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CHAPTER EIGHT GONE
The 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 di
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.