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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

THE HEARTSORE WEAVER

T he air was close, smelling sharp like salt water and overripe like decay. I fell, heart in my throat, and then Rory was there, his strong arms folding around me. “I’ve got you.”

The gargoyle came next, though it took him a moment to squeeze his wings through the narrow hole. When he fell into the cavern, splashing Rory and me with water, he let out a raucous squeal. “And I thought flying was unsavory. But crawling in the earth like an insect— ugh , Bartholomew, look! A worm !”

Rory put his hand over the gargoyle’s mouth. “The point of a hunt,” he said, “is to catch your prey unsuspectingly. Be quiet or send yourself back up that hole.”

“And abandon Bartholomew to the Omen who tried to smite her last night?” The gargoyle batted Rory away. “What kind of squire would that make me?”

“A good squire is a silent squire.”

“Says the knight without one.”

“Both of you, shut it.” I squinted against darkness. The gargoyle had been right. There were worms in the cavern. Luminous green and blue and purple worms that lit the darkness, clinging to dripping mossy walls, climbing over lichen, over rocks. And while the dissonance of lapping water blighted most of the sound around us, I heard a small hum. The barest hint of a noise, coming from the worms.

“They’re sprites,” I whispered. “Tiny silkworm sprites.”

Rory and the gargoyle raised their eyes to the looming walls of the cavern. Pitch-black, it stretched on and on, and would have been impossible to navigate at night without a lantern. But the sprites, their small glowing bodies, cast an ethereal glow, like stars punctuating a moonless sky, affording us a view of a wide, vast space.

“Look out below!”

Benji didn’t jump. He traveled on the magical tide of the inkwell, appearing before us. Maude came after him, and Rory caught her, and she winced in pain. “It’s massive.” She peered at the walls around us. “It must have taken centuries for the sea to wear down all this rock.”

“How could someone live like this?” Benji asked, the cave throwing his echo back at him. “Ever in the dark?”

“You’d be surprised,” Rory murmured.

We struck out. Rory led, coin in hand, and I followed closely, gripping my hammer and chisel. Behind me was Maude, then the king, then the gargoyle at the rear.

“So you’re really not going to tell us how you knew this was here?” Maude asked him.

“I should think it rather obvious.”

“I promise,” Benji said, “it isn’t—”

“Quiet.” I perked my ear. “Listen.”

There. A harsh sound, and its echoes. Clack, clack. “Do you hear that?”

Rory’s gaze narrowed. “Yes.”

The cavern was widening. Diverting. We passed pools of dank, stagnant water. Ahead, the sprites glowed fewer, scattered. Everything was colder. Darker.

Rory stopped. Ahead, three separate tunnels loomed like valves into a black heart.

“Which way now, all-knowing gargoyle?” Maude said.

He made a contemplative hmm . “Perhaps those weavings will instruct us.”

I hadn’t seen them at first. They were worn and wet and growing velvety moss, just like the walls of the cavern. But the closer I got—yes. There were weavings on the wall. Three of them, each the size of a child’s blanket.

Worn down by time and the salt in the air, the colored dye had all but faded, the thread long frayed. Still, I noted how fine the stitches were—how intricate the braided patterns.

“They’re pictures,” Rory said.

So they were.

The first was of worms. Hundreds of them, crawling over walls.

The second picture was of small pale clusters, hanging from thread over a fire.

The third—

I felt my pulse kick.

The third was of moths, fluttering over a stone slab.

“She’s a silk weaver.” Benji pointed at the weavings. “The worm grows. The cocoon is boiled. Those that remain become moths.”

“Grotesque, educational, yet uninstructive,” Rory said. “We still don’t know which path to take.”

“There are five of us.” Maude’s knuckles were white as she leaned on the stone oar. She nodded at the first tunnel. “Benji and I will take this one. You and Sybil take the second, the gargoyle—”

“No one travels alone,” I said. “The gargoyle comes with me.”

“The moth,” the gargoyle whispered, turning to the third tunnel. “We’ll follow the moth.”

It was the darkest of the three paths. The tightest. When I stepped toward it—breathed its damp air—it was as if someone had put wet cloth over my mouth and nostrils.

“Meet back here in twenty minutes, and we’ll explore the final tunnel together,” Rory said, taking my hand. “If one group is not back, the other comes after them.”

Benji’s eyes lowered to our hands together. “Twenty minutes.”

Maude gave us one of her reassuring grins, and then she and the king were disappearing down the first tunnel, and Rory, the gargoyle, and I into the third.

