Page 9

CHAPTER NINE

TIME TO GO, DIVINER

T he air between us tangled for one—two—breaths, then my voice was carving through the room. “You.”

Rory wasn’t wearing armor, just a black tunic and leathers. I could feel the drum of his heart, how it kicked up. His gaze went hard over my shroud, then harder still as it roamed over my bruised arms—the bloodied side of my face.

I wrenched my wrists from his grasp. “Where are they?”

“Who?”

“Don’t play games. You are here, appearing out of nothingness, and they are gone.” I was shaking. “Tell me where you’ve taken them.”

“Who?”

“The Diviners, you brute.”

He was still bowed over me, hands braced on either side of my head, knees pressing just outside my hips. Looking up into his face felt unmistakably similar to other things that might occur upon a mattress in a darkened room.

He seemed to think it, too, because the corners of his mouth lifted. “You’re welcome to search me for them.”

I kneed him in the groin.

A chorus of curses volleyed through the room. Rory rolled off me onto the mattress, groaning into the crook of his arm.

I sat up and watched him writhe. “This isn’t a joke, Myndacious.”

“Do I look like I’m fucking laughing? Just—” He pressed a hand over his eyes. “Pith, I’m going to puke. Be quiet a second.”

I would have purred at a spectacle like this a week ago. But the humiliation of Rodrick Myndacious did little to me now. He coughed, regained himself, and looked at me with such vicious displeasure I felt it on the back of my tongue. “So,” he said. “I’m meant to have stolen five women, have I? Despite the fact that I’ve been in the Seacht, ten miles away?”

“Yet here you are, appearing like a specter in my room—the very place they vanished.”

“And wholly regretting it, I assure you.” He shook his head. “Benji, the prat. I’m here because the bleeding-heart king got a falcon from Castle Luricht. Apparently, a Diviner had come, demanding an audience.” His brows rose faintly. “And that she knocked around a few drunks on the doorstep before slipping into the night.”

“That was the gargoyle.”

“Whatever. You made a fuss, and now I am here in the king’s stead.”

“So, you are an errand boy.”

His smirk was written in vitriol.

“What about the appearing act?” I pressed, nodding at the barred window. “How did you get in here?”

“None of your business.”

It was not lost on me that this knight was embedded with secrets. Even if he hadn’t been caught stealing water from Aisling’s spring, there was something about his revilement of the Omens, his violation of knightly standards, that made me certain he—along with King Castor and Maude—was beyond trust. It was loud in my mind.

But so was my promise to One.

If you disappear, I will come find you. And then we will find the others together, no matter the signs, no matter the portents.

And I would fall off the earth, if that’s what it took, to keep that promise. Even if I had to ingratiate myself with the foulest knight in all of Traum. For the Diviners, I would bear it.

I leaned closer. “Perhaps you have a bleeding heart, too, Rodrick Myndacious. Perhaps you would help me leave this place.”

He made a face, as if sickened I’d appealed to his humanity. “That is why you went to Castle Luricht? To tell the king the Diviners were disappearing?”

I nodded.

“What does the abbess say about it?”

“That they ran away.”

“Did they disappear one by one or all at once?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“I’m revoltingly curious.”

I exhaled through flared nostrils. “One by one, and always while we slept in this room.”

“Has anyone been dispatched to search for them?”

“One gargoyle per Diviner.”

“Did you see anything? Anyone suspicious?”

“Besides you? No.”

His eyes narrowed. “Who broke the mirror?”

“I did.”

“Why are your arms bruised?”

“I’ve been pinching myself. To stay awake.”

Rory’s voice went rough. “And the blood?” His hand came up slowly—a phantom through my hair, pushing it away from my swollen left temple. “This?”

“Gargoyle.”

“Right.” He exhaled and got off the mattress, fiddling with something in his pocket. Rory muttered to himself a whole thirty seconds before he said, swift and sure, “Get your things.”

“I don’t have anything.”

That, of all I’d said, seemed to shock him the most. Rory’s eyes went wide, mouth twisting, like I’d served him a plate of hot manure and called it a feast. “You don’t have anything ?”

I gestured at my dirty dress. “Just my clothes.”

He was muttering to himself again. “Tell me at least you have something for your feet.”

“Like what?”

“Like what—like shoes , you twit. Boots. Slippers. Clogs fashioned by your stupid chisel. Anything.”

