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CHAPTER EIGHT

GONE

T he batlike gargoyle stooped down low, transfixed by a gowan flower. He plucked it. Held it up to Aisling Cathedral’s looming edifice. “Which is more intricate?” he mused. “The designs of men, trying to reach gods, or that of gods, trying to reach men?”

My hammer collided with a chunk of granite. “What is either to the intricacies of women, who reach both?”

Clunk , my hammer fell again. In my periphery, Divining robes danced on the clothesline. I’d walked the entire circle of the Aisling’s compound, keeping to the wall, making like I was looking for crumbled stones, but my eyes had been low, searching the grass for any hint of where Four might have walked. I’d trodden through grass and spiderwebs, past all of the tor’s stone structures—even the cottage with no windows—wind shrieking around me.

I’d found nothing, ending right where I’d begun at the clothesline.

“She wouldn’t run off,” I said for the hundredth time. “Not without saying something.”

“Perhaps she did,” the gargoyle pondered. “‘Something’ is a fairly common word, after all.”

I was going to damage my vision, rolling my eyes this often. He’d been with me all morning, the gargoyle. The abbess meant it as a security measure, assigning a gargoyle to shadow each Diviner after Four had gone missing. She’d even sent the feline gargoyle away from the cathedral in search of Four. Beyond that, the abbess was strangely inactive. Divining continued as usual.

And that did not sit well with me.

My hammer fell again, and the stone cracked. “Would you tell me if you knew where she’d gone? Four?”

“How would I know? And why would I tell?” The gargoyle wrinkled his nose. Opened his stone mouth and threw the gowan flower into it. “What are we speaking of, again?”

My hammer grazed my thumb. “You’re no help.”

That, or the gowan flower’s taste, put him in a sour mood he carried with him through the day. I worked the wall, dreamed in Aisling, and was liberated from the gargoyle’s stone gaze only when he deposited me at the Diviner cottage at sundown.

I rushed up the stairs and found the other Diviners gathered in our bedroom.

Fighting.

“She’s followed the knights, that little minx,” Two said, hands on her hips. “She might have at least finished her service and not left her turns in the spring to us. But that’s Four, isn’t it?”

“She wouldn’t have left without telling us,” Five shouted. “She wouldn’t do that.”

“She might, if she thought one of us might squeal to the abbess about it,” One countered, jutting her chin out at Two.

Two’s lips went thin. “That’s not fair. Four’s like a sister.”

“She is a sister,” Three said, her even voice uncharacteristically choppy. “And it wouldn’t matter if we told the abbess—she clearly does not care. One measly gargoyle as a search party? We should go out and look for her ourselves. She can’t have gotten far.”

I thought Two or Five would object. But the Diviners stood silent and solemn, unspoken resolve hovering around us.

“Tomorrow night,” I said. “If she’s not back by tomorrow night, we’ll slip out—search the holloway roads and Coulson Faire, then be back by morning.”

“We might even go to Castle Luricht and ask for help,” Three offered.

“Then it’s settled.” One put her hands out, and we Diviners took them, forming a circle that felt too small without Four. “Tomorrow. We’ll leave at dark.”

We didn’t reach Coulson Faire or Castle Luricht. After a day of dreaming for the merchants and lords and layfolk who came to Aisling, we Diviners, wrung out but resolute, ate our dinner in the commons. Made like we were going to bed when the sun set in the sky. Waited in our cottage for the fall of darkness. Stole to our door.

And found it locked.

The next morning, the air was colder still. I sat up and combed the room. Held in a scream.

Two was gone.

I was dreaming.

A farmer had paid the abbess twenty-four silver coins to have her future Divined. I hardly saw her face. When I put on my robe, stepped into the spring, tasted blood, and drowned, I fell through my dream. Read the signs from the coin, the inkwell, the oar, the chime, the loom stone.

But all I thought of were Four and Two and my own terrible dream of the moth.

Of Diviners, screaming.

Hours later, I knocked on the abbess’s cottage door. There was no answer.

I searched the tor for her. I searched and searched, until my quest brought me back to Aisling Cathedral.

