Page 3

CHAPTER THREE

THE FOULEST KNIGHT IN ALL OF TRAUM

M y name is Sybil Delling, by the way. Was Sybil Delling. I don’t remember who gave me that name, but I do remember the day that I lost it.

I was a foundling girl, held in strong arms, coughing on water that tasted of rotting flowers. I can’t recall how I found myself in Aisling’s spring, or anything of my life before it. But I do remember sobbing, and that my cries echoed near and far as if a hundred girls were wailing.

The woman who held me was shrouded, bearing the voice I’d come to know as the abbess’s. She loomed over me, telling me that the sick little girl I was before, little Sybil Delling, was gone. She asked if I wished to exact a divine hand over Traum. If I would give her ten years of my time in exchange for her love and care. What answer was there to give but yes?

And then she drowned me.

After, I was sick. The abbess held me in her arms and told me that the spring was holy and magical, and that by drowning in it I had become holy and magical, too, forever changed. That my memory had washed from me the moment the water had touched my lips, as if I’d been reborn. She called me strange, special, new. More importantly, she called me hers , and said it with such pride that I spent my days chasing her approval that I might hear it again. She soothed my stringy silver hair from my eyes and tied a strip of gossamer over them, telling me I would not be safe outside the cathedral, because people in Traum wanted holy things for themselves. She bade me to guard my face, my name, until my ten years at Aisling Cathedral were at an end.

I became a number. Six. But I promised myself I would not forget I was once a person with a name—Sybil Delling—and that I would call myself that name again when my tenure at Aisling Cathedral was up.

There were five other girls, all the same as me: a number. The abbess brought men and women to the cathedral to see us. Lords and layfolk, nobles and knights. They would ask us questions, and in the spring, with the blood of strangers on our lips, the Omens showed us the answers—good, or bad.

Diviners, we were. Holy daughters of Aisling Cathedral. Harbingers of gods.

The years came and went. Again and again, I stepped into cold, oily water. Looked up at the stained-glass window, petals and wings blending into a bizarre visage. Again and again, I drowned and dreamed. And in all that dreaming, in all the holy things that came of it, I broke my promise.

I forgot all about Sybil Delling.

“Settle yourself, Bartholomew. Your dream is at an end.”

In the sacristy, laid out on a bench behind a velvet curtain, I coughed. I was back at Aisling, back in my wet Divining robe. The cathedral was dark now, its windows inky. It was night, and I was alone. Alone, save for—

“Five bad signs.” It was the batlike gargoyle again. “I’m shocked the young king didn’t soil himself. I usually find abject humiliation a joyous affair, but watching young Castor—oh my. You are vomiting.”

I was. Hands locked in fists, I rolled over and spilled the meager contents of my stomach onto the sacristy floor.

The gargoyle let out a shrill noise. “I scrubbed those stones this morning.”

“ I ”—I clenched my eyes shut and heaved—“was the one who scrubbed them.”

“I labored to supervise.”

After the abbess shook me awake, the dream shut off, like a flame snuffed. But I was hazy after a Divination. Sometimes for hours. A gargoyle would carry me away from watching eyes to the sacristy, and I would lie in a foggy, sedated state. When my mind sharpened, I was always sick.

I draped myself over my knees. “What time is it?”

“Night,” said the gargoyle.

“I can see that. Are the others abed?”

“Indeed.” He grimaced. “The knighthood, too.”

I coughed. “The king is still here?”

“The abbess offered him the dormitory. Perhaps she pitied him. And what a useless thing pity is, for a guest is always a kind of trespasser. Why, just while you were lazing here in the sacristy, I caught a few errant knights lurking around the spring. Don’t worry—I set them right.” He tutted, then reached for a linen cloth and crudely patted the bile from my mouth. “Feeling better?”

Everything hurt. The muscles in my brow, my jaw, my stomach—sick from ingesting the spring water. There was no mark upon me for the injuries I’d incurred in the dream. But the pain from a broken collarbone, from wrung-out muscles, was still a ghost in my body.

“I’m thirsty,” I rasped.

The gargoyle glanced at the floor, desecrated with my vomit. “I would escort you to your cottage, but it appears I have swabbing to do.”

I rose onto wobbling legs. “Sorry for the mess.”

He stuck up his nose and didn’t bid me good night.

Outside, the air was chill. Not saccharine and putrid like rotting flowers, but fresh, its effect purifying. The tor boasted no trees—just gravel and stone and grass speckled with gowan flowers. Above, the moon was a pale fingernail in the sky, disinterested in lighting my way. It didn’t matter. Even with a damp shroud around my eyes and no lantern, I found the path through the grounds that led to the stone outbuildings that rested in the ever-present shadow of Aisling Cathedral.

