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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE CHIME

T he ring of the chime was beautiful. Steady, melodic.

But it split into me like a chisel. Suddenly I was fissuring, my mind cracking open. The glen of tightly woven birch trees became a blurred visage, and my thoughts became unmoored. I was everywhere and everything at once. Foundling, Diviner. Sybil, Six. I danced around a pyre in Coulson Faire, climbed a mountainous path in Fervent Peaks, rushed through bustling streets of the Seacht.

Then—familiar noises, echoing in the walls of my mind. Footsteps on the stairs in the Diviner’s cottage. A young Three and Five, laughing. A comb, tugging through Four’s dark hair. One, breathing long and low in her sleep. The batlike gargoyle, humming to me as I worked the wall.

The chime stopped ringing, and I was jolted back to the sacred glen, my mind righting. But then—gods, it rang again. Only this time the notes were not melodic. They were ugly, discordant—a horrible knell. Once again, my mind felt struck open, only now it hurt, disorienting agony radiating from my temples.

I heard the slosh of spring water. The abbess’s voice. “Strange, special… and new.”

When I looked down at my body, my shiny new armor was covered in pale, fluttering moths.

The chime stopped, and everything went quiet. My armor held no moths, just the reflection of licking flames. When I looked around for the gargoyle or Rory or Maude, the knighthood was not standing in a line as they had been. They were scattered among the trees, swaying on their feet. Some had their hands to their ears, others had their eyes shut—but all looked to be in a stupor.

It was the chime. The Faithful Forester’s chime.

The magical stone objects. Their abilities. Transportive, and destructive. The coin, the inkwell, the oar—those were all physical. But this, the chime, the sound of it, wasn’t a flickering of my corporeal self. It was as if my thoughts had been transported. When the chime had rung harmoniously, my thoughts had gone with it, taking me to the joyous corners of my mind. But when it had rung discordantly—

There was pain. Fear.

Strange, special… and new.

I coughed, smoke stinging my eyes.

Meanwhile, upon the dais, the ceremony continued. Helena Eichel, bleary-eyed, had set down the stone chime, and was holding a smoldering branch of idleweed out like a torch. All the nobles were. They turned in predatory circles around Benji, wielding the branches, stirring the air, smoke ghosting behind them.

The glen became blanketed by smoke. It put a lid over me, sedating my senses, burned my eyes. I faltered back a step.

My spine collided with armor.

“Have you smoked yellow idleweed before?” a voice said in my ear.

It took me a moment to recognize Hamelin with his face painted. “No.”

A noble with thin lips and gnarled knuckles bent low over Benji. His spine went rigid, but he did not resist. The noble inhaled idleweed smoke into her nose from her burning branch, seized Benji’s face—

And clamped her mouth over his.

I let out a curt breath. When the noble let Benji go, imbuing him with smoke, the clarity in the king’s blue eyes was already fading.

“They only ever burn it like this when a new king comes for a ceremony,” Hamelin murmured. “I’ve heard breathing it is like a fever dream. Your mind is thrown asunder. Prepare yourself for a treat.”

It’s not just the idleweed , I thought. It’s the chime.

All five nobles bent over Benji, filling him with smoke from their mouths. When they’d finished, the king was still on his knees, but he seemed unaware of it. He was swaying, as if he weighed too little—yet far too much. His eyes rolled back, and he began to hum in wretched harmony with the chimes.

The nobles watched him, satisfaction stealing over their painted mouths. They turned.

And set their smoldering branches loose on the knighthood.

The idleweed was passed from knight to knight, the process repeated. Not all partook. Those who did breathed in the smoke. Pulled in a second breath, then pressed his or her mouth over another’s—filling them with smoke like a tongue fills a mouth in an impassioned kiss.

I thought of Four, blowing idleweed into our mouths the night we visited Coulson Faire. How she’d told us of what life would be like away from the tor, transporting us into the future. How, in a soft cloud of smoke, I’d promised her a world where we would always be together.