Darkness closed its fist around us. The path sloped downward, deeper into the earth. I could touch both sides of the tunnel with my arms spread, and Rory had to slouch so as not to strike his head. “Can’t see an inch in front of my nose.” His breaths were fast. Labored.

“You all right?”

He didn’t answer. Then—“Just stay close to me.”

The gargoyle, undisturbed by the gloom, hummed to himself. “She did her best to spruce the place up, didn’t she? The old Heartsore Weaver?”

I peered over my shoulder. He was running his claws over both sides of the tunnel—snagging over a long, thick thread I had not noticed. “And look. She made a happy little rope to guide herself on dark nights like this.” He gave the thread on the left a tug, ripping it entirely from the cave wall. “Hmmm. Not very sturdy—”

A deep groan sounded from above. Rory and the gargoyle and I went rigid. I heard, then smelled, water rushing, far away at first, then closer, closer, until it was right behind us. We turned.

A wall of water came careening toward us.

Rory was shouting and I was ushering the gargoyle forward, and then all three of us were sprinting into darkness. But whatever pool had been emptied into our tunnel came on a monstrous current. The water caught us—threw our feet out from under us. We were swept into blackness, faster, faster.

And then we were falling.

We hit something hard, a loud ting sounding. Gold, I realized. We’d fallen onto a vast bed of gold at the bottom of a pit—a hole in the tunnel—water pouring over us in a torrid rush. I lost Rory, lost the gargoyle, coughed and spluttered. Salt water shot into my eyes and nose and mouth. I fought against the current, desperate to find my feet.

But the water kept rising.

I choked on Rory’s name. The water held me down, and so did my armor, and I was seized with the vibrant horror that I might easily drown like this. Weighed down without purchase, unable to stand, unable to swim—

A hand found the nape of my neck. Pulled me up.

Rory was coughing, too, struggling like me to keep his feet in the pit of slippery coins with water pressing down on him.

He shouted over the din. “Are you hurt?”

I shook my head. We held on to each other, steadfast as we pulled, each the other’s perfect counterbalance, until we found our feet. When I looked up, I saw that the water was not so torrid as before, running out of furious pressure.

“I say, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle called from the lip of the pit. He hadn’t fallen in. He’d flown to the other edge, the prat—and looked furious to be wet. “Are you quite well?”

“Right as rain,” I snapped. I looked to Rory.

And let out a sharp cry.

I could see it, even in the dim light—even with water in my eyes. A massive dent in Rory’s breastplate.

He gasped for air. “Keep your balance. There are pikes at the bottom of this pit.”

I swore, then shouted once more at the gargoyle. “Throw something down to us.”

“There’s a hefty weave of rope here—oh, but Bartholomew!” He screamed. “There are worms on it.”

“Gargoyle!”

“Must I always save everyone?” He let out a string of language so jumbled not even a scribe of the Seacht could make sense of it, retrieved the rope, and threw it into the pit.

Rory and I hauled ourselves out.

“Well.” Rory lay on his back and wheezed. “At least we know we’re in the right tunnel.”

“That pike might have killed you.” I leaned over him and ran my hand over the angry dent in his breastplate. “Gods, I could kiss your armorer.”

“What about me?” The gargoyle was seething. “Is no one going to kiss me ?”

Rory reached for his face—kissed his stone cheek. “Help me get this off.” He winced. “It’s getting hard to breathe.”

I helped the gargoyle undo the straps and hauled the breastplate off. Rory coughed, then went suddenly pale. “Fuck.”

He looked down at himself. At the tunnel floor. “It’s gone.” Panic touched his voice. “My coin.”

All three of us peered into the pit. The torrential current that had knocked us from our feet was now a steady drip. But the remains of it were still there—a black pool of water deeper than I was tall.

“All the armor comes off, then,” Rory said.

“You can’t jump in there,” I cried. “What about the pikes?”

He stripped his gauntlets. “I’ll avoid them.”

“There must be thousands of coins at the bottom of that pit!”

Off came his vambrace, pauldrons. “Gold ones. Mine’s stone.”

“And that shiny new bruise on your chest—no doubt over your lungs? What about that?”

Next were his cuisses and greaves. “I’m a good swimmer.”

“No, no, Bartholomew, better that I take the risk. I am very good at saving people, after all.” The gargoyle stretched his wings, suddenly heroic after his kiss. “What exactly am I looking for again?”

Rory shot me a heavy-lidded glower.

