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CHAPTER TWELVE

OUR FEET WILL TAKE US WHERE WE NEED TO GO

H e did not stop me from leaving.

Not that he could have. There was an insurgency in my body. If it was not spent out running, I might have easily put it into my fists and broken some vital part of Rodrick Myndacious.

When I crashed out of the Harried Scribe’s lair into daylight and the narrow alley, the gargoyle was where I’d left him—sleeping next to Fig. He’d pulled the saddle blanket and draped it over his head, muffled snores sounding beneath it.

I tore it off. “We must go.”

He gasped, then grimaced. “You’d think one versed in dreaming would know it is rude to wake someone from sleep.”

“Dire circumstances, gargoyle.” I wrenched free my hammer and chisel, voices—King Castor’s and Rory’s and Maude’s—sounding in the corridor behind me. “Take my hand.”

He did so without question, his stone footsteps a raucous toll as he followed me at a run out of the alleyway. We muddled through gawking crowds, down serpentine streets, over bridges—past factories and city gardens—lost like fallen milk teeth within the Seacht’s yawning mouth.

When I was too breathless to go on, we stopped on an empty bridge over a narrow canal. “I forget, Bartholomew,” said the gargoyle. “Why are we running?”

I draped myself over the stone rail like a dirty, wet dress and hauled in breaths. “Don’t trust king, knights—Omen. Need—to—think.”

“Just as well. Discussing things with that equine proved quite a bore.” The gargoyle sighed, suddenly forlorn. “I confess horses are not the intelligent beasts I imagined them to be. Though I don’t think that merits the abuse they suffer postmortem.”

That one took me a moment. “No one actually beats dead horses, gargoyle. It’s an expression.”

“Really? How morbid.”

He began to hum to himself. And I—I could hardly catch my breath. The pieces of my life had been stained by the Scribe’s ink, by his face and words and death . “What do you know about the Omens, gargoyle?” I managed. “I never thought to ask you.”

“Because you believe yourself better than me?”

“That’s not—” I looked over my shoulder at him. “Maybe. Maybe I thought there was a hierarchy to Aisling, like I thought there was to all of Traum. That gargoyles were better than other sprites, just like knights and kings were better than craftsmen—and that I was better than all of them.” I bit my lip. “It sounds awful when I say it out loud.”

“True things often do.”

“I don’t believe I am better than you.” I dropped my forehead onto the bridge’s stone rail. “I don’t know what to believe.”

The gargoyle held still but for his snout, which wrinkled in concentration. “Does not the abbess say that the Omens are gods—and you are special to Divine for them?”

“It is possible the abbess does not know all there is to know about the Omens.” Sickness stirred in my belly. “Or that she, too, does not like saying true things out loud.”

“I suppose that is a permanent possibility. Even your dreams may not show you the truth, Bartholomew. I cannot remember it ever being proven that gods are more honest than anyone else.”

“The Omens’ creeds are about truth. I always assumed them virtuous. Eternal—immortal.” I looked out over the canal. “But it seems they are none of those things.”

Boats passed beneath our bridge, long and narrow and laden with goods. Craftsmen, carrying their stock. A dory filled with bread passed by, and my stomach rumbled.

“When was the last time you bolstered yourself with food and water?” the gargoyle asked.

“I don’t know. A while.”

“Slept?”

“Longer still.”

“Whatever thinking you must do, you cannot do it like this.” He blew air from pouted lips. “What woe is mine, ever to childmind you.”

We had no money for an inn, but we did happen upon an empty forge with a caved-in roof. It smelled of dirt and coal and fires long burned out. I lay my head upon my arm, closed my eyes.

And was lost to sleep in seconds.

I woke from a dreamless oblivion with a racing heart and did not know where I was. The walls, the smells—this wasn’t my cottage. But the crescent moon floated through a broken roof, and I was able to make out that I was in a forge upon a lowly bed of dirt.

I’m in the Seacht. My memory came slowly, then far too fast. I’m with the gargoyle in the Seacht. The Diviners are gone.

And the Omens are a lie.

It was quiet. So horribly quiet without the Diviners, breathing next to me in their sleep.

I sat up. The gargoyle stood a pace away, humming to himself as he looked out a window with broken shutters. Next to him were a tin pitcher and a plate of bread and cheese and apples.