She was upon the chancel—a pale smear in darkness. Hunched over on her hands and knees, the abbess leaned over the spring, the smell I knew so well all around. Sweet, fetid rot.

I heard the sound of lapping water. “Abbess?”

She stilled, then slowly rose. Turned.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, abbess. But there is a matter I’d like to discuss.”

“You never disturb me, Six.” She stepped off the chancel onto the nave, coming toward me with one of her silent, open-armed beckons. She ushered me out of the cathedral. “Come.”

We walked to her cottage in silence. Inside, the small parlor smelled of roses, incense burning near the open window, its long trail of smoke the only adornment in the small room save two wooden chairs near the fire.

I had been in this room only once before. I’d been a girl, and the abbess had handed me a hammer and a chisel with all the tenderness of a mother giving her child a gift. “I always bestow these upon my best Diviner,” she’d said, pressing a hand to my cheek. “See what you make of them—or what they make of you.”

The abbess’s voice was just as warm now as it had been then. “Sit with me, Six.”

Our chairs groaned as we sat. The abbess took my hand, her silken glove so much finer than my toughened palm. I loved the way it felt. “You are here about the runaways.”

“That’s just it, abbess. I don’t believe they ran away.”

The light from the fire cast long shadows over her. She shifted the neckline of her white dress, as if moving a necklace. “What, then? Taken?”

“I don’t know. I simply—” Desperation bubbled inside of me. “I fear something terrible is happening.”

“Shhh.” She soothed my hair. “Fear is not an outward-pointing compass, my girl. You should not let it guide your way. The Omens—their signs—are the only true measure of what is to come.”

“I know that, abbess. Only the day before Four disappeared, I had a very strange dream. It wasn’t of the usual stone objects.” I drew in a breath. “It was of the moth.”

She was quiet a long moment, the only sound in the room the snapping of kindling. “The moth.”

I described my dream. How vivid Traum looked behind the moth’s wings. How I’d witnessed the statues in the courtyard come to life. How I’d looked into the spring’s water and seen her, the gargoyles.

How Diviners had been broken. Twisted. Wailing.

The abbess sat motionless, listening.

“The moth—the sixth Omen—it’s a presage of death, isn’t it?” My heart was racing. I wished, desperately, that she would hold me. “I worry, abbess. I worry something horrible is happening.”

She turned her head and spoke to the fire. Slowly, her hand slipped from mine. “For whom did you provide this Divination?”

“A knight.” I swallowed. “The batlike gargoyle assisted.”

“I see. Did he pay the fee, this knight?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then you made your own arrangement with him. Without me. Divined, without me.” Her voice quieted. “Perhaps you think me superfluous.”

“Not at all, abbess.”

That earned a whispering laugh. “Do you think me oblivious? That I was unaware of your little jaunt to Coulson Faire? Or that I had not noticed you dream twice as much as the other Diviners? You are at war with yourself, Six, always thinking yourself stronger than them, better than them—martyring yourself for them.” Her shroud rippled as she shook her head. “But I know you, my special girl. And I know, beneath it all, you resent them, wishing yourself half as bold as them.”

She sighed, then leaned forward. Hooked my chin in her fingers. “I understand what it means. If the Diviners have run off without a goodbye, then all your love and resentment and martyrdom were for nothing. I can see why you rail against it—why you suppose their absence is part of a larger scheme.” She dropped my chin, dismissing me. “But it isn’t. They left and will be replaced when new foundlings arrive. Now go. Rest. You look like you need it.”

It was a quiet scolding, the abbess’s voice hardly above a whisper. I wished she’d shouted—a cracking whip to match the lashes her words dealt.

“For each Diviner who has vanished, I have sent one of my precious gargoyles. If it will ease your disquiet,” she said when I reached the door, “I will have them lock your cottage again, lest the others inspired to abandon their stations as well.”

A lock did not stop Two from vanishing.

It was only when I reached my cottage that I realized the abbess hadn’t said anything about my dream of the moth, as if it hadn’t been worthy of her condescension.