I bit down. “Do you really need the coin?”

“As much as you need your hammer and chisel.” Off came his chainmail.

I wasn’t going to win this. “Just… be careful.”

Rory stood before me in his under armor. Hooked my chin. “It means something that you care enough to argue.”

Breath fluttered out of me. “Maybe I just like fighting with you.”

“I’m sure that’s the only reason.” He brushed his thumb over my lips. Dropped a kiss onto my mouth, pulled back—then kissed me again, like he couldn’t help himself.

The gargoyle sighed. “Really, Bartholomew, when are you going to put her out of her misery and tell her you love her?”

Rory’s dark eyes roamed my face. He grinned.

Then disappeared down the rope into the pit.

For a time there was nothing, just silence and the occasional sound of Rory in the water. The air in the tunnel was tepid, oppressive, and it was dark. So very dark.

Still, I saw it.

A shadow, darting past my periphery.

“Gargoyle?”

He was next to me, eerily still as he looked down the tunnel. “I saw it, too,” he whispered.

“Is someone there?” I called out.

Is someone there? my echo answered.

I rubbed my eyes and tried to see into the impenetrable darkness.

There was a clacking—so near I felt it in my chest. Clack, clack.

Clack, clack , the echoes sounded. Clack, clack.

Prickles rose on the back of my neck. “Rory.” I leaned over the pit and tugged the rope. “The Heartsore Weaver, Rory.”

But my voice never found him under the water.

The gargoyle gasped. “Look, Bartholomew.”

Out of the darkness, a shadow shifted. It came toward me, and I saw that it was small and on wings. Pale and delicate as gossamer.

A moth.

It fluttered to my face, so close its wings stirred my lashes, then withdrew, fluttering back down the tunnel from whence it had come.

“Wait for Rory,” I told the gargoyle, and stole after it.

The tunnel drew close around me, swallowing me down its throat, and I made myself small to fit, keeping my gaze ever on the moth.

There were more, I realized. Dozens of moths on the walls of the tunnel, their pale, fluttering wings beckoning me. I was on my hands and knees now, the tunnel so constrictive I thought it might strangle me. But the moths kept fluttering, and I kept following, and suddenly I was spat out into a new cavern.

I expected more darkness. And there was. But there was also the night sky. An opening in the cliff, roots and moonlight pouring in. I was in an oblong chamber, with walls of crude rock. Hundreds of weavings hung like tapestries around me. And from the weavings—

Little white sacks hung. Cocoons. Beneath them was a stone bench, stationed against the wall, and upon it—

A woman.

A naked woman, who lay supine and still, a shroud over her eyes.

The world went still. “One?”

I stumbled forward. Banged my knees upon the stone bench. “One.”

Mottled skin. Gray lips. Hands folded over her breasts, One lay upon the bench, her short brown hair fanning around her like a burned-out halo. When I touched her neck, searching for a pulse that was not there, her skin was as cold as stone.

She looked like she was resting, but it wasn’t rest. Whatever dream One walked in now brooked no awakening. She was lost, adrift, gone. No, it wasn’t rest.

It was sleep, eternal.

A cry ripped up my throat.

“Shhh,” came a woman’s low, craggy voice. “Not all have woken.”

I reeled.

Out of shadow, slow and rigid, a figure came, her steps an ominous clack , clack against the cave floor. “It’s been a long time since anyone’s tripped my little snare,” she said. “Or made it out of my pit.”

She didn’t wear a cloak like she had when she’d come to my room last night. It was the same face I’d seen.

But it wasn’t a woman.

She looked like one of Aisling Cathedral’s gargoyles—hewn entirely of limestone. She had wings, tucked against jagged shoulder blades. A head like a goat, with gnarled four-digit paws for hands and hooves for feet. And her eyes, wide and pallid…

Were just like the other Omens’. Just like my batlike gargoyle’s.

Just like mine.

“You—” My armor clattered as I rose to my feet, standing in front of One. “You’re the Heartsore Weaver?”

“Weaver, I was. Heartsore, I am eternally.” The Omen came forward, looking at neither me nor One. She was peering upon her wall. Staring through stone eyes at the white silken cocoons attached to the thread. “You must be quiet. My moths are still sleeping,” she rasped. “Frail little things, they are.”

She began to hum. Tuneless, cacophonous.

I watched her, skin crawling. I did not want her to know how well she terrified me. “Where is your loom stone, Omen?”

“No loom. No loom stone.” She nodded at the tapestry upon the wall. “Once, I wove the finest garments in Traum. Silk robes, I made. But that was a long time ago.”