My hammer and chisel.

I snapped my fingers in my face. “There are some things, actually. They’re kept outside.” I moved to step off the bed.

Rory lurched forward, bracing my hips.

“What are you—”

“ Don’t kick me. I’m trying to help you.” He nodded at the floor, moonlight kissing over thousands of shards of glass. “Unless you’d rather rip your feet to tatters.”

I nodded my consent tersely, and his hands tightened around me. “I’m heavy,” I said before he lifted me. It wasn’t an apology.

“No one’s as strong as you, is that it, Diviner?”

“Put you on your back at Coulson Faire easy enough, didn’t I?”

That got a smile out of him. A moment later I was in the air, slung over his shoulder like a dead deer. I swore and he chuckled, glass crunching beneath his boots as he moved through the room. “Threw you on that bed easy enough, too,” he murmured.

The cottage door was no longer guarded by a gargoyle. Rory slammed against it once, twice, thrice—to no avail.

I donned my cloak, gloating from the shadows.

“Fucking Aisling.” He put a hand to his bruised side. “All right—new plan. Shut your eyes.”

Not. A. Chance. “What for?”

“I’m going to use a tool, which, as previously stated, is none of your business.”

“What kind of tool? I’m revoltingly curious.”

He bit the inside of his cheek, glanced at the door, then reached into his pocket. “We are going to disappear for about three seconds, and in that time we’ll be able to pass through the door. Curiosity sated?”

Not by half. “How—”

Rory snatched my hand. Threw something from his pocket into the air. “Move.”

There was a whirring sound, something small and circular passing over my head and through the door, then Rory and I were moving after it. I winced, bracing to collide with the wood, but my body—my body was nothing —and I didn’t feel a thing as I passed through the door, out of the cottage, into the night.

Rory caught whatever he’d thrown and stowed it back in his pocket, the two of us corporeal once more. He let go of my hand like it had scorched him.

“That was—that was—” I coughed. “What the hell was that?”

“None of your business,” he repeated.

Two minutes later, we stood in the meager shadow of the toolshed. Rory eyed it skeptically. “You keep your shoes in here?”

“Shoes?” I measured the shed door and reared back to face it. “We’re getting my hammer and chisel.”

“Your—no. We’re getting your shoes , Diviner. You can’t go trudging through the kingdom like a bloody sprite, barefoot and—”

“I don’t own shoes.” I didn’t own the hammer and chisel either, but that was none of his business. “Just stand back.”

I threw myself against the shed door. There was a blunt thud , hot pain ripping up my shoulder.

The door stayed shut.

Rory’s thumb was on his bottom lip, tracing a smile.

“Shut up.” I picked up a stone from the path. Smashed it down on the door’s iron lock. Nothing.

“Move aside.” Rory took my place at the shed, then crashed his shoulder into the door. A resonant bang echoed down the hill.

The shed remained closed.

“What the honest fuck are these doors made of?”

“If only we had a tool that could help us, oh, I don’t know—move through walls?”

“Fine.” Rory reached into his pocket once more—

“I say, what on earth is the racket?”

The knife I didn’t know Rory carried was soaring. It hit the batlike gargoyle between his stone eyes, then dropped brusquely onto grass. The gargoyle remained cross-eyed a second, then slowly turned his gaze to me. “Did he just try to smite me, Bartholomew?”

Rory’s gaze jerked. “Bartholomew? That’s your name?”

“Pith, you’re thick—no. He calls everyone Bartholomew.”

“What the hell for?” Rory pivoted back to the gargoyle. “What the hell for?”

“Don’t yell at him,” I snapped.

“Shall I break his neck?” the gargoyle asked me. “Or would you find that violence terribly ignoble?”

“I would.” I looked up at Rory. “But exceptions can be made.”

He glared down at me. “He’s joking, right?”

The gargoyle puffed out his chest. “It’s my duty to protect Bartholomew against those who would harm her.” He dusted his shoulder primly. “I have a remarkable talent for violence.”

“Those who would harm—are you serious? I’m helping her escape.” Rory pointed an accusatory finger at Aisling. “ You bruise her face and keep her prisoner and drown her. Which of us is the brute, gargoyle?”

That seemed to trouble him. His stone eyes roved over me. “What has happened to your face?” He blinked. “What do you mean, ‘helping her escape’?”

Rory lowered his eyelids at me. “And I’m the thick one.”