There were six buildings besides the cathedral upon the tor. The largest was a two-level dormitory with attached stables that were often empty, but now smelled of manure from the knights’ horses. The second-largest building was an ivy-laden cottage where the abbess lived. Directly behind it was the dining commons, and then two more cottages. One for the gargoyles, who didn’t eat or drink but did enjoy sleep, and one for the Diviners.

The last building was a tiny stone cottage that sat far on the south side of the tor, where the wind was loudest. No one ever went there. The cottage had no windows, just an ancient iron door. A sad excuse for architecture, and utterly abandoned for it.

My walk through the grounds was quiet. I wound my way past the stables, the dormitory. All the windows were dark. Either the knighthood were somber for their king’s ill portents or they were abed. But then I rounded the abbess’s cottage, coming into view of the dining commons—

I blinked. The common windows were bright. And a knight, armed to the teeth, was stationed at its door, looking straight at me as I came from the darkness.

“Oi!”

I skidded to a standstill.

The knight, bearing a sword on her belt and a lethal-looking axe in her left hand, marched toward me, squinting against her torch. “Who’s that?”

My voice was a croak. “Six.”

“Who?”

“Six.”

The knight kept coming, aglow in the yellow torchlight. She had ornate bronze and gold and silver rings in her dark, cropped hair. A sharp nose. Lines between her brows and around her narrowed gaze that made me certain she was older than I was. Her green eyes had charcoal drawn around them; they widened as she looked me over. “Bloody pith, Diviner.” She lowered her torch. “You look like a ghost in that—that—”

I followed her gaze down to my Divining robes. The white silk, still wet, left no part of my body to the imagination. “I’m on my way to my room,” I said, clipped.

“At this hour?”

“I’ve been dreaming. Or have you forgotten the Divination?”

The knight stared. Not in the awestruck way strangers who came to Aisling often did, but more meticulous. “I haven’t forgotten. But everyone has gone to bed. Your Diviners and abbess included.”

“The gargoyle let me rest in the cathedral.”

She perked a brow. “You need rest after dreaming?”

“I doubt a simple soldier would understand the complexities of Divining.”

The knight’s brow rose. For a splintered second, I felt shamed, talking down to her like that. But then my good sense kicked in. She was, after all, a knight, serving a king whom the Omens clearly did not favor. No remorse was due. “I am thirsty,” I said.

“Well.” She tapped her boot over dirt. “It would be this simple soldier’s honor to walk you back to your dwelling.”

I nodded at the building behind her. “The kitchen is just inside. I’ll get water here.”

“I’ll bring you some.”

“Thoughtful.” I pivoted around her. “But unnecessary.”

“Wait, Diviner.” She reached for my arm. “Wait—”

I wrenched open the door to the dining commons.

Bent over, boots unlaced, another knight sat upon a long wooden table. He wasn’t wearing armor. Or chain mail. Or a tunic. He wasn’t wearing anything at all above the haphazard lacings that kept up his trousers.

He turned at the sound of the door, dark eyes skittering to a halt over me. Firelight caught along the three gold bands in his right ear.

The knight from the road.

He was smoking something, a small, smoldering twig that smelled sharp, like nettles. Just like when we’d locked gazes earlier, me on the wall, him upon his horse—

There was no warmth in his eyes.

Then he spoke. Not in curt hollers like he had from the road, but lower. And I thought maybe that’s where all the warmth of him lived. In the fervid, coal-stoked depths of his voice. “What’s this, Maude?”

The knight behind me—Maude, apparently—shifted. I’d stopped mid-stride over the threshold, leaving her half jammed in the doorway. “I found her stumbling in the dark.” She said the next words slowly. Pointedly. “She came to get a drink of water.”

“Hey,” another voice called.

I jumped. I hadn’t noticed the second figure in the room, near the fire, looking at me with rounded cheeks. “That’s my Diviner.”

King Benedict Castor.

He nodded at me in greeting, proffering a bright, boyish smile. Gone was the trembling king—this one, despite the abysmal portents his dream had yielded, looked entirely at ease. “Quite an experience, Divination,” he said. There was a large flagon in his hands he didn’t quite manage to hide behind his back. “Thanks for that.”

“You’re… welcome.” Maybe he was drunk. No sober man in his circumstances would smile so stupidly. I turned my attention to Maude. “I wasn’t stumbling in the dark. I was walking the grounds. Because I live here. You are the guests.”

