Page 19

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I CAN’T SWIM

W e left the inn, saying nothing as we wound our way through the darkened village and down the road. The crescent moon was high in the sky, holding water, dropping a shaving of silver light over everything it touched. I looked out over the vantage, the cloudlessness affording me a view through the mountains. Beyond, I could see the waters of the Tenor—the rolling fields of Traum.

But no matter how hard I squinted, I could not see Aisling.

“There’s a spot at the base of that.” Rory pointed a finger up at the nearest looming peak. “Hot springs. Hot enough to ease some of the ache your muscles are undoubtedly feeling after three days of hauling ass.”

I stopped mid-step. “My muscles are fine.”

“Mine aren’t.” Rory chuckled. “It’s grueling work, getting you into fighting shape.” He turned. Noted my stillness. “That’s a bad joke, Diviner. You’re ready for tomorrow.”

“That’s not why—” My cheeks burned. “Don’t laugh.”

The echoes of his chuckle still lingered in the air. “I’ve never laughed in my life.”

The breeze picked up, reaching its fingers into my clothes, goading a confession. “I can’t swim.”

He surprised me with the gift of silence. And it was a gift, because I didn’t want to say out loud that it would have been as arbitrary as everything else that happened at Aisling Cathedral, teaching a girl intended to drown how to swim.

Perhaps he already understood that, and the silence was for both of us to put that ugly truth somewhere private.

All Rory did, in his usual half-hearted way, was shrug. “That’s no trouble.”

I expected the hot springs to smell of rotting flowers. They didn’t. They smelled of earth. Hidden in the shadow of the mountains, steam rising off them like tired old ghosts, sat a cluster of pools.

Rory led me to the largest. I was about to ask him if he’d come here many times before when he reached down, gripped the hem of his tunic.

Yanked it over his head.

My gaze followed where muscles cusped his spine, then moved to the two small dimples just above the rim of his pants. I hadn’t seen him bare like that since his first night at Aisling. Back when I thought him the foulest knight in all of Traum.

And maybe he still was, because Rory was currently flinging off his boots and reaching for the leather clasp around his pants. Tugging it—

“What the hell are you doing?”

He peered over his shoulder. Whatever he saw on my face, the panic, the heat, made him smile. “Feel free to avert your virtuous eyes.”

His pants hit the ground.

Water splashed, steam billowed, and then all I could see of Rory was his head, his neck, the lines of his clavicle, peeking out of the hot spring.

He stretched his arms over his head and let out a moan that made me bite down. “Good for what ails you.”

He fixed me in his gaze. Twirled his hands and bowed exaggeratedly. “Wouldst the lady join me?”

“Why are you so annoying?”

“Why are you afraid to get in? I am standing in the deepest point—no swimming required.” His eyes flittered over my nightshirt. “If it’s about protecting my innocence, you’re too late. You were practically naked in that wet Divining robe the night we met.”

“How mortifying for you.”

He slapped a hand over his eyes and turned around, proffering me privacy and another view of his sculpted back. “Never said that.”

I thought of bold Four. How, if she were here, she’d already be naked, and the other Diviners would inevitably follow, Two grumbling, Three and Five half-timid, half-excited, and One sighing as she held her arm out to me. “Come on,” she’d say. “Someone has to mind them.”

Loneliness touched everything. And the aching beauty of the peaks, the pools, the incomparable night sky, made it so much worse.

I put a hand to my heart—to the five invisible cracks that lived there—and began to unbutton my shirt. It fell to the ground, pooling around my bare feet. Next off were my undergarments, and then I was exhaling shakily, crossing my arms over my breasts, thighs pressing together—naked under the silver moon.

Rory kept his back to me, shoulders tightening.

The pool was warm, as if it had its own feverish heart, working faster than mine. I waded into the ripples until I wore the water like a new dress. “You can turn around now.”

He waited a breath. When Rory faced me, the derision I’d come to know him by was absent, the lines of his brow smoothed, eyelids almost heavy. “You’re nervous.”

I flicked water in his face and rolled my shoulders and damn it , he was right. The water was good for what ailed me, a balm over aching muscles. I rubbed my neck—let my head fall back.

“Where are you sore?” Rory lifted an accusatory finger out of the water. “Don’t bother denying it. How’s the wrist?”

I could toss the Artful Brigand’s coin with both hands, but never perfectly with my left. So I’d spent the last three days using my right, resulting in an ache in the joint that never seemed to quiet. “It’s fine.”

He gave me a champion sneer, and I laughed. “It aches. A little.”