She kept staring at her tapestry, and I followed her eyes. The cocoons had attached themselves to one particular weaving, as if the sprites favored it. It was fashioned in a beautiful braid that ran along the wall. Not woolen, but fine. Thin, sheer, and pale.

Gossamer.

Diviner shrouds.

I let out a wretched sound.

“Hush,” the Heartsore Weaver rasped, looking down at One. “They come to me every ten years, Aisling’s Diviners, brought by gargoyles. Naked but for their shrouds, and always, always , dead. Still, they smell of spring water.” Her throat hitched. “Taste of it, too, I imagine.”

I drew my hammer and chisel, blocking One with my body. “If you touch her, I’ll—”

“I said be quiet .” The Omen showed her teeth, rows of cracked limestone. “I do not touch the Diviners. I lay them down here in my caves, my own little underworld, where the sea air has its way with them. It is the best burial I can offer.”

She looked over my shoulder at One’s lifeless body. “She was your friend?”

Tears burned my eyes, the cracks in my heart growing irreparably deeper. “Yes.”

“Is that why you have come? To see with your own eyes the fate of Diviners like yourself?” The Weaver’s eyes fell to my hammer and chisel. “Or have you been sent from your master upon the tor?”

I sprang forward, leveling the tip of my chisel against her stone throat. “I have no master, Omen. I come on my own volition to challenge you at your craft and claim your magic loom stone.” A single strike, and I could split her like I had a thousand stones before. “To take magic, power, myself , back from false gods like you.”

The Heartsore Weaver did not withdraw her throat from my chisel’s tip. “But I’m not a god,” she whispered. “Once, I was not so different from you.”

She blinked up at me with wide stone eyes. “Strange, that you have no memory before Aisling, yet you still knew to claw yourself free from that horrible tor. How wonderful, how wretched, it must have been, stepping out into the world. Learning the story you’d been told was a lie.”

“Do not pretend you did not benefit from that lie, Weaver. Is not the gold wasting in your pit from Aisling’s coffers? Did Diviners not drown, that you might earn it? Do folk not look for your signs in every bit of thread?” I was a rabid dog, my words snapping barks. “If I am wonderful and wretched for learning the truth of the Omens, your hands are marked by the blood of my metamorphosis.”

The Heartsore Weaver pressed her neck against my chisel, iron scraping against limestone. “Then you need not challenge me to my craft, daughter of Aisling. You have already beaten me by it.” She held out an empty stone paw, as if to show me she had nothing to lose—or give. “Who better than a lost Diviner to learn, then conquer, love and heartbreak?”

Moonlight crept through the fissure in the ceiling, casting the Omen and me in an eerie silver glow. “Where is your loom stone?” I asked again, my voice dangerously soft.

“That, I fear, is a long story.”

“I have time.”

She grinned then, shadows cutting across her inhuman face. “More than you realize.”

The Heartsore Weaver took a step back from my chisel’s tip. “You know by now there is magic in the world. The stone upon the tor, its water—the spring you drank from, drowned in—is the mother of that magic. From it, five objects were hewn. A coin, an inkwell, an oar, a chime.” She sighed. “And a loom stone.”

I waited.

“What you do not know, perhaps, is we whom you call Omens had no sway over that magic when the objects were made. I did not chose my loom stone’s power, and neither did she who carved it for me, yet, strangely, it suited me. Magic is like a god in that way. All-knowing, and most effective when not fully understood.”

I hated talk of gods. “What does your loom stone do?” I said, clipped.

“I could slip my finger into the hole in the center of it. If the stone’s face was pointed outward, I would be transported—made invisible. I could jump through the walls of this cave. Travel twenty feet in the air. All I had to do was know in my mind where I wanted to go. So long as the distance was not more than my line of sight, I could get there. Brilliant magic it was. But when I turned the loom stone over, its face pointed inward—”

How burdened she suddenly looked. Her head lowered, as if weighed down. Even her eyes seemed too heavy to lift. “I was transported not in body, but in mind. Perhaps it’s because I’m a weaver, and a tapestry is like a memory brought to life. I always know what I was feeling in that moment, what I was thinking, when I look back on something I’ve woven. The loom stone was no different. I’d slip it on my finger, and it gave me back the most important thing I’d lost.”

Her eyes lifted. Found my face. “My memory. If I wished to, I could recall who I was before I was the Heartsore Weaver.” Her head turned as she surveyed me. “Tell me, Diviner. Do you recall anything before you tasted Aisling’s waters?”