My stomach yanked. “Where did you get that?”

He screamed. “Sprites and spoons—you startled me, Bartholomew.”

“Have you been stealing , gargoyle?”

“Yes,” he said with delight. “I’m rather good at it. I was caught only twice. But you—you look stern. Have I behaved ignobly again by your childish standards?”

He had. But it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume he’d throw the pilfered food out the window if I told him as much. “Not at all. Besides, I’m starved.”

The pitcher was full of water. I drained it and devoured the food platter. “Thank you.”

The gargoyle watched me eat, then picked up my hammer and chisel. “Are we leaving, Bartholomew?”

I took the tools in my hands. Even with their familiar weight, I felt unbalanced. “I think… Perhaps we…”

“You seem troubled.” The gargoyle looked up at me with wide, earnest eyes. “Would you like me to tell you a story?”

“No one could craft a story fine enough to make me feel better right now, gargoyle.”

He nodded, like I’d said something profound. “Then let us explore this strange mechanism named the Seacht instead. Our feet will take us where we need to go.”

The night sky announced every turn the gargoyle and I took, throwing moon shadow, our silhouettes twisted figures upon the street. I didn’t mind. The moon’s vigilant quality was not disapproving like Aisling’s—I didn’t feel the urge to watch my back.

I kept my hood low, and the gargoyle, not one to be left out, stole a tablecloth from a clothesline to drape over his head, obscuring his face in shadow. Still, it was too early, or too late, for there to be any foot traffic—hardly anyone looked at us.

That did not mean the roads were empty. People milled about, awake despite the hour, different from the folk I’d seen in the Seacht in the light of day. Children in rags, men and women digging through scraps and washing their clothes in the canal.

I was stricken by shame when I caught myself staring. I’d never seen poverty before.

We carried on, entirely without aim, though at some point I slid both hammer and chisel into my left hand so that the gargoyle could hold my right. My mind remained on the Harried Scribe, his stone eyes, the way he had eaten my hair—licked up my blood. I thought of King Castor, too. What it might mean, him taking up the mantle, challenging the Omens for their magical stone objects. I thought on the Diviners and how I was no closer to finding them.

I considered it all, a canyon worrying itself between my brows.

Meanwhile the gargoyle was practically skipping down the street, pointing and commenting on everything he saw. “You seem contented,” I said, peering over my shoulder. “Being away from Aisling.”

“Perhaps I am.” He pondered. “What does it feel like to be contented, Bartholomew?”

As if I knew. The only happiness I’d felt was with the Diviners, in the tales of what we might do when we left the tor. My stock of joy was held in the future, ever out of reach. “I think contentedness,” I said bitterly, “is just a story we tell ourselves.”

The gargoyle nodded. “It is all the same, then. Contentedness. Truth and honesty and virtue. Omens. They are all stories, and we”—he gestured to the Seacht’s climbing walls—“tread the pages within them.”

Our feet did indeed take us where we needed to go. When the sky was purple, clouds blushing from a dawn we could not yet see, the gargoyle and I came across a street with plain brick houses. The largest had an inscription upon its door.

Pupil House III

A School for Foundlings

“How quaint,” the gargoyle said. “I confess, I’ve always fancied myself a bit of a schoolmaster and you my pupil, Bartholomew, though you have never held the position with the respect it’s due—I say. What are you doing?”

“Wait here.” I rushed to the house, opening its gate and tripping over little shoes. “They’ll get a fright if a menacing stone bat knocks upon their door.”

“That’s derogatory,” he called after me.

I knocked three times. Waited. Knocked again, louder.

I heard creaking. The shuffling of footsteps. Then the door was opening, wrenched in by an aged woman in a nightdress with a lump of gray hair and deeply etched lines around her eyes and lips.

She thrust a candle in my face. “Who the hell are you?”

“Apologies for the intrusion, milady. I know it’s early.”

“ Milady? What kind of twaddle is that? I’m the house mother. If you’re looking to drop off a foundling, we’re all full—”

“I’m not here for that.” I pulled my hood down. “I’d like to ask you a question.”

Her brows lifted into her hairline. “What’s a girl from Aisling doing at my door? Come to check on your investment?”

“What investment?”

“Your abbess is our patron.”

I’d almost forgotten. “Do the girls the abbess selects ever come back?”

“Here? Can’t see why they would.”

