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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE FIRST DIVINER

W hen Rory and the gargoyle found me, I was sitting on the stone bench, surrounded by moths, my left hand upon One’s body, my right upon the Heartsore Weaver’s.

“Sybil.” Rory was breathless, his face lined with fear. “What—”

He took in the room. The Omen—and the Diviner—dead within it. “What’s happened?”

I looked past him, directly into the gargoyle’s stone eyes. “The story,” I murmured. “The one you’ve tried to tell me. The one with the tragic beginning, and the desolate, interminable middle.”

He knew. He was the strangest, the wisest creature, in all of Traum. So much like a child.

Because he was.

The gargoyle folded his hands in front of him, watching the moths. “Would you like to hear it?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “I cannot tell it all myself. I do not remember it all. But I will tell you the story the way she told it to me—in her own words.” He steadied himself. Made his voice even, smooth. Like the abbess’s.

It began with a whisper.

“You know this story, Bartholomew, though you do not remember it. I’ll tell it to you as best I can and promise to be honest in my talebearing. If I’m not, that’s hardly my fault. To tell a story is in some part to tell a lie, isn’t it?

“Once, you came upon Traum’s highest tor, where the wind whispered a minor tune. There, the gowan flowers were white and the stones were gray and both stole the warmth from your bare feet.

“You were a foundling boy, wandering and starving and alone. You cried out, but there was no one to save you. You lay yourself down in grass, and white moths came to float over you. You shut your eyes…

“And died, Bartholomew.”

My armor was a ruinous vise. I fought to draw breath.

The gargoyle kept going. “I found you there, and I, a graver—a kind, quiet carver of stone—brought you to the top of the tor where a spring of magic water leached. I put that water upon your lifeless lips. You coughed. Stirred. And awoke strange, special, and new.

“I took care of you, Bartholomew. Loved you, like you were my own child. We lived on the tor, needing nothing but spring water to survive. For many years, we lived that way. Then, one day, five craftsmen came, all different in mind and manner and skill. One believed in coin, another knowledge. One held fast to strength, another to intuition, and the last to love.”

Moths fluttered over my hair, stirring it, but I stayed perfectly still.

“But their finest craft,” the gargoyle continued, “was arrogance. They could not choose a leader, each believing themselves the superior choice. Tools of their crafts became weapons, and when those were not enough, the craftsmen took to one another with arms and fists and teeth until they all lay upon the grass, bloodied and silent and still.”

Rory and I looked at each other, his face the mirror of my own horror.

“They killed one another,” the gargoyle murmured. “All five craftsmen, dead. When their bodies were cold, I made a cup of my palms and brought spring water to their mouths, and though they were dead, the craftsmen took in air like it was their first breaths. When they awoke, their eyes were pallid, like limestone. They had no memory of who they were or how they’d died, and oh—how obedient that made them. It was easy to convince them they were divine. Then, with the tools of my craft, I fashioned them each an object from the tor’s magic stone. A coin for the brigand merchant, whom you called artful, an inkwell for the harried scribe, an oar for the ardent oarsman, a chime for the faithful forester, and a loom stone for the heartsore weaver.

“So you see, Bartholomew. Firstly by happenstance, then with great intent, you and I created gods.”

My hammer and chisel sat in my palms, feeling like a thousand pounds.

The gargoyle went on, his eyes blank as he recited the abbess’s tale. “We became Traum’s architects. For it was the tor that we minded, the spring upon it the strangest, the strongest , magic of all. With it, I could bring dead things back to life, but also, I could wield dreams. Did you know that, Bartholomew? That all the dreams you had were by my own design?

“No. Of course you did not know. You were never that clever. You, my little foundling, my perfect Diviner, would lie in the spring, and I would press down upon you until you lost consciousness. I could make you dream anything I wished. I showed you frightful hamlets, stone objects, signs. Portents were named, and faith was forged, within that spring upon our tor.

