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Pupil House II had darkened windows. This house mother answered the door with a broom, and nearly fell over when she saw my shroud.
She hadn’t seen any Diviners, either.
A baker opening his shop, who dropped his flour at the sight of the gargoyle, pointed us to the final Pupil House. There, the house mother slept through my knocking, and her dog ventured out in her stead. The mutt chased us for three city blocks. All the while the gargoyle shouted, his voice ringing through the streets, “Fear not, Bartholomew! Every day has its dog.”
The Seacht was waking up, its impoverished citizens slipping into shadow. When dawn came, the gargoyle and I did the same, retreating into an empty alley and slumping to the ground, defeated.
I pretended One was there, sitting next to me. “I was so important at Aisling. Climbing the wall—looking out at the view—I thought it would be the same when my service was up. That for all the dreams I’ve endured, I’d be important in the hamlets, too. That Traum, its people, its Omens, would love me.” I traced the split in my lip the Harried Scribe had dealt. “But Four was right. We will only ever be Diviners. Harbingers of gods—not real women. People will want us without ever wishing to know us. A daughter of Aisling is not a real daughter, just as the abbess—” I swallowed. “Just as the abbess is not a real mother. Diviners are but the tools of the craft of Divination. Holy, not human.”
“The cathedral, its Omens, its Diviners sit on high,” the gargoyle said plainly. “If you only ever look up at something, can you ever see it clearly?”
“I suppose not.” I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. “But, really—I tried to be good. To be a perfect Diviner and do everything the abbess told me to. I never complained, never said no. My worth was written by the rules I followed. But then the abbess called me resentful—a martyr. And maybe I am. But didn’t I become that way because her love cost as much?”
The gargoyle took my hand. “That is a very sad story, Bartholomew. I wonder… how does it end?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do or who to believe in or how to find my friends.” A sharp pressure began behind my eyes. “I don’t know who I am without Aisling.”
We sat in a silence he no doubt found contemplative and I oppressive.
An hour later, the streets now properly busy, a pair of girls came down the alley toward us. They wore simple garb and looked no older than twelve.
I thought of the Diviners. “How does the abbess choose the foundlings she brings to Aisling?” I asked the gargoyle as they passed.
He put a thoughtful claw to his stone lip. “All I know is that they are always girls. And often sick.”
“Why?”
“She told me once. I don’t remember when, or why.” The melodramatics he was so apt to show were nowhere upon his face. This time, the gargoyle seemed truly overcome by sadness. “She said that girls bear the pain of drowning better, and that sick ones always wake strange, special. And new.”
My throat tightened.
Meanwhile, the girls, passing in the alley, paid us no mind. Their pace hurried. I barely had time to pull my feet back lest they trip.
“Good morning,” the gargoyle said cheerily, his melancholy gone.
The girls didn’t answer. Their gazes were cast over their shoulders, their eyes wide and stricken—
There. Behind them. Three men, stalking forward. They made like they were casual, hands in their pockets, but I could see exactly what they were by their committed steps—the hungry, fixed line of their gazes.
Wolves, stalking mewling fawns.
They came past where the gargoyle and I were seated. With my cloak—and his tablecloth—we no doubt looked like a pair of vagabonds. The men did not ever look our way, watching only the fleeing girls.
My foot shot out.
The first man went down hard, landing on his forearms near the gargoyle’s feet, blocking the alleyway with his body.
The man behind him swore—kicked my leg out of his way. “Clumsy bitch.”
I rose to my feet. “Why are you chasing little girls down the street?”
“Get out of my face.” He stamped his palm over my cheek and shoved me into the alley wall. My other cheek scraped against brick, cutting my skin, stirring my shroud.
And I did not think. I just…
Swung.
And all hell broke loose.
My hammer made no noise, save the sick crack of bone. The answer was a bloodcurdling scream, and the alley became a knot of limbs, shouts, and blood.
The gargoyle rose to his feet, trampling the first man I’d hit, trying to get to me. Meanwhile the third man, shoving past his friend—whose elbow I’d decidedly shattered—levied his fist. He landed a weak punch to my stomach—no follow-through, because the gargoyle had him by the back of the neck, claws digging into flesh as he wrenched him back.
My hood dropped and the gargoyle’s tablecloth fell. When the man saw who exactly he was kicking and thrashing at, he went still. “Diviner. Please. We didn’t want anything with the young girls. Just a friendly—”
“I’m friendly, too,” the gargoyle said. “So is Bartholomew.” He looked at my hammer, held once more at the ready, and winked. “Aren’t you?”
He pushed the man toward me.
I dropped him with a horrible thwack of my hammer, right in his ribs.
“Guards!”
