. But my armor kept me grounded—I was determined, same as Maude, to keep up Benedict Castor’s work and oust the Omens from Traum. But the day-to- day muck made little impact. I was not well liked among my fellow knights —I had no influence, no wealth, but I inspired fear, and there is power in that. I trained. Traveled to all five hamlets. Patrolled for sprites without killing one—I was an asshole, not a butcher. I existed, but I hardly lived.

But I had Maude, and Benji, and both of their names meant something in Traum when mine didn’t. And it was their names that, when King Augur died of dullness—he fell off his horse and never got back up—solidified

Benji as candidate for the next king. The very thing we’d hoped to do since his grandfather’s death. A new king, the same cause: to take up the mantle.

And suddenly, there was something to look forward to. Something, besides my own festering derision, to keep me going. I was the king’s sword, and Maude lent him the indisputable might of the Bauer name, and together we’d travel through the hamlets and rid Traum of its false gods.

But first, we needed spring water.

Hundreds of times I’d gone back to the Artful Brigand’s chamber to kill him. Hundreds of times, he eluded me. I needed something to draw him out.

What was it the bastard had said? What a human thing to want something so badly you let it hurt you. For him, I knew, it was spring water.

And so to Aisling Cathedral we went to get it.

When I rode with the rest of the knights up the tor, I was thinking on death. On killing the Artful Brigand—would I do it quickly or slowly?— when my gluttonous horse decided to plant her feet on the side of the road. I felt the looming presence of the cathedral bear down on me and didn’t meet its gaze. I refused to once more be awestruck by that great, hallowed place.

But then the bells began to chime, noble and haunting in their ring. I

looked up.

And saw a woman.

She stood on the wall, several feet above the road, looking down at me.

The setting sun caught in her silver-blond hair, and the wind pushed it from her brow, pushing my derision along with it. I was, for a moment, undone.

Struck by wonderment, by admiration, by fear.

Then I remembered myself. Pith, I remembered why I was there. I took off my helmet. Glared at her.

“Knight,” she called. “You lot make quite the spectacle. Is the king so fretful that he requires the company of his entire knighthood for a Divination?”

My face went hot. “Between our two lots, mine is hardly the spectacle.”

And even as she chastised me, and even as I rode away, I wore that moment like an overfastened belt. I couldn’t breathe correctly having looked upon her.

The next night, I slipped into Castle Luricht with a flask of spring water, Maude and a slightly drunk Benji at my side. I took the right passages, stayed out of sight, muscle memory taking over. When I reached the

trapdoor and climbed to the door at the top of the castle, I opened the flask.

Poured a fifth of it onto the wood floor. When the Artful Brigand appeared through the wall, he didn’t even look at me. He simply fell to his knees and licked the spring water where it puddled near my feet.

I had a speech prepared about how he did not break me—how I’d become a knight—how a nobody could defeat a god. But all I did was step from shadow and put a blade to his neck.

He looked up. Laughed. “Is that you, boy? Not so skinny now—”

I slit his throat and took his stone coin, its weight perfect in my hand.

“We should go,” I said to Benji and Maude. “I have to get back to the cathedral for my Divination.”

It went too fast after that. I don’t know the exact moment I stopped existing and started living or when I began to have faith in the world and the people in it. Killing Omens hadn’t opened my eyes to the goodness of the Stonewater Kingdom.

But she did. That woman on the wall who traveled with us—who put her hammer and chisel into Omens as surely as she did into my pride and

disdain and godlessness.

Sybil Delling.

Yes, time went too fast. I no longer carried myself like I was the king’s sword—whoever I was, whatever I was capable of, was shifting, metamorphosis striking me like a rushing, torrid fever. Every time I’d look at Sybil, a torturous ecstasy, like seeing a table full of food after weeks of hunger, would find me. Still, it took me longer than it should have to touch that ecstasy. By then I knew better than to gorge myself, even on things I was desperate for.

But I couldn’t help it. I wanted her so badly I’d let her hurt me. I’d let her do anything to me.

But then, a blighting pain. I was on the tor, and the Omens were dead.

Aisling Cathedral had fallen, and Sybil was with me—everything was as it should be, save the sword Benji had slid into my body.

My last memory of Sybil was blurry. She was so close I could almost reach her, and yet she was as the moon, the distance between us impassable.

I knew I would not survive the wound I’d been dealt.

Maude carried me away and laid me down on grass. I’d never seen her weep before, but she was weeping now, long, anguished wails, and so was

Bartholomew. In those moments before my death, I thought of my old mentor. How Benedict Castor the First had died here, and the grass I lay in now was the same stretch of the tor I’d carried Benji through, shielding him against the pain of the world.

My last moments were covered in blood, my vision slowly waning.

“Bring me back.” I was crying out to Maude, clawing at the flask of spring water on her belt. “Please. Bring me back. He needs to know. She needs to know.”

My final words were a portent, a promise. “Death is not my surrender.”

My vision snapped into focus, chaos erupting around me. I was still on my hands and knees on the floor of the king’s box, panting in the confines of my helmet, tangled with other guards. It was too much, all that memory at once, rage and wonder and that sick hunger that couldn’t be anything other than love… I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak.

Sybil. Sybil. Sybil.

I put a hand to my chest. Weasel Face—no, Tory Bassett—was still in front of me, the loom stone resting in her hand. She was peering down at it, relief easing the lines between her brows— Silk brushed against the side of my face, and then Tory was falling— someone had knocked into her shoulder and sent her tumbling onto her back. The loom stone fell once more, clattering onto the floor of the king’s box and landing beneath my bent head.

A bare heel slammed down, rattling my teeth.

When I looked up, Sybil Delling stood above me, her foot planted over the loom stone. Her crown caught the light and her veil rippled with the effort of her breathing. When she lifted her heel, pieces of bloody limestone were embedded in the skin of the foot, the Heartsore Weaver’s magical object reduced to a dozen jagged pieces.

When they came, my breaths were ragged in the iron cage of my helmet.

Sybil turned. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I knew them, knew her. My chest tightened and my mouth went dry. I understood full well the seismic

shift my body underwent when Sybil Delling’s gaze took hold of mine.

But she did not know me.

Sybil’s gaze turned. Before I could catch my breath, she was pushing away, moving through the crowd, trailing pieces of bloody stone behind her.

Benji flickered out of nothingness, appearing in the heart of the bedlam.

When he saw Tory, fumbling to get to her feet, then the broken loom stone in front of her, his mouth fell open.

“I don’t know what happened, sire.” Tory’s cheeks were wan. “I—It fell and—”

Samuel Eichel pushed guards aside that he might wring his hands in full view of the king. “A terrible portent, sire,” he said, nodding at the pieces of the loom stone. “A terrible portent indeed.”

Dedrick Lange stepped in. “There’s been a disturbance, Benedict. You and the Diviner should come at once.”

Benji went a brilliant shade of red. “I’d bloody say there’s been a disturbance! What foul, ignoble cur knocks their own king off a horse? And you. Fucking gods, Tory.” He was screaming now. “The loom stone—”

“It’s not the joust or the loom stone, King Castor.” Dedrick’s voice boomed over the din. “I’ve just heard the reports. Aisling Cathedral’s ruins have been desecrated.” He whistled loudly. “Knights—guards. Collect your weapons and retrieve your horses. We ride for the tor.”

Benji froze. “Desecrated? How?”

“It’s the sprites, sire. Those wretched vermin. They’re digging among the ruins.” His voice lowered. “They’re trying to get to the spring.”

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