The wolfish gargoyle stood sentry at my cottage door, his stony eyes focused on nothing. He set to unlocking the door, and I wondered how things had gotten so twisted. I’d gone to the abbess to unburden myself—in search of comfort, of answers —and left with nothing but shame.

I climbed the stairs. Entered the room.

One and Three and Five were there, quiet and still. One caught my arm. “Did you speak to the abbess?”

“She…” I didn’t know what to say. My eyes fell to the floor. “She says they’ve run away.”

“ What? ” Three marched out of the room, steps echoing on the stairs. “She can come and see for herself.” A loud banging ensued. “Unlock this door, you stupid hunk of stone!”

She banged and screamed. We listened from our room. When Three went quiet, the silence was deafening.

We all got onto the same mattress. “Tell us something,” Five whispered into my shoulder.

I told a story of the Fervent Peaks—of the hot springs rumored to be there and how the sky was so clear it was as if you stood closer to the moon. One nodded off first, then Three, then Five—head drooping onto my shoulder. The sky went from blue to black to violet. I watched them sleep, their chests rising and falling in unflagging rhythm, the gentle beat of a lulling song. I shut my eyes only a moment…

And jolted awake.

The sky was yellow-pink now. I knew what had happened before my gaze fell to the bed.

Three was gone.

It was not so hard to trick a gargoyle. The trouble was getting him to leave.

“I don’t see why you must work at this hour,” the batlike one said at twilight, spinning an iron ring of keys upon his finger. It crashed into his nose, and he sneezed so violently a dozen mourning doves fled a nearby bush.

“I told you,” I answered, praying the crash of my hammer upon stone would soften the pitch of my lie. “Divining has set me back. I need to finish quartering these.” I put a hand to my stomach. “But to be truthful, I’m feeling a bit queasy. All those times in the spring…” I heaved, spitting onto stones. “I think I might—I might be—”

The gargoyle put his hands over his eyes and stumbled away with remarkable speed. “For pity’s sake, Bartholomew. You needn’t be so disgusting.”

He was gone in seconds, muttering indignantly to himself.

I straightened. When he disappeared into the consuming shadow of Aisling, I dropped my hammer and chisel in the grass. Pulled my cloak from beneath the stone I’d hidden it.

Ran.

I was out of breath when I reached it—the part of the wall we’d climbed over with the knights. I hauled myself up onto the wall and looked back. The Diviner cottage was a humble square in the distance. From it, a light burned, two silhouettes cloistered near the second-story window.

One and Five.

I waved. A moment later, the light snuffed out. They’d close the window, keep each other awake, until I returned from Castle Luricht.

I looked down. There were no knights to catch me this time. But if I held on to the wall and maneuvered just so, I could easily—

My foot slipped on lichen. The wall denied my grasping hands purchase, and a grating squeal I’d only ever heard pigs make fled from my mouth. “Motherfuck—”

I dropped like a stone.

The road was pitiless. I hit it with a brusque thud and I coughed so hard my eyes hurt. When I managed to right myself, I checked that nothing was broken or bleeding and, more essential, that my shroud was still in place. Then I hauled my aching body up. Coughed again.

And scrambled down the road.

The night was quiet. The trees that cloistered the holloway held no noise, no laughing knights, no echoing notes of music upon the wind. And the holloway, with its earthen sides and a lid of heaving branches, was dark . The kind of quiet, the kind of dark, that made me worry my thoughts were too loud.

A twig snapped from above. My gaze shot up.

Sprites. Dozens of them, watching me from the gnarled ceiling of branches. Moonlight bathed them in deep blue halos that winked when their wings fluttered.

They followed me down the road, never near enough to touch me, tearing through leaves and errant spiderwebs to remain close.

I shivered and hurried on.

The holloway was dropping leaves, and afternoon showers had made them damp. My bare feet were cold and wet by the time I reached a crest in the road. Below me was Coulson Faire—its tents darkened, its fervor dimmed. I heard no music, saw no bonfire, the grassy walkways empty but for a few lingering merchants.

And I wondered. Should I comb the Faire for the lost Diviners? Ask after them?