The half-naked knight slid off the table. I kept my gaze stubbornly aimed at his face and nothing below it. Not the lean muscles etched into his abdomen, not the sharp V they made over his hips, not the line of dark hair that trailed from his navel into his waistband—

“Must be something special.” Smoke bloomed from the part in his lips. “Being a Diviner.”

He didn’t sound like he thought it was special.

“It’s a privilege to Divine. To be Divined for, too. You might know that, had you bothered to attend the ceremony.”

“You noticed me go, did you?”

“Difficult not to, what with the show you made.”

Maude cleared her throat. The knight turned, the two sharing a look I could not read. I saw it, then. The thing I’d missed with him turned only half toward me on the table. The reason his shirt was off.

A dark, vicious cluster of bruises, decorating the right side of his body. Damaged, mottled skin over what surely was at least one broken rib.

“What happened?” I blurted.

He looked down at his side. Peered at me through another plume of smoke. “None of your business.”

King Castor forced out a laugh. “Is there anything I can get for you, Diviner? That water, perhaps?” He bustled through the commons, placing the flagon he’d kept hidden behind his back on the table near a ratty old notebook, and I heard the glugs and sloshes of its contents.

A familiar smell touched the air.

I sniffed like a dog. I knew that damn smell. It filled the room—rising from the flagon. Not wine as I presumed, nor sharp like the knight’s smoke, but sweeter. More putrid. Like rotting flowers.

Aisling’s spring water.

The shirtless knight glowered. “Diviner?”

My stomach rolled. Bile I thought had all been spent on the cathedral floor returned, and before I could pay the knight’s impudence back with my own, I put a hand to my stomach. Heaved forward.

And was sick on his boots.

I ran.

Maude, who was halfway through her alarmed cry of “What the fuck!” stumbled back. My shoulder collided with her pauldron, and then I was sprinting into the night. Through darkness and grass and onto a crude stone path, I made my way to the stone cottage where the Diviners lived.

I was nearly there when I heard him behind me.

“Diviner.”

I didn’t look back.

“Diviner.”

A rickety wood gate stood between me and the last twenty paces to my door. I caught myself on it, fumbling for the latch. It groaned, clicked open—

A hand came from behind me, pinning the gate shut. When I looked down, I realized why it had taken him so long to catch me.

He’d removed his boots. The ones I’d unceremoniously spat bile upon.

There was a reason we Diviners were kept out of sight after a dream. It was not worthy of our image, our station, that we should be seen as frail. That dreaming of gods was in any way diminishing. It was not known how sick Aisling’s spring water made us.

My entire body burned that I should be made vulnerable in front of this asshole.

I turned. The knight was right behind me. “Step back,” I snapped.

He was looking at my shroud, at me, like I was a venomous asp. Transfixed—and repulsed. This close, I could see the thing he was smoking was branch-like, thin and gnarled and no longer than my middle finger. He put his lips to it, withdrew his hand from the gate, and took three full steps back.

It was still too close. His bareness—

“You couldn’t have put on a shirt?”

His eyes roamed my body, then immediately withdrew. He threw his head back—shot smoke out of his mouth at the sky. “I could say the same to you.”

I looked down at my wet Divining robe, thin and clinging.

Lecher. “Why does the king have spring water in that flagon?”

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“I could smell it.”

“You sure you weren’t just smelling yourself? You reek of Aisling.” The knight was tall—but he did not wield it. Knees bent, he kept his weight pitched forward in a lazy slouch, like it was a labor standing at full height. “Have you been in the cathedral this entire time?”

“Why?”

“Benji would like to know.”

“Who?”

“Benedict Castor.” His eyelids lowered in annoyance. “The king.”

Brazen, this knight. The title of king might not carry the same influence as the abbess’s, or even as a Diviner’s, but he was still majesty or sire . Nothing as dull and flippant as Benji .

My stomach made an appalling squelching sound. “Yes. I’ve been in the cathedral.”

The knight’s gaze, his face, proved a challenging translation. His eyes were unfathomably dark, catching moonlight and gifting it back as he surveyed me. All I could read of him was that he did not like my shroud. He’d glance at it, frown, then look at a spot above my head, like he’d rather talk to the air than a half-obscured face. “Is it the blood or the spring water that makes you vomit?”

“None of your business.”

He took another drag off the branch he was smoking, then held it out to me. “Here.”

“What is it?”

“Petrified idleweed. It’ll help with the nausea. With the discomfort.”

I smiled, hostility seated on my lips as my gaze flitted to the bruises along his side. “I’m not the one enduring discomfort. Beyond this conversation, at least.”

He smiled back, equally hostile. His teeth were white, straight—except the front bottom three, which were crowded. A pallid row of disorganized soldiers. Were he to bite me, I imagined the indent would be as unique as his fingerprint.