“A cathedral was built there, and you tiptoed, small as an insect, through the narthex, into the nave, down the aisle. Blood stained your lips, and you fell into the spring that came from that ancient stone upon the chancel. When you looked up at the rose window, the light kissed stained glass. Your craft was obedience. You said the names of gods and how to read their signs. You learned how to dream—

“And how to drown.”

The gargoyle sighed. “But then—you stopped obeying me, Bartholomew. You stopped being my perfect Diviner. You did not wish to dream or to talk of the Omens any longer, for you had helped make them, and therefore could not fully believe in their divinity. You no longer wished to tell a story that was a lie, even when I assured you it was necessary. That the hamlets of Traum had become the Stonewater Kingdom, and a kingdom always needs something to believe in. Constantly, I had to childmind you. When that ceased to work… I remade you.”

The gargoyle’s voice hardened. He shut his eyes, imitating the abbess. “Lie in the spring, Bartholomew. What signs do you see, Bartholomew? Don’t mix up your words, Bartholomew. Don’t cry or be sick, Bartholomew. Ignore all the pain, Bartholomew. Never complain, Bartholomew. Stop humming, Bartholomew. Swallow the blood, Bartholomew. Would that you were a daughter, Bartholomew. Soon I’ll replace you, Bartholomew. I’ll forget and erase you, Bartholomew. Bartholomew. Bartholomew. Bartholomew—”

His shoulders shook, and he let out a long, mournful sound. When he opened his eyes, looking me in mine, I knew he was speaking in his own voice now and not the abbess’s.

“She kept me locked away in the cottage with no windows. Denied me spring water, thinking I might starve. I do not know how long it took for my body to fracture and change… a long while, I think. I must have gone senseless for the pain. I starved, but I did not die, turning to stone instead. I became a gargoyle. Fearsome—a guardian at Aisling’s gate. Suddenly, she was pleased with me again. Suddenly, I was useful once more. After all… swords and armor are nothing to stone.”

“Oh, gargoyle.” I ran to him, armor rattling, and threw my arms around his body.

He made sad little sounds against my shoulder. “She told me to find her more dead foundlings. Girls, this time, since I had proved such a disappointment. I searched the gutters of the Seacht, Coulson Faire, the Chiming Wood, and brought them to the tor, where she’d fill their mouths with spring water and coax them awake. She tied gossamer over their stone eyes and told them they were strange. Special. New. They dreamed in her cathedral, as if born of its water, and the story of the Omens prevailed. Then, every ten years, the dreamers would vanish, and new foundlings had to be brought. But the ones she liked best, the ones she lent her hammer and chisel to—the most obedient—she always kept locked away to make into gargoyles.”

Rory’s face was wan.

“I suppose I saw it then,” the gargoyle said. “How she guarded the tor like a dragon. How she was made as large as a cathedral herself, commanding the Omens, the spring, and the foundlings she raised to dream within it. How, like a god, she said she loved us but hurt us.”

Tears fell down my cheeks, stirred, then made cold by the fluttering wings of moths.

“My name was wiped from her stories, and so were the names of all the Diviners that came after me. But I tried to hold on. I think I must have spent centuries trying to tell the world who I was in my own peculiar way.”

I pressed my hands into his stone body. “My dream. Of the moth. That wasn’t a sign from gods. You were the one to drown me… it was you, Bartholomew.” My tears fell. “You, trying to tell me your story.”

He pulled back to look at me. “I’m sorry for all of it,” he said, wiping my cheeks. “But she gave me a second chance at life, though it was hardly living. My devotion to Aisling was hard to undo. I am sorry I found you, sick in the Seacht; I am sorry that I brought you back to the cathedral like the dozens of dead or dying girls I’d brought before.” His chin quivered. “I’m sorry that, upon the chancel, you died. I’m sorry she remade you with spring water, and that you bore such loyalty to her for it.”

He wrapped his arms around me. “To live again after death is strange magic, and an even stranger fate. Would that things were different, Bartholomew. Would that we had never been reborn. But if we hadn’t… well. I have wondered, and pondered, and now I am sure. For better, for worse—

“The rest of the story could not exist without us.”