Then I remembered that merchant who’d taken hold of me the last time I’d wandered the tents alone—how horribly vulnerable I’d felt when he’d reached for my shroud.

No Coulson Faire, then.

I kept east, following purple banners.

There was no one about. The night’s silence wore holes in my senses, and my mind hurried to fill the chasms. How are the lost Diviners managing, alone in a strange land? What if some terrible violence has already befallen them? Are One and Five still awake at the cottage?

Has something already happened to them?

I shook myself. “Don’t let your mind run wild.”

“What pace should I let it run, then?”

I screamed, and so did the batlike gargoyle behind me.

“You idiot!” I put a hand to my breast. “You scared me.”

“Don’t shout at me, Bartholomew.”

He was crying. And not the sniffling, peer-through-his-fingers-to-see-if-I-was-watching cry. This was an all-out sob. “I w-worry, Bartholomew. It is undoubtably m-my w-worst quality. I worried you might be s-sad to be s-sick, all alone at the wall. I came back and—and—” He threw his head back and wailed. “You were gone .”

He kept on yowling, shaking a few sprites from the trees.

I sighed and put a tentative arm around his shoulders. His limestone skin was cold and entirely without softness. “There’s no need for that. I was going to come back.”

He sniffled. “The abbess promised you’d be the one to stay with me.”

I doubted she’d said anything of the sort, but saying so would only make it worse. I offered him my hand instead. He didn’t take it, petty thing. But he did trail behind me after that, not so petulant as to leave me alone on the road, though he stuck his nose up whenever I cast a backward glance. Eventually, he began to hum. I might have told him how the night did not seem so dark or frightening with him at my back, but he was being a petulant little ass, so I said nothing.

I could see Castle Luricht’s turrets pierce the night sky before I was clear of Coulson Faire’s final tents. The gargoyle and I ambled along, the night quiet until—

Voices. Ahead, on the road.

I heard a low rumble, and a wagon pulled by two draft horses rolled past, splashing muddy water onto the hem of my cloak.

“Oi,” someone called. “Look! A gargoyle!”

The gargoyle and I were already scampering down the road. We rounded a corner, then another, then another, past painted houses and reaching hedgerows until the road snapped straight, and suddenly we were among hundreds of purple banners in the shadow of a castle.

The road gave way to a looming drawbridge over a moat. I did not look at the dark water, my gaze forward. I was imagining what I would say to the king or an answering knight when I spoke of the missing Diviners. By the time we reached the gate, I’d half a speech composed, my spine straight and my blood up.

Only I didn’t speak to a single person within Castle Luricht.

The gargoyle and I weren’t even permitted through the castle gate.

“You must let me in,” I said to the guard a second time.

Torchlight jumped over a looming edifice of ivy-laden stone, catching over the guard’s armor. He stood in front of the gatehouse’s iron entry, blocking my way. “I’m very sorry, milady. It’s like I said. I’m forbidden to let anyone in past midnight.” His armor creaked. “Perhaps you could come back at dawn?”

“That’s far too late,” I snapped.

“And also too early.” The gargoyle was sniffing vines of greenery, unaware that he was roasting his own wing in an open torch. “I say, what sort of ivy is this? It’s wonderfully robust. Putalian? Wurspurt? Surely it’s Gowanth?”

“Get a hold of yourself,” I hissed, swatting his wing out of the flame. I turned to the guard. Removed my hood. “Do you know who I am?”

The guard, who was bleary-eyed after we’d roused him from sleeping at his post, stared at the gargoyle, then me. “You’re from Aisling, of course.” He began to stammer. “Forgive me. It’s an honor, you being here.”

“Quite. So please. Go inside and alert a member of the knighthood that there is a Diviner in need of assistance.”

The guard looked even more uncomfortable. “Neither the king nor the knighthood are here, Diviner.”

“All of them are gone?”

“Far as I know.”

“Where, exactly?”

“The Seacht.”

“When will they be back?”

He squirmed. “I don’t know.”

“Have there been Diviners besides me here these last few days?”

His armor rattled. “I don’t know that either, I’m afraid.”

“Is that common in the king’s service?” the gargoyle pondered. “An abysmal lack of knowledge?”