“Be nice .” I hunched to look the gargoyle in the eye. “I need my hammer and chisel. Where are your keys?”

“My burden is always upon me.” He unfolded his blunt, claw-tipped fingers, revealing the iron ring and the keys upon it. “Though it is far too late to be working stones, Bartholomew.”

“I’m not.” I led him to the shed door. “I’m leaving the tor.”

His eyes went wide, the rest of him perfectly still. For a moment he looked like a true gargoyle, a lifeless monster carved of stone—Aisling’s watchdog. But then he threw his head back and wept. “Why, Bartholomew? Why would you leave me?”

Rory looked like he wanted to catapult himself out of his own skin. “Please—shut him up. He’ll wake the dead.”

The gargoyle’s shoulders shook, his yowls near and far, echoing through the night. “I will have n-no one to talk to. N-no one to—to—”

“Diviner!” Rory snapped.

“I’m working on it.” I might have put a hand over the gargoyle’s mouth, but the poor thing was in such a state I feared he’d bite me. I patted his head instead, my smile too toothy to be convincing. “I care about you very much, and perhaps when I’ve found the other Diviners I will come back to visit—”

“Diviner.”

Rory’s voice was quiet now. I turned and found him looking out at something in the darkness.

There. Twenty paces away, watching us from the gloom. Three more gargoyles. The serpent, the bear, the falcon. Ahead of them, poised and still as if hewn from stone herself—

The abbess.

I straightened my back. “I’m sorry.” A tremor quickened through me. “I cannot finish my term here, abbess. I am leaving Aisling. Tonight.”

The breeze answered, stirring the abbess’s shroud. “It is not safe for you to go,” she said, beckoning with open arms. “Come with me back to the cathedral, my girl.”

“I cannot,” I said again. “I am leaving to find the Diviners.”

“No, Six.” The abbess’s words were soft, bereft of their echo outside of Aisling’s cavernous body. “Stay. I will take care of you.”

“Just as you took care of the others?”

A desolate frost touched the abbess’s voice. “But I did take care of them. I made them special. They tried to be worthy of it, but they remained so… human. But never you, Six. Stalwart, uncomplaining—you have ever been the perfect Diviner.” Her shroud rippled. “Until quite recently.”

I flinched.

She kept going. “The stories you tell of the things you and the other Diviners will do when you leave Aisling, the beautiful places you will go, are but the lurid imaginings of a fretful mind. You play at strength with your muscles and your martyrdom, but you wear such profound fear, my love. Because deep down, you know you are nothing outside these walls. You understand, better than the rest, that you will never be more useful, more powerful, more desired, than you are here, upon my tor. Stay with me.” It was impossible to see her eyes. But I was certain that her gaze had turned to Rory. “There are terrible things in the land of Traum. With and without armor.”

Rory spoke as the abbess had—softly. Only his voice was coated in venom. “It’s true. There are terrible things in Traum. I may even be one of them. But she has asked to go, and I am bid by a code to gratify that wish. Let us leave. If you do not—” He pulled something from his pocket. “Well. I’d probably enjoy that.”

He squared his stance, the line of his shoulders hardening. And I understood, even without armor, who he was in that moment. Not the brute, but the soldier.

The knight.

Only the idiot wore not a single weapon upon his belt.

The abbess closed her beckoning arms. “Kill him,” she said to the gargoyles, retreating back to the cathedral, a pale mark against darkness until the night swallowed her. “And bring her to the spring.”

The gargoyles stalked forward.

“Which one, Diviner?” Rory’s voice was deathly calm. He looked over his shoulder at me. “Which one marked up your face?”

My teeth pressed into my bottom lip.

“Tell me.”

“The serpentine one.”

The gargoyles lunged.

Rory’s visage wrinkled, then disappeared, something small sailing through the air. The gargoyles collided with one another in a vicious tangle, and Rory appeared five feet away. Caught whatever it was he’d thrown into the air—then sent it at the serpentine gargoyle’s head.

And the gargoyle… exploded.

Stone shattered, dust and chunks of limestone cannoning in every direction. My mouth fell open. Rory shot me a pointed look. “Hammer and chisel. Hurry.”

I dove for the keys in the batlike gargoyle’s hands. “Open the shed door—now.”

Stone fingers curled around the iron ring. “Take me with you, Bartholomew.”

“What?”