How, without meaning to, I’d lied.

Next to me, Hamelin held a branch of idleweed. Breathed it into his nostrils, then turned to me. “Take a deep breath. You’ll like it.”

I shook my head.

Hamelin’s hand fell upon my shoulder. “Come, Diviner. Be mythical, be fearsome,” he said, echoing the words he’d said to me weeks ago, between kisses. He sucked more smoke into his nostrils, leaned his face toward mine. Whispered, “He’s a dark horse, keeping you close.”

He tried to blow the smoke into my mouth, his lips practically on mine.

I shoved him back. Hard.

He stumbled, as if the idleweed—and being twice denied by a Diviner—had made him unsteady. Hamelin looked up with lifeless eyes. Took a step toward me again.

And was brought to a wrenching halt.

Rory had his fellow knight by the face. He gripped Hamelin’s cheeks—pressed brutally. Hamelin coughed out smoke—and Rory sneered at him, slapping the idleweed branch from his hand. “Don’t fucking touch her again.”

Hamelin’s gaze darted from Rory to me, then to Benji in the distance, as if beseeching the king to put a leash on his knight. But Benji was on his knees upon the dais, swaying with shut eyes, leaving Hamelin no option but to lower his own.

When Rory let go of him, he blurred away, disappearing into the glen—into smoke.

I reached for Rory. “It’s the Faithful Forester’s chime,” I said. “When it rang, did your mind—did you—”

Rory caught my arm and pulled me against him. “Yes.” He winced against the smoke. “The idleweed isn’t helping. Or maybe it is. No one suspects a magic chime is twisting their thoughts when there’s this much smoke in the air.”

He reached to his belt. Withdrew a small knife, then cut the hem of his tunic into two strips. He held one to his face, covering his nose and mouth, then handed me the other. “This will help with the idleweed. That chime, however—”

Maude was suddenly there, and so was the gargoyle, their voices reverberating around me. She nodded at the dais. “We need to snag that chime from Helena Eichel while the others are too distracted by the smoke to—”

The chime rang again, harmonious.

The world blurred.

My thoughts were as helpless as gowan flower against a gale. I was suddenly a girl, back in Aisling Cathedral, spring water on my lips. The abbess was there, holding me, stroking hair from my eyes and tying a shroud around them. “There, there,” she murmured. “Everything will be better for you now, little foundling. To sleep is to finally awaken. After all—swords and armor are nothing to stone.”

The chime stopped, and my vision righted.

Helena Eichel stood next to Benji upon the dais, running her fingers over the Faithful Forester’s chime, eyes rolling back in her head. “It came from this glen, this chime,” she called into the haze. “A gift from the Omens, just like the gold we’ve found over the years. Yes, yes, a gift from the Forester, for whenever I strike the chime, I feel transported through time and space. I feel bliss and agony, just as the faithful must.”

The other nobles in yellow cloaks stepped off the dais, moving slow and serpentine between birch trees. “Do you feel it?” they called. “Do you feel the divine?”

All around, knights swayed, moving through tightly positioned trees. Whether they believed their thoughts had fallen prey to idleweed or something more sacred, it frightened me to see the kingdom’s most commanding soldiers, like its king, so easily manipulated.

Perhaps it was why the Omens were so sure of their own transcendence. The Faithful Forester’s chime—the stone objects, their magic, their power —was astounding.

Maude shook herself, her eyes red but pointed firmly on the dais. “I’ll distract Helena Eichel.” She caught Rory’s arm. “You, my thief, will snag that chime. Six, you and the gargoyle make sure Benji is all right.”

I lowered my hand, and the gargoyle took it, and we all headed for the dais. But just as we grew close, Helena Eichel lifted the Faithful Forester’s chime once more.

And struck it.

My vision spun. The chimes. The chimes. So dissonant they sounded like the notes within notes, rasping against one another. Against the walls of my head, where, in darkness, the abbess’s voice waited. “All your love and resentment and martyrdom were for nothing.”