I blew air into my cheeks. “There must be someone I can speak to.”

“I’ll go see.” The guard was off in an instant, making his way toward the castle, leaving the gargoyle and me with our fists locked around the gate’s iron bars.

“He didn’t even invite me in.” The gargoyle stuck out his stone tongue. “A prodigious idiot.”

We waited. The night was a purple blanket, soft and silent. Then—

Laughter echoed behind me, and with it, the rolling noise of a cart.

“Told you,” came a loud, slurring voice. “Gargoyle. Right fuckin’ there.” There were shouts. Gasps. “And a Diviner!”

It was the same cart as before, only now it was coming toward me, rolling onto the drawbridge. Bathed in Castle Luricht’s torchlight, I noted several men inside. Their clothes were wrinkled, their eyes glassy, their mouths drawn in lazy smiles. Even at a distance I could smell the ale.

“How much?” a gray-haired man shouted. He pulled a coin purse from his belt. “How much for my future, Div—oh shit.” He dropped the purse, silver coins spilling onto the bridge.

I pulled up my hood. “We should go,” I whispered to the gargoyle.

Two men dropped from the cart. The gray-haired one made a horse’s ass of himself collecting his coins, falling over and hooting with laughter, while the other approached me with bold steps. “The things you must know, speaking to the Omens,” he slurred. He reached for my shoulder—

And screamed. When he doubled over, grasping his arm, I could see that the bone was broken, bent at a grotesque angle, skin already mottling.

The gargoyle stood over him, eyeing his arm with the same rapt attention with which he had tended the ivy on the wall. “The human body is such a fascinating machine, though I forget the fragility of the design.” He turned to me, smiling. “Well, Bartholomew? Shall we be on our way back home?”

We ran, though the men were too drunk to do anything but roar after us. Down the holloway road, into trees teeming with sprites, we hurried. Even through the dense canopy of treetops, I could see the moon was terribly low. The night was fading.

A night utterly wasted.

“You’ve been no help,” I said, throwing my fury at the gargoyle. “You shouldn’t have been so brutal.”

He plucked a flower from the side of the road and examined its petals as he walked. “Why not?”

“Because.” The snap of bone still echoed in my ears. “Violence is ignoble.”

“That is a very childish thing to say, Bartholomew.”

I whirled on him. “Of the two of us, I am not the one who behaves like a child.”

He rid the flower of its petals one by one, ignoring me.

When we returned to Aisling, the gargoyle unlocked the gate—ushered me to my cottage and unlocked the door. I pushed past him. Scrambled up the stairs. Called out for the Diviners. “One! Five!”

One sat, slouched over herself, asleep at the vanity table.

Five was gone.

The bear gargoyle hammered three iron bars across each of the cottage windows, the day punctuated by a menacing clang , clang , clang .

The cottage door was locked, and not just for the evening. This time, One and I found it locked at dawn. A flagon of water and a plate of honey bread that had gone stale were delivered by the falcon gargoyle, who locked the door behind it, and we watched the day pass through the washroom’s barred window on the first floor.

One tapped the iron bars. “Clearly the abbess doesn’t want us sharing the tale of vanishing Diviners with the tor’s visitors.”

“Why hasn’t she come to speak to us?” I said. “How could she let this happen?” The abbess had told me fear was not an outward-pointing compass. And maybe that was true. My own fear was deep within me, piled so high it had begun to rot, emanating its own putrid heat. My knuckles went white over the bars. “How could she treat us this way?”

One had no answer. She turned away from the window and climbed the stairs. I followed and sat down next to her upon a mattress, trying not to look at the empty beds around us.

“I’ve been praying.” One looked so, so tired. “You’d think, after all we’ve done in their name, that the Omens would help us in some way.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but One did not wait for my answer. She was on her feet again, moving slowly to the cracked looking glass. She stared at her reflection. Then, with a ghostly hand, reached behind her head into her cropped, tangled hair.

And began to untie her shroud.

My body seized. “What are you doing?”

