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CHAPTER TWELVE OUR FEET WILL TAKE US WHERE WE NEED TO GO
He did not stop me from leaving.
Not that he could have. There was an insurgency in my body. If it was not spent out ru
When I crashed out of the Harried Scribe’s lair into daylight and the narrow alley, the gargoyle was where I’d left him—sleeping next to Fig. He’d pulled the saddle blanket and draped it over his head, muffled snores sounding beneath it.
I tore it off. “We must go.”
He gasped, then grimaced. “You’d think one versed in dreaming would know it is rude to wake someone from sleep.”
“Dire circumstances, gargoyle.” I wrenched free my hammer and chisel, voices—King Castor’s and Rory’s and Maude’s—sounding in the corridor behind me. “Take my hand.”
He did so without question, his stone footsteps a raucous toll as he followed me at a run out of the alleyway. We muddled through gawking crowds, down serpentine streets, over bridges—past factories and city gardens—lost like fallen milk teeth within the Seacht’s yawning mouth.
When I was too breathless to go on, we stopped on an empty bridge over a narrow canal. “I forget, Bartholomew,” said the gargoyle. “Why are we ru
I draped myself over the stone rail like a dirty, wet dress and hauled in breaths. “Don’t trust king, knights—Omen. Need—to—think.”
“Just as well. Discussing things with that equine proved quite a bore.” The gargoyle sighed, suddenly forlorn. “I confess horses are not the intelligent beasts I imagined them to be. Though I don’t think that merits the abuse they suffer postmortem.”
That one took me a moment. “No one actually beats dead horses, gargoyle. It’s an expression.”
“Really? How morbid.”
He began to hum to himself. And I—I could hardly catch my breath. The pieces of my life had been stained by the Scribe’s ink, by his face and words and death. “What do you know about the Omens, gargoyle?” I managed. “I never thought to ask you.”
“Because you believe yourself better than me?”
“That’s not—” I looked over my shoulder at him. “Maybe. Maybe I thought there was a hierarchy to Aisling, like I thought there was to all of Traum. That gargoyles were better than other sprites, just like knights and kings were better than craftsmen—and that I was better than all of them.” I bit my lip. “It sounds awful when I say it out loud.”
“True things often do.”
“I don’t believe I am better than you.” I dropped my forehead onto the bridge’s stone rail. “I don’t know what to believe.”
The gargoyle held still but for his snout, which wrinkled in concentration. “Does not the abbess say that the Omens are gods—and you are special to Divine for them?”
“It is possible the abbess does not know all there is to know about the Omens.” Sickness stirred in my belly. “Or that she, too, does not like saying true things out loud.”
“I suppose that is a permanent possibility. Even your dreams may not show you the truth, Bartholomew. I ca
“The Omens’ creeds are about truth. I always assumed them virtuous. Eternal—immortal.” I looked out over the canal. “But it seems they are none of those things.”
Boats passed beneath our bridge, long and narrow and laden with goods. Craftsmen, carrying their stock. A dory filled with bread passed by, and my stomach rumbled.
“When was the last time you bolstered yourself with food and water?” the gargoyle asked.
“I don’t know. A while.”
“Slept?”
“Longer still.”
“Whatever thinking you must do, you ca
We had no money for an i
And was lost to sleep in seconds.
I woke from a dreamless oblivion with a racing heart and did not know where I was. The walls, the smells—this wasn’t my cottage. But the crescent moon floated through a broken roof, and I was able to make out that I was in a forge upon a lowly bed of dirt.
I’m in the Seacht. My memory came slowly, then far too fast. I’m with the gargoyle in the Seacht. The Diviners are gone.
And the Omens are a lie.
It was quiet. So horribly quiet without the Diviners, breathing next to me in their sleep.
I sat up. The gargoyle stood a pace away, humming to himself as he looked out a window with broken shutters. Next to him were a tin pitcher and a plate of bread and cheese and apples.
My stomach yanked. “Where did you get that?”
He screamed. “Sprites and spoons—you startled me, Bartholomew.”
“Have you been stealing, gargoyle?”
“Yes,” he said with delight. “I’m rather good at it. I was caught only twice. But you—you look stern. Have I behaved ignobly again by your childish standards?”
He had. But it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume he’d throw the pilfered food out the window if I told him as much. “Not at all. Besides, I’m starved.”
