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CHAPTER THIRTY

THE END OF THE STORY

W e returned to where Traum’s most sanctified story, its most crafted lie, began.

The tor.

It had taken all day to get there. I was on horseback, holding tightly to Rory, and for once Fig cantered with urgency, as if she felt our turmoil. Benji rode behind us—without the rest of his knights. What we meant to do was not for them to see. Above, still too injured to ride, Maude flew in the arms of the gargoyle. Our pace was unrelenting, our brows slick with sweat as we hastened through Traum’s hills upon the holloway road, hungry to lay all our rage upon the cathedral’s door. To collect the last stone object—to kill the final Omen.

To end the story.

We reached the tor at nightfall. Aisling Cathedral was coated in moonlight. I stared up at its looming edifice, its wall. It was not so long ago the Diviners and I had perched, watching the king come, on that very spot.

The path felt steeper than it ever had.

We reached the cathedral gate and found it shut. Locked. Benji held the Harried Scribe’s inkwell and the Ardent Oarsman’s oar, and Maude bore an axe with her uninjured arm. The gargoyle held tight to the Faithful Forester’s stone chime, and Rory the Artful Brigand’s coin, which he raised, rough side up—and threw.

Aisling’s iron gates exploded, announcing us with a thunderous knell.

I pushed ahead of the group. “Abbess!” Gravel flew as I marched into the courtyard. “I’ve come back.”

The statues in the courtyard watched me, and so did the cathedral’s stained-glass eyes. The night air was cold, fluttering out of my nostrils on misty tendrils. I raised my hammer. “Abbess!” My arm, my fury, was exact. I struck the statues, hitting them again and again, unrelenting until all five were cracked and crumbling. “I’ve come back!”

Nothing.

Then, like the moths I’d watched rise from cocoons, she came.

Out from the shadow the abbess crept, coming to stand before the cathedral’s colossal wood doors. Behind her, six gargoyles trailed. Chimeras of human and animal features, entirely hewn of stone.

The wall of Rory’s chest hit my spine, and the gargoyle’s—Bartholomew’s—stone hand slipped into mine. Even Benji looked fearsome next to Maude, the two of them standing at my wings. We were but five in number, but we felt like an army, come to storm the gates and rip a wicked foe from their towering pedestal.

But if our arrival, our appearance, our promised violence touched the abbess, she made no indication of it. She hid behind her shroud, her voice entirely distant. “Six.” Her chin dipped as she took me in. “You’ve come home.”

I’d forgotten her effect. How pale her dress and gloves were. How mesmerizing her shroud looked when the wind rippled over it. I came forward like a beast of prey. When I stood before her, our heights were the same. I’d never noticed that. “I wanted to see you,” I told her. “One last time.”

I struck out—grasped her shroud.

Tore it off.

And gasped.

It wasn’t just the abbess’s eyes, like Omens, like Diviners, that were hewn of limestone. All of her was stone. She had no hair, her skin—lips, cheeks—just as pale as her eyes. Only she was not a gargoyle. Her face was still that of a woman. She was beautiful. Mythical. Fearsome.

Entirely inhuman.

The abbess never turned her gaze upon Rory or Maude or Benji or even the gargoyle. Her pallid eyes remained ever fixed on me. First the left, then the right, she stripped her gloves, revealing smooth, unblemished stone arms. Were she a carving—a statue—she would be declared perfect, her craftsman named a master.

Her lips spread into a lavish smile. “Am I all that you imagined?”

She reached into her dress. From its neckline, the abbess extracted a stone circle upon a thread. A loom stone.

“Kill them,” she told the gargoyles. She reached out, catching my wrist with bruising strength, then slid a finger into the hole in the loom stone—

And the two of us disappeared.

I was falling, my body nothing . The abbess and I passed through darkness, into the cathedral, down the nave, over the chancel—where she dropped me.

I fell like a stone and collided with water, sucked into the cold womb of the spring. I put out my arms, churning water, trying to reach the surface.

A hand found my throat, just above my chainmail, and yanked.

