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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 ca
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 ca
“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 ca
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, pi
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 ru
“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 gri
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.”
“Fu
“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.”