“So you haven’t seen any Diviners of late?”

“None save you, mourning dove.”

My chest fell. The woman crossed her arms, eyeing my split lip. “You look like you’ve had a time of it.” She sighed and pushed open her door. “Want a cup of something?”

“No—thank you.” I looked up at the dawning sky. “How many Pupil Houses are there?”

“Three. The other hamlets send their orphans here, but mainly the girls—especially the poor sick ones. Gives ’em a good shot to end up at Aisling as Diviners. Most of the boys run off and fend for themselves.”

“Can you tell me where I might find the next Pupil House?”

“Off the square. But you won’t find any Diviners there, either.”

“Off the square. Wonderful. Where’s that?”

Pupil House II had darkened windows. This house mother answered the door with a broom, and nearly fell over when she saw my shroud.

She hadn’t seen any Diviners, either.

A baker opening his shop, who dropped his flour at the sight of the gargoyle, pointed us to the final Pupil House. There, the house mother slept through my knocking, and her dog ventured out in her stead. The mutt chased us for three city blocks. All the while the gargoyle shouted, his voice ringing through the streets, “Fear not, Bartholomew! Every day has its dog.”

The Seacht was waking up, its impoverished citizens slipping into shadow. When dawn came, the gargoyle and I did the same, retreating into an empty alley and slumping to the ground, defeated.

I pretended One was there, sitting next to me. “I was so important at Aisling. Climbing the wall—looking out at the view—I thought it would be the same when my service was up. That for all the dreams I’ve endured, I’d be important in the hamlets, too. That Traum, its people, its Omens , would love me.” I traced the split in my lip the Harried Scribe had dealt. “But Four was right. We will only ever be Diviners. Harbingers of gods—not real women. People will want us without ever wishing to know us. A daughter of Aisling is not a real daughter, just as the abbess—” I swallowed. “Just as the abbess is not a real mother. Diviners are but the tools of the craft of Divination. Holy, not human.”

“The cathedral, its Omens, its Diviners sit on high,” the gargoyle said plainly. “If you only ever look up at something, can you ever see it clearly?”

“I suppose not.” I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. “But, really—I tried to be good. To be a perfect Diviner and do everything the abbess told me to. I never complained, never said no. My worth was written by the rules I followed. But then the abbess called me resentful—a martyr. And maybe I am. But didn’t I become that way because her love cost as much?”

The gargoyle took my hand. “That is a very sad story, Bartholomew. I wonder… how does it end?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do or who to believe in or how to find my friends.” A sharp pressure began behind my eyes. “I don’t know who I am without Aisling.”

We sat in a silence he no doubt found contemplative and I oppressive.

An hour later, the streets now properly busy, a pair of girls came down the alley toward us. They wore simple garb and looked no older than twelve.

I thought of the Diviners. “How does the abbess choose the foundlings she brings to Aisling?” I asked the gargoyle as they passed.

He put a thoughtful claw to his stone lip. “All I know is that they are always girls. And often sick.”

“Why?”

“She told me once. I don’t remember when, or why.” The melodramatics he was so apt to show were nowhere upon his face. This time, the gargoyle seemed truly overcome by sadness. “She said that girls bear the pain of drowning better, and that sick ones always wake strange, special. And new.”

My throat tightened.

Meanwhile, the girls, passing in the alley, paid us no mind. Their pace hurried. I barely had time to pull my feet back lest they trip.

“Good morning,” the gargoyle said cheerily, his melancholy gone.

The girls didn’t answer. Their gazes were cast over their shoulders, their eyes wide and stricken—

There. Behind them. Three men, stalking forward. They made like they were casual, hands in their pockets, but I could see exactly what they were by their committed steps—the hungry, fixed line of their gazes.

Wolves, stalking mewling fawns.

They came past where the gargoyle and I were seated. With my cloak—and his tablecloth—we no doubt looked like a pair of vagabonds. The men did not ever look our way, watching only the fleeing girls.

My foot shot out.

The first man went down hard, landing on his forearms near the gargoyle’s feet, blocking the alleyway with his body.

The man behind him swore—kicked my leg out of his way. “Clumsy bitch.”

I rose to my feet. “Why are you chasing little girls down the street?”

“Get out of my face.” He stamped his palm over my cheek and shoved me into the alley wall. My other cheek scraped against brick, cutting my skin, stirring my shroud.