I slapped my hands against my ears.

“My mind is playing tricks on me,” said the gargoyle at my side. “What is magic, what is memory, and why are both so haunting?”

“It’s the chime.” My breathing was too fast. I pressed the cloth Rory had given me harder against my mouth. “It’s bringing me back to Aisling.”

“Me as well. I see craftsmen upon the tor, each holding a distinct stone object. Coin. Inkwell. Oar. Chime. Loom stone. I see Aisling, and I see dark, fetid water. I see blood.”

The gargoyle began to tremble. “I see young girls wearing shrouds, and I watch them age. The ones that do not vanish fracture and bend and cry out. But, like mine, their voices catch in the wind, distorting, then disappearing, over the landscape.”

I looked down at him. “That sounds like my dream, gargoyle. The one I had of the moth.”

His stone eyes held me. “I imagine it does.”

A sound perforated the wood. This time, it wasn’t a chime.

It was a scream.

I stumbled. “Did you hear that?”

There. Coming from behind us, somewhere in the dark haze of the glen. More screams—followed by shouts. I put a bracing hand out to the nearest birch tree.

And felt it prickle .

I turned. The tree’s bark was laden with gooseflesh. Only it wasn’t bark. It was skin. And the knots in its trunk—gashes in all that pale, sloughing flesh—

Were eyes.

I dropped the cloth I was holding and jerked back, yanking the gargoyle with me.

“Bartholomew, what are you—”

“Shhh!”

The tree, no—the birke—watched us, horrifying and grotesque and utterly silent. And I thought, maybe, just this once, it was not such a terrible thing to be from Aisling. Because this sprite, this monster , took no interest in the gargoyle’s stone eyes, and no matter how it searched for mine, it could not glimpse them behind my shroud.

I heard the ring of swords, more shouts sounding. “Sprite attack!”

The birke beside me shifted, and I saw how large it was. Behemoth—rivaling the tallest tree in the glen. It lifted its roots from the earth, moving toward the heart of the glen until it was looming over the dais—Benji and Helena Eichel still upon it.

There were more sprites, I realized. The glen was full of birke—every other birch tree seeming to move, the sacred glen morphing into something unholy. An ambush. A hunting ground.

Visors lowered, protecting their eyes against the vicious swipes of the birke’s gnarled branches, the knights struck out against dozens of swiping birke. Maude was at the lead. “Don’t let them see your eyes!” she cried, swinging her axe to the sickening sound of flesh splitting, blood splattering. Then—more screams.

They came from Helena Eichel. She was on the dais, holding tight to the Faithful Forester’s chime and staring up at the behemoth birke. Next to her, Benji, by fear or idleweed, was so incapacitated he couldn’t even raise his head. He trembled, and Helena screamed.

And the great birke drew closer. It blinked its dozens of eyes and reached forward with branch-like limbs. Then, the pale surface of its flesh was opening—a hole peeling wide in the center of the birke. No teeth, not tongue, just a dark, lipless mouth and more eyes within.

The gargoyle and I pushed forward on frantic feet, my hammer and chisel drawn. “Benji!” I shouted. “Benji, move .”

He looked up, right into the birke’s dark mouth, and froze. The birke made a horrible rasping call, and the king shut his eyes, quivered—

And vanished.

The birke’s branch-like fingers curled around Helena Eichel instead, and the Faithful Forester’s chime fell, catching on one of the creature’s branches. The birke raised Helena, screaming, from the dais. Brought her to its wide, gaping mouth.

And ate her whole.

Benji reappeared twenty feet away, clasped tightly in Rory’s arms. Hamelin and Dedrick Lange broke from the knights fighting more birke, and Rory handed them the king. They hurried from the glen, retreating into smoke, and Rory vanished, too, reappearing seconds later back on the dais.

It took a moment for him to spot me in the mayhem, his eyes so dark and desperate my heart stopped.