“Not half as much as that confession, I’ll wager.” He drifted closer, closer, until he was an arm’s length away. “May I?”

Everything was languid. Slow. As if night itself had dipped its long finger in the pool and stirred the water backward. I held out my arm and Rory took my wrist with such startling care I exhaled sharply. His gaze rose. And it was impossible to tell with eyes already so dark, but his pupils seemed to widen over me.

Then his fingers were moving, pressing, intricate and purposeful over the soreness of my wrist. I let out a heavy noise and Rory nodded, like he understood the language of pain and reprieve. “Is this all right?”

Just a whisper. “Yes.”

Lines drew between his eyes. Rory took to my muscles with honed precision, firm fingers, insistent but never prodding, like it was important to him—a craft to do well. Just like when he’d measured me for armor, I studied him. Ran my gaze down his face, neck, chest.

I wondered if his ribs were still bruised. “What about you?” I reached out. Drew a finger up his side. “Are you still in pain?”

He shivered. “Near you? Always.”

“Your ribs, you idiot. From getting caught stealing Aisling’s spring water.”

“Hmmm—that. It still aches. A little. ”

I frowned, thinking of him in pain. Of him, thieving as a boy. We’d both been foundling children, both taken under the wings of Omens—the abbess, and the Artful Brigand. But where the abbess had put me in gossamer and made me exceptional, Rory had endured the opposite. And it seemed so impossible he should have come to know Benji’s grandfather, met Maude, become a knight—and that I had purposely chosen the short straw that day. Lingered along the Aisling wall. Looked down, seen him.

I was losing my faith in everything. But the two of us meeting… it felt almost divine.

“What was it like?” I asked. “Killing the Artful Brigand?”

“Years in the making—and over in a moment.” His fingers moved up to my forearm. Again he asked. “May I?”

He waited at the gate of every place he touched until I granted him entry. And as Rory soothed the muscles he’d help make sore, I wondered if I should tell him I did not always think him so unknightly. That his unwavering belief in me during our training had not gone unnoticed—that I had not detected an ounce of Maude’s skepticism in him, as if he already knew the outcome of my fight with the Oarsman. Not because of dreams or portents and not because it was a fantastical story he told himself—he simply believed I could win.

Errant knight Rodrick Myndacious, prideful, disdainful, godless, believed in me .

The charcoal around his eyes had been rubbed away, his black hair dropping trails of water down his clavicle, his chest. “How are your feet?” he asked. “Can’t be easy, wearing those fine boots day in, day out.”

“You touch my feet, you die.”

A wicked smile unraveled over his mouth. Rory snatched a hand under the water. I drew back, kicking to the surface, splashing him. He laughed. When I aimed another kick he caught my ankle, pulled—

I slipped.

I spread my arms, but the water was without pity, giving me nothing to cling to. I fell backward.

And suddenly it was not a hot spring I was falling into, but the spring at Aisling Cathedral. Pressed down by the abbess. Opening my mouth, taking putrid water into my lungs, waiting for pain, for dreams, for stone objects and the terrifying presence of the Omens—

A hand found the back of my neck.

I was thrust out of the water. “I’ve got you. Breathe, Diviner.”

I hauled in air. When I opened my eyes, I expected to see the rose window high in Aisling’s cloister. But all I saw was the moon, hovering in its dark heaven. The moon—and Rory.

“I didn’t think.” He pushed my hair out of my face, careful of my shroud, and kept his hand at the nape of my neck as my feet found the rocks at the bottom of the pool.

I coughed. “It’s fine—”

“It’s not lost on me how terrible I’ve been. Growing up under the Artful Brigand—” He said it in a gasping rush, like it was he who’d been underwater. “I’m discourteous and utterly poisoned by contempt. I know that.” His throat hitched. “And I don’t know how to behave around you. You make me so fucking nervous. But letting you fall underwater when all you ever did at Aisling was drown , I—”

“Myndacious.” I reached up. Put a hand over his mouth. “It was an accident.”

He nodded too fast and wouldn’t look at me.

My hand slid to his cheek. “Rory.”

Silver moonlight painted his hair, his nose, the lines of his brow, and when Rory glanced down, I saw a misery in his eyes. I’m sorry , he mouthed.

And just like that, another crack fissured in my heart.

“We should go back,” he said after a drawn silence. “You need your rest for tomorrow.”

“Not yet. Can you—” I didn’t want it to end like that, him riddled with guilt, me thinking of drowning. “My right shoulder,” I managed. “It’s a little sore.”