I breached the water, gasping. High above me, the night sky touched the cathedral’s rose window, painting it blue. But then the abbess loomed over me, blotting out the light. “You poor thing.”

Beyond, echoing down the cathedral’s throat, I could hear the clash of weapons—Rory, Maude, Benji—fighting against the gargoyles in the courtyard. There were gargoyles near the spring, too. Seven of them, closing in from the shadows of the ambulatory.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” the abbess murmured, pressing my neck. “Out there, beyond my wall?”

“If you mean the truth, Aisling , yes. I did.”

Her chest heaved, low, contemplative noises sounding behind her lips. “Then you know why you have no memory before this place. No memory of being taken from the gutter, too sick even for the foundling houses in the Seacht to keep you. No memory of my gargoyle, carrying you into my cathedral.”

She grinned. “No memory of dying.”

She shoved me back under the water, showing me just how strong she was as she held me down—down. I clawed at her. Thrashed. Spots bloomed behind my eyes—

She yanked me up, air punching its way back into my lungs.

“After,” she said, like my coughs and splutters were nothing, “I put water to your lips, and you awakened, as if reborn. But just as you came, so too must you go. I learned with Bartholomew that no Diviner should dream forever. You tend to spoil with time, your loyalty fissuring. You begin to yearn for a life beyond the tor.”

She signed. “That is why, when you, my most perfect Diviner, broke my rules and left the tor for a night of impiety at Coulson Faire, I knew it was time to replace you.”

She leaned over me, her loom stone dangling from the string around her neck. “I began with Four. Slipped the loom stone over my finger, whisked her away. I kissed her brow, held her closely—then broke her neck. That’s the beautiful thing about my spring water. It only brings you back once. Four died, and this time, it stuck.”

She seemed proud when my eyes grew wide with loathing, a smile upon her pale mouth. She always did love telling a story. “I sent her with a gargoyle, who brought her to the Artful Brigand. One by one, I retrieved the Diviners with the loom stone. Held them in my arms. One by one, I broke their necks. Stripped them of their robes; sent them out into the hamlets that the Omens might have their fill. Terribly inconvenient, as I have yet to find new girls. But it had to be done, because you decided to break my rules and lead the Diviners off the tor. So really, my dearest girl, you might say this entire misadventure began”—her lips curled—“because of you.”

I struck her with a closed fist. Hard, just beneath the jaw. Her head snapped back, but her grip remained tight over my throat.

The gargoyles rushed forward, stone hands catching along my head, my shoulders, my knees—pressing with brutal strength over my armor. I writhed. Screamed.

But I couldn’t get away from them. Couldn’t get out of the spring. Couldn’t move but to barely hold my mouth above the water’s fetid surface.

“What about the Faithful Forester? She’s been dead decades .” Spring water slipped between my lips, choking me. “Are you such a monster that you would kill one of your own Diviners for an Omen nigh thirty years gone?”

For the first time, emotion touched the abbess’s unflinching coolness. Her stone brow twisted, her eyes narrowing.

“You did not know she was dead? Killed by one of King Castor’s knights?” I coughed. Laughed. “You stand here upon your chancel, upon your tor, and look down at everyone, looming like a god. But you know nothing of what really goes on in the hamlets. Nothing of the real Traum.” I choked on water. “It will be your undoing.”

She squeezed my throat. “Diviners and kings come and go—and so will Omens. Traum is but five hamlets and me . If my gods are killed, I will make new ones. A Diviner’s blood is never wasted, so long as someone is fed.” Her lips peeled back in a smile. “I’m sure their carcasses were a fine feast for sprites.”

I thrashed in the water. “You could have let us go after our service, like you promised. If the Omens needed spring water, you could have given them spring water. But blood…” My voice ripped up my throat. “How could you be so monstrous?”

“To the faithless, a god is a monster. And I am certainly a god.” She touched her stone skin. “I was born in this very spring, a hundred years before Bartholomew came to the tor. I was a babe—a stillborn. I have never tasted humanity, nor food, only sweet, rotten water. My infant flesh fell away, leaving only stone.” She smiled. “And there is nothing to stone.”