“I’ve waited forever to take this thing off.” Her voice was harder than before, as if she was putting the last of her vigor into it. “I’m starting to think if I wait for permission, it will never happen.”

Her courage was a gale—a bold wind. And while it stirred me, it could not dismantle ten years of doing as I was told. I’d broken more rules in the last week than I had in a decade, but this was not one I could bear. I kept my hands in tight fists at my side and did not touch my shroud. When One’s fell, silent as it hit the floor, I turned my gaze to the wall.

Her gasp filled the room. Soft, quiet horror. “What’s happened to us?”

My voice shook. “What? What do you see?”

One did not answer. When she returned to the mattress, she was wearing her shroud once more. She didn’t say what she’d seen in the looking glass, and I was too afraid to ask again.

The day slipped into night, and for every hour we tried to stay awake, One’s shoulders sank farther. “I can’t remember my childhood.” She rested her head on my shoulder. “Everything before Aisling is so… dark.”

She sank deeper into the mattress. “Don’t forget me if I disappear, Six.”

“If you disappear,” I said fiercely, “I will come find you. And then we will find the others together, no matter the signs, no matter the portents. I promise .”

One held out her arms and I nestled into them. We lay on our mattress, staring up at the ceiling. “Talk to me.” One’s breath grew heavy. “Tell me a story.”

“We’ll see all the hamlets. Study their customs, their crafts, even their sprites. I’ve heard rumors of sprites as big as trees—as big as mountains.” My eyelids grew burdensome. I forced them open and pinched myself until my arm was covered in bruises. “It’s a wild world out there, One. Strange and magnificent, and we’re going to see it. Everything will be so… entirely… beautiful…”

When I opened my eyes, it was morning.

I knew by the quiet, by the cold—by the balance of the mattress beneath me—that One was gone. The cottage was empty now, hollowed out. Outside, the wind wailed a sorrowful tune.

My tears did not come. They were trapped somewhere within me, festering beneath a heavy surface I could not shift.

When the serpentine gargoyle came to deliver more bread, I rushed to the cottage door. The gargoyle dropped the bread, caught me by the waist, and hauled me back up the stairs.

I kicked, bruising my shins on stone. The gargoyle threw me down onto my bedroom floor so hard I saw stars. Shadows danced in my periphery and the cottage grew hazy, then winked out entirely.

I woke to a twilight sky.

There was a small pool of blood, cold, beneath my head where my temple had met the floor. When I pulled myself to a rickety stance and saw myself in the cracked looking glass, my cheek—my silver hair—was painted red on the left side.

My visage fragmented in the broken mirror. For a moment it looked like there were still five other women in the room with me.

But it was merely a trick of the glass.

I held my breath. Lifted my hand to my shroud, ready to do what One had done. To finally see myself.

And froze.

No. The truth of what One had seen beneath her shroud had not saved her—nothing had. I slammed my fist into the mirror instead, shattering the already fractured pieces. Glass rained upon the floor. I dropped onto my mattress. Buried my face in the pillow that still smelled of One.

Night came, the moon tossing silver light through my barred window. I watched it travel across the floor with heavy-lidded eyes, too tired to plan, too tired to cry, too tired even to sleep—

The moonlight in the window disappeared, swallowed by a shadow. A moving shadow.

I sat up slowly.

The shadow belonged to an object. I couldn’t make it out, only that it was small. A stone, perhaps. Then—gods, I was losing my mind—because the object began to fall, and a moment later, as if the iron bars blocking my window were nothing but a suggestion—

A man stepped into the room and caught it.

His back was to me. His shoulders stiffened when his boots crunched over shards of the broken mirror. He stood over the blood on the floor, hissed out an exhale.

I crashed into him, knocking both of us onto the floor. Glass sang and scattered. “Who are you?”

I thought I heard the faintest notes of a laugh. He reared, fast and sudden, and then it was me who was falling, catapulted backward by the momentum of his body, my spine slamming onto one of the mattresses.

He was on top of me in a second, pinning my wrists above my head. Dark eyes roved my face, his mouth turning in a distinct, familiar sneer. “Well, if it isn’t my least favorite Diviner.”

Rory.