His focus drifted down my neck. Slowly, he reached for my shoulder.

I relaxed into his touch and let my head fall back. I looked up at the sky, the thousands of stars stitched upon a vast purple tapestry, reveling in the sensation of being held up in water and not pressed down.

“Your hair is pretty,” Rory murmured. “Like moonlight. And your skin is so soft. But beneath…” He kneaded my muscle. “If I were to bite down, I’d break my teeth on you.”

“If you were to bite down,” I said to the sky, “your bottom teeth would leave a crooked mark, unique as your fingerprint.”

Rory’s hand stilled. A flush rolled onto my face. “That’s what I thought when we first spoke at Aisling,” I muttered. “Outside the Diviners’ cottage. You smiled.”

He looked half amused, half something else. “And you were imagining what pattern my teeth might leave on your skin?”

“I was in the throes of the idleweed. Out of my senses.”

“Mm-hmm.” He resumed his ministrations. “Shall we see, then?”

I wondered if he could feel my pulse, drumming through the water. “Where would you bite me, knight?”

“Wherever you told me to, Diviner.”

My arms. My neck. My mouth, stomach, breasts. And maybe he knew, because his breath quickened, like he, too, was thinking of all the parts of me he might sink his teeth into.

I lifted my palm to his lips, just as thousands of palms had been lifted to mine during Divinations. Only now there was no viscous blood to swallow, just moonlight over a sheen of water. Rory held my gaze and slipped his teeth over the flesh below my thumb. Pressed down.

My lips parted. His bite was the same as his touch, exacting but gentle—a low, determined pressure. Then his teeth were gone. Rory shut his eyes. Sighed into my palm.

Replaced his teeth with his lips.

Rory kissed the place he’d bitten with arduous slowness. “I’d rather this left a mark instead,” he murmured into my skin.

He was a thief, stealing my breath, my reason. “May I ask something of you?”

He looked up.

“If tomorrow does not go well… will you find a home for the gargoyle? Will you keep looking for the Diviners?”

His grip on my hand tightened. “If you have imagined portents, let me dispel them. The only thing that matters in this world is the effort you exact, Diviner. And you have been working harder than anyone I’ve known. So, please—don’t look to dreams, and don’t look for signs. Just look forward. Tomorrow will go well.”

“Two things can be true at once, Myndacious. I can look forward. Work hard.” I labored over the word. “And still die. So I’m asking you. Will you find a home for the gargoyle? Will you keep looking for the Diviners?”

“Yes.” He drew closer, water sloshing around us, and I was aware of his body, mine—and the bareness of them beneath the spring’s surface. “The thing is—I think I’d do anything you asked of me.”

And then he was pulling away, moving farther into the pool, leaving me tangled in the beat of my own heart. “Try to get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

I remained unmoving ten seconds. Twenty. When Rory turned to give me privacy, I lifted myself out of the pool. Found my nightshirt. Threw it haphazardly over myself and glanced back at him. “Aren’t you coming?”

“I need a minute.”

I wandered back to the village. The mountainous earth was chill beneath my feet, and the Tenor sang its distant watery song. I stopped to listen. Noted how the moon had journeyed in the sky. How the wind through brome and heather was a delicate whisper.

And it startled me, that the loneliness I’d felt earlier was no longer so oppressive, as if put to sleep. The night was half-gone, and though I needed rest, I could not bring myself to mind that I was awake and out of bed. Everything was just so…

Beautiful.

I looked down at my hand. The marks from Rory’s teeth were still there. I’d been right—the bottom row looked like a crooked, crowded line of soldiers, unique as a fingerprint, as a line of stars.

I lifted my palm. Put it to my mouth. Ran my lips over the indents.

Maude and the gargoyle were still snoring when I returned to the inn. When I slept, I didn’t dream of Aisling Cathedral’s looming edifice or Diviners swathed in gossamer. I didn’t even dream of the Ardent Oarsman.

I dreamed of a knight with gold in his ears and charcoal around his eyes, who did all the ignoble things I asked of him.

Maude was up with the dawn, abrupt as the thundering sky. “It’s time.”

The gargoyle waltzed around our small chamber, humming a tune. I sat up in bed. Rubbed my shrouded eyes. “What has you so pleased?”

“Bartholomew suggested I act as your squire, since you have none.”

“My—”

Maude stepped back, revealing a pile of armor at the foot of my bed. Her armor. “It won’t be an exact fit,” she said. “Not as effective as the one being made. But more protective than your leathers or chainmail alone. You’re strong enough to bear it.”