And I did not think. I just…

Swung.

And all hell broke loose.

My hammer made no noise, save the sick crack of bone. The answer was a bloodcurdling scream, and the alley became a knot of limbs, shouts, and blood.

The gargoyle rose to his feet, trampling the first man I’d hit, trying to get to me. Meanwhile the third man, shoving past his friend—whose elbow I’d decidedly shattered—levied his fist. He landed a weak punch to my stomach—no follow-through, because the gargoyle had him by the back of the neck, claws digging into flesh as he wrenched him back.

My hood dropped and the gargoyle’s tablecloth fell. When the man saw who exactly he was kicking and thrashing at, he went still. “Diviner. Please. We didn’t want anything with the young girls. Just a friendly—”

“I’m friendly, too,” the gargoyle said. “So is Bartholomew.” He looked at my hammer, held once more at the ready, and winked. “Aren’t you?”

He pushed the man toward me.

I dropped him with a horrible thwack of my hammer, right in his ribs.

“Guards!”

One of the men was screaming. The first one—the one I’d tripped—who’d been clever enough to stay down. He was screaming out the mouth of the alley. There, two armed guards wearing gray sashes had stalled, looking at us with narrowed eyes.

The man kept screaming. “Guards! Help! ”

Hands fell to the hilts of swords.

I spat blood onto cobblestones. “Take my hand, gargoyle.”

And then we were running. Again.

We crawled over the men, a mess of groaning limbs. “Didn’t that feel so delightfully ignoble?” the gargoyle howled, grinning madly as we scurried like rats down the alley.

We passed brick and wood and stone, taking so many turns I felt upside down. I thought we’d gotten away, but one wrong turn begot another, and then the gargoyle and I were faced with a looming wood edifice—a dead end.

“Quick! Fly us out of here.”

He looked at me like I’d spat in his eye. “And be mistaken yet again for a bird?”

The guards were upon us. When they caught us against a wall, they slowed to a halt. Kept their hands fast upon their hilts.

“Those men were going to hurt a pair of girls,” I said, the urge to confess akin to throwing up spring water. “We were defending them.”

“Did a bit more than that,” one of the two guards said. “They’ll need a physician. You’re both from Aisling?”

I puffed up my chest. “I’m a Diviner.”

“Number Six?”

“Who’s asking?”

The guards looked at each other. “There’s a warrant out for your arrest.”

The gargoyle snorted. “For what? Stealing breakfast and a tablecloth and—”

I put my hand over his mouth. “Surely you have better things to do than hound us for a bit of petty crime.”

“Excuse me, I am a thief as well as an assailant,” the gargoyle said, breaking free of my clutches and sticking up his nose. “Nothing petty about that.”

“Unfortunately this warrant comes from on high.” The guards turned, heads close together, quietly conferring.

“I wonder what they are talking about,” the gargoyle mused.

I touched my bottom lip, bleeding again from when that pig had shoved me against the wall. I was muttering indignities to myself when the taller of the two guards split off, going back down the alley. The other turned to the gargoyle and me. By her tight shoulders, she didn’t seem pleased. Were she a Diviner, I’d have guessed she’d just pulled the short straw.

She didn’t take her hand off her sword. “Follow me.”

We were delivered to a walled compound, where a strange cracking noise echoed behind a vast wooden door. Bug-eyed, its sentry watched the gargoyle and me approach, and with one word from our escort guard, he opened the door.

We came upon a gravel yard, sectioned by two crossing ropes, a pair of knights standing in each quadrant. They each bore a whip—the source of the cracking noise I’d heard—and were practicing wielding the long, serpentine weapons. Those not occupied in the training watched from the sidelines, drilling or goading their fellow knights.

Until they weren’t watching anything but me.

I recognized a few. Hamelin, the one I’d almost taken to the grass, was cracking his whip in the nearest quadrants. When he saw me, he coughed, choking on his own surprise.

Then, as if by silent order, they all looked away, their focus back on their work and decidedly away from me and my stone companion. As to the likely reason why—

He stood in shadow on the sideline. Leather clad, new charcoal drawn around his eyes, he was looking at me through an uncharacteristic crack in his derision, as if something he did not fully believe in had suddenly appeared right in front of him.

Rodrick Myndacious.