“Is my voice too quiet?” He hauled in a breath. Shouted in my face. “ Take me with you, Bartholomew! I don’t want to start over again and again and watch children dream and never see beyond this place. I don’t want to be in the middle of the story anymore. Please.” He wrenched open the shed door. “Take me with you.”

There was no debate whether or not I had a bleeding heart. “All right, fine. Just—stop shouting.”

“Huzzah!” He clapped his stone hands. “Oh, what fun. A whirlwind adventure—”

The bear gargoyle tackled me to the ground.

We landed in the shed, the lump on my temple colliding with the hay-strewn floor. I coughed, groaned. The hammer and chisel were nestled in hay an inch from my nose. I tried to reach for them, but stone arms locked around my middle, pinning my hands to my sides.

I thrashed. “Get off of me!”

The bear gargoyle’s grip did not loosen. It dragged me, kicking and screaming, out of the shed, through grass and toward the cathedral. Then—

A ringing sound. Another explosion of limestone. I dropped to the ground. When I looked up, the bear gargoyle was headless—nothing but a jagged piece of stone, dust raining down around him.

At its feet, a small object sat in the grass.

A coin.

“Are you all right, Bartholomew?” The batlike gargoyle pulled me up, stretching his wings wide to shield me.

I dove into the shed. Yanked my hammer and chisel free.

Rory was several paces away, only now he wasn’t disappearing and reappearing but skirting blows from the remaining falcon gargoyle. He rolled, barely missing a blunt swipe, then sprinted toward me. Caught my waist. “Time to go, Diviner,” he panted, bending to pick up the coin. Behind him, the falcon gargoyle was getting closer, closer—

“Watch out!”

I shoved Rory down by his hair just before the falcon’s pointed wing collided with the back of his skull. I didn’t think—I just swung. The resounding crack rolled like thunder, my hammer colliding with the falcon’s face so viciously its entire head fissured.

It fell onto the grass and didn’t move again.

I looked down at Rory. He was on his knees in front of me, breathing hard. I let go of his hair instantly.

The corners of his mouth curled. His fathomless eyes held me a second, and then he was standing to full height, offering me his hand.

We ran, the batlike gargoyle right behind us.

Doors slammed in the distance, the low pulse of footsteps echoing around us. More gargoyles came from the shadows, screeching as they spilled from their outbuilding. I kept running, hammer and chisel in one hand, Rory’s hand in the other. I steered us to the west side of the wall, bracing to climb. “We need to be careful when we climb down—”

“We’re not climbing.” Rory tossed his coin through the wall, and we disappeared through stone, through branches, through air.

And then we were falling.

Rory caught the coin midair, our bodies rematerializing—our feet slamming onto the road.

“ Ugh. ” Pain shot up my legs. “My poor knees.”

Rory bit down on a laugh, then pulled me by the hand down the holloway road, wedging us between two beech trees. We stood close together, gazes tilted up, watching the shadows of Aisling’s gargoyles as they flew overhead.

They passed by, and the night quieted.

Rory stepped out onto the darkened road, frowning. He peered left, then right, then jerked his head at me to follow him. I looked back only once, but the hill was too steep to see Aisling. It didn’t matter; I knew the cathedral was watching me, cold and beautiful and disapproving, as if to say, You’ll come crawling back soon enough .

Then, high in the sky, a dark shape flittered over the moon. I heard a humming sound—an off-pitch tune.

I grinned. “There he is.”

The batlike gargoyle was there, singing to himself as he followed us from above, stone wings flapping as he soared through the air.

Rory’s gaze traced my smile. “He’s your pet?”

“I imagine he thinks I’m his.”

“Funny. He’s not coming along.”

“Looks like he is.”

Rory muttered to himself, fidgeting with something in his left hand. I caught a proper glimpse of it before he stowed it in his pocket. The coin. The thing he’d been throwing. It was larger than a normal coin. Oblong and made of stone. One side was smooth, the other rough.

I lost a step. I’d seen that exact coin before. Many, many times.

But only in my dreams.

“Your abbess is right,” Rory called. “There are terrors in Traum. Vicious sprites—and they’re nothing to the nobles you’ll meet. We’ll join the knighthood in Seacht. See what we can learn about your lost Diviners.”

He must have sensed I was no longer directly behind him, because he turned. He could not tell, but he was looking directly into my eyes. “Allow me the privilege of taking you to the king.”