I ran to him.

Rory caught me around the waist, gripping me so tightly I lost my breath.

I turned to the birke. “We’ve got to get that chime.”

Rory weighed his coin in his palm. “Too high to throw.” He turned it over, rough side up—but he didn’t throw it, saying in a strained voice, “I don’t want to kill it.”

“Why not?”

“They’re starving. All the sprites are. The knighthood makes sure of it. Even Maude.” Turmoil lined his brow. “Hunger is a slow, maddening torture. If the sprites are monsters, it’s because we’ve made them so.”

Behind us, the battle raged on. Birke swung at the knights, opened their mouths and snapped at them, but the knights were far quicker with their blades. They cut the sprites down, and the birke shrieked, a wretched sound that put a thousand prickles on my neck. Several fell—the rest retreated.

The knights kept attacking.

Meanwhile, the Faithful Forester’s chime was still stuck high upon the behemoth birke’s branches. It turned, drawn by the clash of swords, and lumbered toward the knights.

The gargoyle sighed. “Very well. If you find the violence ignoble”—his voice was dry, but his finger trilled excitedly—“go ahead. Ask me to be your pigeon.”

Rory and I turned. “You want to fly?”

“By the seat of my skirts.” He grasped my waist, smiled, then on mighty feet, the gargoyle sprang from the ground. His wings spread, beat the air, stirring smoke. I held to his neck, and he to my waist, and then we were soaring.

“‘Seat of my pants,’” I called over the wind.

He flew us to the top of the birke, where the air was not so smoky. I took in gulping breaths—held my arm out. For each pass around the great beast, I tried to snag the Faithful Forester’s chime off the fleshy branch it was lodged against. The birke aimed a few idle swats at us, but its attention was spent on the knights, leaving the gargoyle and I to keep circling.

But no matter how I reached, I couldn’t grasp the chime.

On the next pass, I let go of the gargoyle’s neck. “Toss me.”

Oh, he was delighted, smiling so wide his fangs peeked over his lips. “Toss you?”

“I can’t reach the chime. You’re going to have to—”

I was already airborne. I collided with the birke a few hands below the chime, grasping the creature’s mottled flesh, the effect so grotesque my stomach rolled.

The gargoyle clapped, and Rory swore from below. When my stomach was not in my throat, I clung tighter to the birke, swung my legs around it, and began to climb.

Flesh and stone were nothing alike. Still I managed, pretending I was back at Aisling, climbing its wall. I could hear the wet sounds of the creature’s many moving eyes. Feel the vile prickle of skin beneath my hands.

Below, the crash of swords and the horrible sounds of sloughing flesh echoed, but I did not look down. All I held in my gaze was stone, the Faithful Forester’s chime closer, closer. But just as my finger closed around it, a low, horrible groan sounded. The birke trembled.

Rory began to shout.

When I looked down, a spring of blood was flowing from the birke. A fatal wound. The knighthood stepped back, but Maude remained, striking again and again with her axe, like she had something to prove, someone to save.

The birke swayed. Rory kept shouting for her to stop. To retreat. “Maude!”

She didn’t heed him. Maude kept on swinging, and the birke kept on taking her blows and I—I lost my grip.

My fingers wrapped around the Faithful Forester’s chime—and I fell, plummeting though air and smoke. Stone arms caught me, the gargoyle chuckling with glee. “All in a squire’s duties.” Then we were soaring, wind scraping against my cheeks as we shot out of the trees and into the night.

When I looked back at the sacred glen, the idleweed was burning low, illuminating the conquered sprites, who lay like fallen timber upon the earth. The last of them, the great behemoth birke, fell—the monster slain. But if the creature was a monster, it was because it was made that way. And maybe the birke knew that. Maybe knights and boy-kings and Diviners weren’t the only creatures in the Traum who wanted to kill their tyrants, because when the great birke succumbed to the axe, dropping like a felled tree in the forest—

It took Maude with it.