The guard brought the gargoyle and me before him. “These the ones you’ve been looking for?”

I glared from behind my shroud. “ On high is a bit overstated, isn’t it?”

A smile ghosted across Rory’s lips. “Where were they?” he asked the guard.

“Brawling on the east side.”

Rory’s smile vanished, his dark eyes skittering to a halt over on my face. My freshly bleeding bottom lip. He stared a moment, then another. Ever so slowly, his gaze rose to the guard at my side. “Which lowly picket of the Seacht struck her?”

She put her hands in the air. “She was like that when we found her. Her and the gargoyle roughed up some—”

“Vile men,” I interrupted.

“Whoever they were,” the guard said, “Jordy went to fetch them a physician.”

Rory didn’t answer. His gaze was still on my bottom lip. “Anywhere else?”

I suddenly didn’t know. His eyes were so dark. “I’m fine.”

“I, too, am unharmed.” The gargoyle patted his stone chest. “Right as raindrops.”

So close.

Rory’s gaze didn’t leave my face. He reached into his pocket, extracted three gold coins, then handed them to the guard. “Much obliged.”

She took the money, giving me a wide berth, then quit the compound.

“Well,” the gargoyle said, yawning as he watched her go. “I’m due for a good sleep. Where can I station myself so as not to hear the revelry of these”—he waved his hand at the knights and their whips—“riotous clods?”

Rory looked halfway to laughing, halfway to questioning his own sanity. “I can’t tell if it will make you cry to tell you to sleep in the stables.”

“Why would that make me cry?”

“I… truly don’t know.”

“Not very shrewd, this one,” the gargoyle muttered. He crossed his arms. “Aren’t you going to offer me a blanket?”

“You get cold?”

“I like to rest with something over my eyes.”

“Like covering a birdcage,” I explained, adding hurriedly, “not that you are anything like a bird.”

“There should be blankets in the stables.”

“Very well.” The gargoyle sauntered away, but not before casting me a backward glance. “In all your stories of things you might do when you left Aisling, Bartholomew, did you ever tell one like today’s?”

I managed a weak laugh. “Not by a mile.”

He smiled. When he was gone, into the stable, I felt Rory’s gaze on the side of my face.

I blew out a sigh. Faced him. “I have questions. Or must I beat you at your craft to have them answered?”

“No.” A nearby knight wrapped himself in his own whip, the yard an uproar of laughter. Rory kept his focus on me. “But, out of curiosity, what craft is mine, Diviner?”

“Pride. Godlessness. Disdain, maybe.”

“And you’d defeat me by… what? Throwing me down in front of the knighthood? Aiming your pitchfork tongue at me, calling me stupid and a thousand other unflattering things? I’d say my pride is wholly forfeit at this point.”

“You say horrible things to me all the time.”

“I know.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “Perhaps it’s why I worried you might be twenty miles away. That I might not—” He made a face. “That you might not come back.”

“I didn’t come back. I was arrested.”

“You and a gargoyle against a couple of guards? Please. You could be halfway to any of the hamlets by now, but you are not.” He paused. “As to the grievance of my godlessness—”

Rory’s back tensed, shoulders practically at his ears. “You. Me. Maude. Benji. The Harried Scribe. I realize it wasn’t exactly a mild way to show you the… complexity of the Omens.”

A complexity I did not yet understand by half. “Nothing about you is mild, Myndacious. Your disdain for Aisling, for the Omens—for me—has been written on your face from the moment I clapped eyes on you.” I sighed. The day was just beginning, and I already felt defeated by it. “My own fault for not seeing the signs.”

“I have disdain in me, yes.” Rory’s brows drew together, lips parted slightly enough for me to hear the shaky sound of his exhale. “But none for you.”

Our gazes held. They held and held, the effect sharper than the cracking of whips—

“Six!”

I turned, looking into a pair of beautiful green eyes. “Maude.”

She came before me. Gripped my arm. “Happy you made it back to us. I meant to ask yesterday—” She looked down at my dirty feet. “Where are your shoes?”

Rory snorted. “We’re working on it.”

Maude took my hand, winked at Rory, then went into the compound. “I should have something that’ll fit you.”

“Oh, there’s no need—”

“I’m being nice. You’ll be wanting the king’s ear.” She threw her arm over my shoulder. “But first you need a bath.”