What a horrible thought.

“With the nausea, then.” Smoke plumed from his nostrils. Again, he offered the idleweed. “Or it is a bad portent—smoking under a silver moon?”

“Not everything is a sign.”

“Could have fooled me. I can’t go anywhere in this wretched kingdom without hearing about how a coin fell or ink spilled or water moved or the wind chimed or a fucking thread snapped.” He shook his head. Laughed without warmth. “It’s clever, Aisling’s system. The stone objects the Omens are known for are common, their portents vague. The margin for error and misinterpretation is so wide my horse would die of starvation trying to get from one end to the other. And yet this cathedral, this hallowed ground, is the only place in Traum where people can justify that wasting one’s life looking for signs is a life well spent. They pay hard-earned coin to do so.”

The shock of his irreverence whipped through the air. I felt its sting upon my cheek. This kind of blasphemy was something the knighthood was supposed to root out of the hamlets, not cultivate within their ranks. Not in my ten years at Aisling had someone dared speak to me this way. What a vile man, unworthy of his station. I’d known it from the moment I’d clapped eyes on him that he was crude. Indecent.

The foulest knight in all of Traum.

My entire body bristled. “It’s not a waste. Divination takes away the pain of the unknown. Knowing if you are headed for something good or ill-fated is like peering into the future. It’s magic what the Omens do. What I do.” I leaned against the gate and ripped the idleweed from his hand. “Show some fucking deference.”

He watched me through eyes so dark I’d lost sight of his pupils. When he spoke, low and deep, it was like two voices sounding at once. That warm, rich tone—and a deep rasp, like knuckles dragged over gravel. “What’s your name?”

I brought the idleweed to my lips and drew in a tentative inhale. The smoke burned down my throat, sharp and hot. “What’s your name?”

“Rodrick Myndacious.” He winced, like he’d strung an out-of-tune fiddle. “Rory.”

My eyes watered. The smoke in my lungs had gone itchy. A cough that refused to be dampened bubbled in my throat. I put a sleeve to my mouth and hacked.

The corner of Rory’s mouth twitched.

“Six.”

His brows lifted. “Six.”

Oh. A fuzzy feeling was settling into me. The nausea in my stomach had uncoiled. Another puff of the idleweed and it was gone. Another, and the hollowness in my limbs was replaced by a warm, blanketing haze—

“That’s plenty.” Rory plucked the idleweed, which was just about gone, from my mouth. He dragged it over his bottom lip, took a final pull, and dropped it onto the path. “Six is a number, not a name.”

“We don’t deign to speak our real names.”

“Just like you don’t show your eyes?” His gaze flickered over my shroud. “Why is that, by the way? No one seems to know.”

I kept my lips sealed.

“So, it’s a secret.” He nodded. “And I suppose it’s also a secret why no one but high and holy Diviners are allowed to drink Aisling’s spring water.”

I thought of the flagon in King Castor’s hands. “It’s been attempted. Only a few years ago, a merchant from Coulson Faire was so desperate to see the Omens’ signs he rushed down the nave and drank from the spring like a pig from a trough. The gargoyles clocked him over the head and dragged him into the courtyard. He didn’t dream, of course, but he did vomit until he was sobbing. So, tell your king to go ahead and drink his stolen spring water. Just take care to mind your boots.”

Rory glowered, and I rolled my shoulders. “Only Diviners dream,” I said.

“But what is a Diviner, really? A foundling?” He looked me up and down. “The abbess strips you of name, face, clothes, distinction—cloisters you to the cathedral grounds, where you are destined to drink blood and drown and dream. You know of the Omens and signs and how to look down your nose at everyone, but nothing of what really goes on in the hamlets. Nothing of the real Traum that awaits you the moment your tenure is up—which, given your age, can’t be too long now.” He sucked his teeth and grinned at me in a way that was not at all friendly. “Careful, Number Six. Someone will accuse you of having too much fun up here on this god-awful hill.”

Heat choked up my neck. How dare he. “Hold your tongue or I’ll rip it out. I serve gods . You a serve a boy-king who has just garnered five ill portents. Only one of us is worthy of reproach.”

So abruptly I kicked up gravel, I turned on my heel and snapped open the gate to my cottage.

“Aren’t you going to apologize for my boots?” he called after me.

I turned to shout at him—throw gravel, maybe—but Rodrick Myndacious had already proffered me his back. Night carved shadows across broad muscles as he walked away. “It’s been a privilege , Diviner,” he threw over his shoulder.

I seethed all night and got no rest.