She looked down on me, pitiless. “But you… flesh and hair and blood… you’re young. Guileless. You do not understand the weight a god must bear, or that, sometimes, we must do the wrong thing for the right reason. You do not know what it takes to rule this tor, and you do not know the responsibility of controlling that which you have created. Starving things make for loyal pets, so long as you feed them just enough. It’s how I control my Diviners, starving them for love, and it’s how I control the Omens. They craved spring water, and so I gave it to them, diluted in blood, that they’d always heed me, hungering for more.”

I’d never heard her laugh before. The sound bubbled out of her like boiling water. “They could have stopped drinking—the Heartsore Weaver did. They would still be eternal, like my gargoyles. But when you tell someone they are a god long enough, they stop believing they should have to give anything up. All they do is take.”

Again, she pushed me into the water. Held me down, longer this time, yanking me out just before I lost consciousness.

“Was I not like a mother to you?” she whispered over my soaked face. I couldn’t hear the noise in the courtyard anymore. My gasping lungs, my pulse, were too loud. “Did I not care for you, clothe you? Make you wondrous? I would have kept you, Six. You would have made such an obedient gargoyle.”

She ripped my hammer and chisel from my belt. “You have been a witness to the wonders of the Omens. A pupil to their portents. Ever but a visitor to their greatness.” When she looked down at me, I could tell she thought it was for the last time. “Now sleep.”

She kept one hand on my throat, and raised the chisel with the other. The gargoyles gripped me harder, holding me still.

I fought. My hands breached the water, gauntlets scraping over the abbess’s stone face. She let out a hiss but held fast to my throat. The gargoyles tightened their grips, and when I looked up at the chisel’s tip, I was looking up at the cathedral’s moonlit windows, too. They in light, I in darkness.

“All your love and resentment and martyrdom,” the abbess said, “were for nothing.”

An inhuman roar shook the cathedral.

The chisel stilled, and the abbess’s hand disappeared from my throat. She drew back, and so did the gargoyles that held me.

I fell, slipping into dark, fetid water.

I grasped for the edge of the spring, arms churning, air fleeing my mouth in bubbles. I thought, This time, I finally succumb. This time, the drowning will be complete.

Then a man’s hand was there, breaching the water, searching, desperate. It clasped the nape of my neck, bringing me out of darkness. I hauled in air, and when spring water fell away from my eyes, all I saw was Rory.

“I’ve got you, Sybil.”

He pulled me out of the spring. Beyond, the cathedral had become a battlefield. Maude and Benji were together—Maude with her axe, Benji holding tight to her, flinging the Harried Scribe’s inkwell, disappearing and appearing somewhere else every time a gargoyle drew too close. Maude’s face was white, her bandages bloody. Next to her, Benji’s left cheek was swollen, his bottom lip split, but his blue eyes remained alight.

The abbess stood in the heart of the bedlam. She’d dropped the hammer and chisel, and I saw then that her perfectly hewn visage was marred. There were teeth marks in her neck. A giant cut of stone, ripped out of her.

The batlike gargoyle stood before her, wings spread, baring his teeth, stone shards falling from his mouth. I’d never seen him so monstrous—so befitting of his namesake. A true guardian. Not of Aisling, not of the tor.

Of me.

“No one should live forever in the middle of a story,” he murmured. “If this is how it should end, Aisling… I am happy to see it done.”

“Bartholomew.” The abbess spat. “I should have killed you a century ago.” She reached for the loom stone—vanished. When she reappeared, she was high in the cloister, holding to a buttress, looming over us. “My cathedral is the keystone to Traum,” she called. “Take it away, and the kingdom crumbles. I am the architect, the master, the god of this place. Swords and armor are nothing to stone.”

All around us, her gargoyles closed in.

I dropped to my knees. Picked up the fallen hammer and chisel. “Please,” I said to them. “Go. Leave this place and never return.”

They did not heed me. They were creatures of Aisling. Died, and born of the spring. They kept coming toward me, stone claws reaching for me, for Rory—

And I could not save them from what the abbess had done to them.