I could tell she already knew the answer. “No.”

She nodded. “Losing something is painful. Sometimes, finding what we’ve lost is just as agonizing.”

I looked down at One, lifeless beneath the tapestry. Whispered, like I was telling her a story before bed, “You can never really go home.”

“No. You cannot.”

The Heartsore Weaver looked out into the darkness of her cavern. “But I did not want to look back at who I was. I was too enthralled with being an Omen. For many years, I did not use the loom stone in that way. I kept to my hamlet, as we Omens said we would. For decades I sowed the seeds of gods and signs within the Cliffs of Bellidine. Used my loom stone to appear and vanish. To kill sprites. I gave Traum something to rally behind. To believe in.”

She began to pace. “Then, on a year without mark, she came. The Omens and I—we all needed the tor’s spring water to live. Not much, and not often, but we needed it. Sometimes the water came in a flask at the hands of her little foundling, but this time she brought it herself. We drank it together, like old friends. Then she asked me to make her a silk robe.”

The Heartsore Weaver reached out. Pet the gossamer weaving upon the wall, its delicate fabric snagging against one of her stone claws. “‘A Diviner is not so different from a silkworm,’ she said. ‘That is what I will call my foundling—a Diviner . He came into the world vulnerable. Fell into dreamless sleep. I wrapped him in my arms, put water to his lips, and he awoke a moth.’” Her stone eyes flashed. “‘Strange. Special. New. I want him to look the part.’”

My throat tightened. “You’re talking about the abbess. The abbess, and the foundling child from her story.”

“I knew her before she was abbess of anything.” The Heartsore Weaver’s gaze dropped to my hammer and chisel. “When she was but a stonemason who wore a shroud over her face. A craftsman, like me. I made her the robe. When I traveled to the tor to deliver it, the first stones of a cathedral had been laid. Many years later, she came to see me again, asking for five more robes. This time, there was no foundling child at her heels, but a stone gargoyle.”

The Heartsore Weaver rolled her shoulders, the sound inhuman—like rocks, scraping together. “More time passed. One by one, I made her the robes she’d asked for. But by the time I was on the sixth and final robe, I’d grown weary. Lonely. So I slipped the loom stone back on my finger, facing inward, hoping to be comforted by memories of my past.”

She stopped pacing. Shut her eyes. “Only they were a torment. I remembered my real name. My mother and brother. My wife and her parents. My naughty yellow cat. I remembered what it was like to love and be loved, to be careful and also carefree, to be good and bad—to be human. But I’d spent too much time sustaining the charade of the Omens. When I finally went home to see my loved ones, most had died of old age. Those who remained looked upon my stone eyes in terror. They’d thought me missing. Mourned me—let go of me. Soon they, too, died and I was alone with naught but my memories.”

The Weaver seemed lost in her story, her digits moving in strange patterns. Had she fingers and not claws, I might have thought her plaiting an invisible tapestry. “I withheld the final robe. When she came for it, I told her I no longer wished to be an Omen. That I didn’t have it in me to live forever, playacting as a god. I thought she would pity me. She didn’t. She called me disloyal. Took the robe I’d made and left me alone with my caverns, my silkworm sprites, and my steadfast foe—time.”

Her stone eyes snapped open, and the Heartsore Weaver took a step toward me.

“The spring water stopped coming, as I expected it would. I did not seek it. I hoped without it I would die. For nine years, I starved. On the tenth year, the limestone from my eyes began to spread, twisting and distorting my face. It traveled to my arms. Then my legs and torso. I fractured, my body changing until I was neither human nor animal nor sprite, but a weaving of all three.” She gestured at her goat-like body. “I became this. Hewn of stone. It was… excruciating.”

The Heartsore Weaver kept coming, her hooves tapping against rocks, her stone wings quivering. “She sent me coins from Aisling’s coffers to remind me that I was still holy in the eyes of the kingdom. I threw them in the pits of my cave, but ever, they mock me. Make a false god of me.”

Nearer and nearer she drew, her steps an ominous clack , clack —like nails in a coffin. “I don’t know when she decided starvation was a better tool than her hammer and chisel, or when her craft became cruelty. I wonder if the other Omens even questioned it. They don’t carry the horrible, beautiful burden of memory, of humanness, the way I must. When the first dead Diviner was brought to them, did they even pause before drinking her blood, hungry for spring water—or did they think only of their holiness? That, as gods, a Diviner’s body, her sacrifice, her tragedy , was owed to them?”