Maude’s armor was intricate—swirls that resembled billowing boughs engraved in the breastplate. “It was my mother’s,” she said. “And hers before.”

A lump formed in my throat. “You realize if I die you’ll likely lose it.”

“Thought about that. Figured out a solution.” Maude hauled me off the bed. Surprised me with a fearsome hug. “Live.”

The gargoyle’s stone fingers were blunt and clumsy, mostly because he was trilling with excitement. “Me, a squire.” He held up chainmail, fastened armor to my legs, my arms, snapped Maude’s breastplate over my chest. “Would you wear the helmet, Bartholomew?”

“Yes,” Maude answered for me.

The gargoyle handed it over, like he’d once handed me my Divining robe, and I tucked it under my arm. “I’m ready.”

The inn was dark. None of the other knights had risen, oblivious of their king’s absence. But there were fishermen, nets on their backs—moving in droves down the mountain to cast in lower parts of the Tenor. I spotted Hamelin’s mother and a few of the other nobles among them. They watched us as we passed, nodded, their gazes keen and curious and reverent as we disappeared into the mountains.

Rory and Benji were waiting on the other side of the plateau, armor clad. When they saw me, fitted in the same attire as them, they both went still.

Benji whistled. “You’re a proper knight, Six.”

Rory’s eyes were fast, measuring the scope of me. When he saw Maude’s helmet tucked under my arm, he gave me a pointed look.

“I’ll wear it,” I muttered.

He approached. “And this?” He tucked an errant strand of hair behind my ear, brushing my shroud.

“I’ll wear it, too.”

He gave me his fist—unfurled his fingers. Handed me the Artful Brigand’s coin. “Let’s go kill an Omen.”

We made it up the mountain the same way we had before—carried up and over the waterfall in turns by the gargoyle. He did not complain this time. He was still too heartened to be considered my squire, which, I was beginning to suspect, he considered a more essential role than knight. First with Rory and me, then with Maude and Benji, he spread his stone wings and flew us skyward into a gale.

We landed at the Ardent Oarsman’s castle. The shale sprites were not on the stairs this time, but we tiptoed up the steps just the same. Knocked upon the ancient door. Waited.

There was no answer.

Rory slammed his open palm against groaning wood, but no matter his hails, the Ardent Oarsman did not come.

“Perhaps he went on a sabbatical,” the gargoyle offered. He peered up at the tempestuous sky. “And not a moment too soon.”

“Well then.” Benji stepped back. “Let’s invite ourselves in.” He rolled his shoulders and sprang forward, crashing full force into the castle door.

It burst open in a cloud of dust.

“That’s the spirit, Your Majesty.” Rory hauled Benji to his feet, and Maude led us, axe in hand, into the castle just as the sky opened up.

The clatter of rain upon the roof was like a thousand tapping fingers, muffling the sound of our footsteps. Still, I felt obtrusive in armor, too loud—an unwelcome guest. But the dark corners of the Oarsman’s castle, full of hungry shadows, held no one who might admonish me. Not in corridors, not in the great spartan chambers. Not even sprites stirred to see us.

There was simply no one there.

“What the hell?” We stood in the great hall, near the Ardent Oarsman’s pool and great pile of coins. Benji stared at the money, then rubbed his hands over his eyes and blinked repeatedly, as if willing the Omen to appear. “What sort of game is this?”

Wind and rain flew through the open east wall, spraying us.

“I don’t understand.” Stone crunched beneath my boot. “It’s been three days. Where is he?”

“There.”

Rory stood near one of the columns, wind in his face, looking out. We crowded around him, and I was afforded a view of the silver-blue basin behind the castle—the crystalline water that fed the Tenor River.

Fixed in the center of the basin was a platform. A broad wooden square. And upon it, hood back, jagged hands rested upon his oar—

The Ardent Oarsman. Looking out at us with unblinking stone eyes.

Waiting.

“There?” Benji said, incredulous. “He wants to fight her there ?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Maude face was drawn. “He’s got his oar. He can drop it in the water at any moment—spin circles around her. He’ll shake the platform, break her aim. One misstep, and the Artful Brigand’s coin is going in the drink—and Six along with it.” She turned to me. “I hope you’re a damn strong swimmer.”

Rory went white, last night—the hot spring and me, slipping beneath its water—unveiling over his face.

“It is not like me to be the bearer of bad tidings,” the gargoyle said. “Bartholomew does not know how to swim. But worry not—” He looked up at me. Smiled proudly. “She has always excelled at drowning.”