One of the men was screaming. The first one—the one I’d tripped—who’d been clever enough to stay down. He was screaming out the mouth of the alley. There, two armed guards wearing gray sashes had stalled, looking at us with narrowed eyes.
The man kept screaming. “Guards! Help!”
Hands fell to the hilts of swords.
I spat blood onto cobblestones. “Take my hand, gargoyle.”
And then we were ru
We crawled over the men, a mess of groaning limbs. “Didn’t that feel so delightfully ignoble?” the gargoyle howled, gri
We passed brick and wood and stone, taking so many turns I felt upside down. I thought we’d gotten away, but one wrong turn begot another, and then the gargoyle and I were faced with a looming wood edifice—a dead end.
“Quick! Fly us out of here.”
He looked at me like I’d spat in his eye. “And be mistaken yet again for a bird?”
The guards were upon us. When they caught us against a wall, they slowed to a halt. Kept their hands fast upon their hilts.
“Those men were going to hurt a pair of girls,” I said, the urge to confess akin to throwing up spring water. “We were defending them.”
“Did a bit more than that,” one of the two guards said. “They’ll need a physician. You’re both from Aisling?”
I puffed up my chest. “I’m a Diviner.”
“Number Six?”
“Who’s asking?”
The guards looked at each other. “There’s a warrant out for your arrest.”
The gargoyle snorted. “For what? Stealing breakfast and a tablecloth and—”
I put my hand over his mouth. “Surely you have better things to do than hound us for a bit of petty crime.”
“Excuse me, I am a thief as well as an assailant,” the gargoyle said, breaking free of my clutches and sticking up his nose. “Nothing petty about that.”
“Unfortunately this warrant comes from on high.” The guards turned, heads close together, quietly conferring.
“I wonder what they are talking about,” the gargoyle mused.
I touched my bottom lip, bleeding again from when that pig had shoved me against the wall. I was muttering indignities to myself when the taller of the two guards split off, going back down the alley. The other turned to the gargoyle and me. By her tight shoulders, she didn’t seem pleased. Were she a Diviner, I’d have guessed she’d just pulled the short straw.
She didn’t take her hand off her sword. “Follow me.”
We were delivered to a walled compound, where a strange cracking noise echoed behind a vast wooden door. Bug-eyed, its sentry watched the gargoyle and me approach, and with one word from our escort guard, he opened the door.
We came upon a gravel yard, sectioned by two crossing ropes, a pair of knights standing in each quadrant. They each bore a whip—the source of the cracking noise I’d heard—and were practicing wielding the long, serpentine weapons. Those not occupied in the training watched from the sidelines, drilling or goading their fellow knights.
Until they weren’t watching anything but me.
I recognized a few. Hamelin, the one I’d almost taken to the grass, was cracking his whip in the nearest quadrants. When he saw me, he coughed, choking on his own surprise.
Then, as if by silent order, they all looked away, their focus back on their work and decidedly away from me and my stone companion. As to the likely reason why—
He stood in shadow on the sideline. Leather clad, new charcoal drawn around his eyes, he was looking at me through an uncharacteristic crack in his derision, as if something he did not fully believe in had suddenly appeared right in front of him.
Rodrick Myndacious.
The guard brought the gargoyle and me before him. “These the ones you’ve been looking for?”
I glared from behind my shroud. “On high is a bit overstated, isn’t it?”
A smile ghosted across Rory’s lips. “Where were they?” he asked the guard.
“Brawling on the east side.”
Rory’s smile vanished, his dark eyes skittering to a halt over on my face. My freshly bleeding bottom lip. He stared a moment, then another. Ever so slowly, his gaze rose to the guard at my side. “Which lowly picket of the Seacht struck her?”
She put her hands in the air. “She was like that when we found her. Her and the gargoyle roughed up some—”
“Vile men,” I interrupted.
“Whoever they were,” the guard said, “Jordy went to fetch them a physician.”
Rory didn’t answer. His gaze was still on my bottom lip. “Anywhere else?”
I suddenly didn’t know. His eyes were so dark. “I’m fine.”
“I, too, am unharmed.” The gargoyle patted his stone chest. “Right as raindrops.”
So close.
Rory’s gaze didn’t leave my face. He reached into his pocket, extracted three gold coins, then handed them to the guard. “Much obliged.”
She took the money, giving me a wide berth, then quit the compound.
“Well,” the gargoyle said, yawning as he watched her go. “I’m due for a good sleep. Where can I station myself so as not to hear the revelry of these”—he waved his hand at the knights and their whips—“riotous clods?”
Rory looked halfway to laughing, halfway to questioning his own sanity. “I can’t tell if it will make you cry to tell you to sleep in the stables.”
“Why would that make me cry?”
“I… truly don’t know.”