My heart beat against my breastplate, and the Omen came closer. Closer. “ She certainly thinks that way,” the Heartsore Weaver rasped. “She believes herself a mother and a god, nurturing Traum with stories of the Omens and faith. But is it godly to punish your subjects for questioning you? Is it motherly to demand resolute devotion?”

She was almost upon me, so near I could see the cracks in her teeth.

“ Moth , she calls herself. An insect made holy for mastering death—but she is not holy. She’s the sixth Omen. Abbess of the tor. But you know her true name. There is not a man, woman, child, or sprite who does not. It wails on the wind. Looms, like her eponym cathedral, casting shadows, darkening this land.”

And then she was right in front of me, her stone eyes locking onto mine. “Aisling.”

I was firm upon my feet, but it felt like a dream. Like falling. “The end of her lies, her sanctified story, draws nigh, Omen. Answer me—where is your loom stone?”

“I will tell you. But first, you must begin what you came here to do. Gift me what Aisling never did.” She reached for my hand. Lifted my chisel. “End my battle with time. I have never been able to do it myself.”

I stared into her stone eyes and waited for a snare. An attack of duplicity or force, like the other Omens had tended. None came. The Heartsore Weaver bore no weapon but her unrelenting silence as she waited upon my chisel—and my answer.

I’d lost my voice. All I could manage was a whisper. “You want me to kill you?”

“Yes.”

She let out a long breath, stepped over rocks, and came once more to the wall of weavings. Upon a stone table, next to One, beneath the pale cocoons, she laid her body down.

I stood over her. “Where would you have it?” My chisel brushed over her wrists, her throat, then settled over her heart.

“There is fine,” she said.

I fixed my chisel in my fist. Lifted my hammer. “Your loom stone, Weaver. Tell me where it is.”

“Strike me first.” She shut her eyes and let out a choked laugh. “I am ashamed, after all these years spent dreaming of death, that I still fear it.”

My throat tightened. “Be still.”

I struck.

The sound bellowed like thunder through the cavern.

“Again,” the Heartsore Weaver said, fissures coursing down her chest.

Again, I struck her.

The cocoons along the wall trembled.

If she felt pain, she bore it. I struck the Omen once, twice more, dust filling the air, her goat-like body breaking apart beneath my unrelenting hand. She had no blood within her, composed entirely of limestone, like my wall upon the tor—like Aisling Cathedral itself. When her limbs were at my feet and her chest fissured beyond saving, the Heartsore Weaver let out a gasping moan. “That is all. Let me speak.”

I stayed my hammer. Sweat dripped down the back of my neck into my armor, the joints in my shoulder, my arm, aching. The pale cocoons kept trembling. They jerked and swayed, until one let out a little white moth.

The rest came after. Dozens of moths, struggling within, then breaching their cloistered cocoons and crawling over gossamer, over One and what remained of the Heartsore Weaver. Out and into the world.

The Heartsore Weaver watched them through cracked stone eyes, and smiled. “Thank you.” Her voice was quiet. “My loom stone rests where it was made. Upon the tor. I returned it to Aisling when my body twisted beyond all recognition. When I became but one of her many stone creatures. An inhuman gargoyle.” She coughed, and dust flew. “Just like that first Diviner I’d made a robe for.”

Footsteps echoed behind me. “Sybil?” It was Rory’s voice, calling me. “Sybil!”

But I was frozen, staring down at the Heartsore Weaver, my voice a wretched scrape. “But the gargoyles on the tor… they’re sprites…”

“No. They are not.”

Again the Weaver coughed, more injurious this time. Her body was falling apart. “To be a gargoyle…” she rasped, “is a very strange thing. The ones upon the tor do not tell the stories of who they are—indeed they hardly speak—I think, because they do not remember what it is to be human. Or maybe they are too afraid to disobey their master. But not that first one. He was a most peculiar boy. What was his name? The first gargoyle she made?” Her breaths were labored. “I saw him not two days ago upon my cliff… came to see him last night, but you frightened me away. What was his name…”

Rory kept shouting, his voice desperate. “Sybil!”

“Bartholomew!” came the gargoyle’s echoing cry.

The Heartsore Weaver’s breath went out. “That’s it. The foundling upon the tor. The first Diviner.” The newborn moths fluttered, their pale wings beating over stone. The Heartsore Weaver watched them with unseeing eyes, her last words quiet as a prayer. “Little Bartholomew.”