So I swung.

My hammer hit stone. There was a great crack—a pouring of limestone dust that stuck to the water on my armor. Rory’s coin flew, and the batlike gargoyle’s claws tore, but the others kept coming, and I kept swinging.

Until the abbess’s gargoyles were nothing but lifeless chunks of stone upon the cathedral floor.

She watched from above, looming like a gargoyle herself, untouched by the brutality, the martyrdom, of her stone creatures.

“Whatever craft is yours,” Rory snarled, “cruelty or violence, we have beaten you by it. Get down, you fucking coward. Your ending has come.”

“The king of Traum has taken up the mantle,” Maude shouted, holding tight to Benji. “Your gargoyles are gone, your Omens defeated.”

Benji’s voice, triumphant, and a little unbelieving, echoed near and far, distorting through the cathedral. “Surrender your cathedral, abbess. You have lost.”

“Lost?” Once more, she vanished, reappearing near the great rose window, casting a shadow over all of us. “I will be as the wind, my loom stone keeping me ever out of reach. You may bear my stone objects, but you will not be safe. I will put you down as I did your heretical grandfather, and then I will come back to my tor. Make new Diviners, new Omens. The story does not change, boy-king. The hamlets will always look to their signs, and folk will come to me to Divine them. I have my cathedral, my spring, my tor. The only thing of influence you ever had, Benedict Castor the Third”—she pointed a finger over me—“was her.”

She appeared right in front of Benji—hit him over the chest with such brutal force his breastplate dented. He fell, and the abbess reached for her loom stone once more—

And screamed.

Maude’s axe had fallen, and with it, the abbess’s stone hand. It fell, hitting the floor with an ungracious bang, is if it weighed a hundred pounds.

I sprang forward. When our bodies collided, mine and hers, the sound was that of stone crashing into stone. A terrible, vociferous crack . The abbess fell, and I clattered over her, our feet upon the chancel. She reached into her gown—pulled a knife. The same one she carried with her during a Divination. It slashed through the air, and when it collided with my breastplate, the peal rivaled the ringing of cathedral bells.

I looked down at where she’d struck me, and so did the abbess. My armor was dented, a blooming pain radiating through my chest. She struck me again and screamed, as if she could not fathom why I would not break. Like she expected me to be made of nothing but gossamer.

“Am I all that you imagined?” I said, looking down at her. “Or am I so much more?”

I slammed my fist into her jaw, sending a dozen cracks, like tributaries, into her face. She hit me, too, with such force it felt as if the flesh beneath my armor had burst. Dropping the knife, she struck me with both hands, hitting my breast, my ribs, my arms—kicking at my legs. My skin broke, my armor dented.

But I did not diminish.

With one vicious tug, I had her careening forward, screaming as she scraped over the chancel, over the edge of the spring, falling into dark, rotten water.

I grasped the stone ledge with one hand and with my other I pressed . The abbess cried out under the water. Clawed and yanked at me. Flailed. I kept a grip over her throat and pressed. Bubbles filled the water. I kept her down. I pressed and pressed, drowning her. Then, with all my strength, I pulled her from the water. Threw her down upon the chancel.

I loomed over her. The gargoyle came to stand with me, then Rory and Maude, and finally Benji. There was no question of which we would take from her—hands or throat. There was no question at all.

There was only stone, and the tools to make it yield.

The abbess was writhing, seething, spitting chunks of limestone upon the chancel. I looked into her eyes—eyes just like mine. Then, with her own tools, with hammer, with chisel—

I struck. Right upon her stone heart.

I was not exact as I had been with the Heartsore Weaver. This was an annihilation, and Aisling would bear the mark of it. My blows were unbridled in their violence, stone flying, hitting my face as they flew by, scoring me with pain. Still, I kept striking her.

With hammer, with chisel, I hit her until she was dust. Until Traum was free of its false gods. Until her last breath came—not loud like the peal of a bell, but frail. Still I kept striking her. I struck and I struck and I struck.

Until the final Omen was dead.