The pitcher was full of water. I drained it and devoured the food platter. “Thank you.”
The gargoyle watched me eat, then picked up my hammer and chisel. “Are we leaving, Bartholomew?”
I took the tools in my hands. Even with their familiar weight, I felt unbalanced. “I think… Perhaps we…”
“You seem troubled.” The gargoyle looked up at me with wide, earnest eyes. “Would you like me to tell you a story?”
“No one could craft a story fine enough to make me feel better right now, gargoyle.”
He nodded, like I’d said something profound. “Then let us explore this strange mechanism named the Seacht instead. Our feet will take us where we need to go.”
The night sky a
I kept my hood low, and the gargoyle, not one to be left out, stole a tablecloth from a clothesline to drape over his head, obscuring his face in shadow. Still, it was too early, or too late, for there to be any foot traffic—hardly anyone looked at us.
That did not mean the roads were empty. People milled about, awake despite the hour, different from the folk I’d seen in the Seacht in the light of day. Children in rags, men and women digging through scraps and washing their clothes in the canal.
I was stricken by shame when I caught myself staring. I’d never seen poverty before.
We carried on, entirely without aim, though at some point I slid both hammer and chisel into my left hand so that the gargoyle could hold my right. My mind remained on the Harried Scribe, his stone eyes, the way he had eaten my hair—licked up my blood. I thought of King Castor, too. What it might mean, him taking up the mantle, challenging the Omens for their magical stone objects. I thought on the Diviners and how I was no closer to finding them.
I considered it all, a canyon worrying itself between my brows.
Meanwhile the gargoyle was practically skipping down the street, pointing and commenting on everything he saw. “You seem contented,” I said, peering over my shoulder. “Being away from Aisling.”
“Perhaps I am.” He pondered. “What does it feel like to be contented, Bartholomew?”
As if I knew. The only happiness I’d felt was with the Diviners, in the tales of what we might do when we left the tor. My stock of joy was held in the future, ever out of reach. “I think contentedness,” I said bitterly, “is just a story we tell ourselves.”
The gargoyle nodded. “It is all the same, then. Contentedness. Truth and honesty and virtue. Omens. They are all stories, and we”—he gestured to the Seacht’s climbing walls—“tread the pages within them.”
Our feet did indeed take us where we needed to go. When the sky was purple, clouds blushing from a dawn we could not yet see, the gargoyle and I came across a street with plain brick houses. The largest had an inscription upon its door.
Pupil House III
A School for Foundlings
“How quaint,” the gargoyle said. “I confess, I’ve always fancied myself a bit of a schoolmaster and you my pupil, Bartholomew, though you have never held the position with the respect it’s due—I say. What are you doing?”
“Wait here.” I rushed to the house, opening its gate and tripping over little shoes. “They’ll get a fright if a menacing stone bat knocks upon their door.”
“That’s derogatory,” he called after me.
I knocked three times. Waited. Knocked again, louder.
I heard creaking. The shuffling of footsteps. Then the door was opening, wrenched in by an aged woman in a nightdress with a lump of gray hair and deeply etched lines around her eyes and lips.
She thrust a candle in my face. “Who the hell are you?”
“Apologies for the intrusion, milady. I know it’s early.”
“Milady? What kind of twaddle is that? I’m the house mother. If you’re looking to drop off a foundling, we’re all full—”
“I’m not here for that.” I pulled my hood down. “I’d like to ask you a question.”
Her brows lifted into her hairline. “What’s a girl from Aisling doing at my door? Come to check on your investment?”
“What investment?”
“Your abbess is our patron.”
I’d almost forgotten. “Do the girls the abbess selects ever come back?”
“Here? Can’t see why they would.”
“So you haven’t seen any Diviners of late?”
“None save you, mourning dove.”
My chest fell. The woman crossed her arms, eyeing my split lip. “You look like you’ve had a time of it.” She sighed and pushed open her door. “Want a cup of something?”
“No—thank you.” I looked up at the dawning sky. “How many Pupil Houses are there?”
“Three. The other hamlets send their orphans here, but mainly the girls—especially the poor sick ones. Gives ’em a good shot to end up at Aisling as Diviners. Most of the boys run off and fend for themselves.”
“Can you tell me where I might find the next Pupil House?”
“Off the square. But you won’t find any Diviners there, either.”
“Off the square. Wonderful. Where’s that?”