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CHAPTER FIFTEEN MOUNTAIN SPRITES
I rested my head against the wood lip of a cart, dappled sunlight dancing over my face. We were out of the Seacht, past its cobbled streets and reaching bridges, back on the holloway road. I’d refused to look back. Refused a horse as well. The gargoyle, heartened by the spirit of refusal, had declined to fly, and so accommodations were provided, the two of us riding like cargo, jostled about in a horse-drawn cart.
I was wearing all the clothes Maude had left me, tunic and cloak and leggings. But the boots—the boots sat in a corner of the cart, untouched.
Maude sat next to them, catechizing me on what lay ahead. “The Fervent Peaks are rough—wet and windblown and cold. There’s one road, and it’s steep. The village is scattered upon it, but most of the dwellings sit on a wide plateau where the Tenor River pools. Folk fish there, but rarely go higher into the mountains, which are almost impossible to climb.”
“What a horrible picture you paint,” the gargoyle said, smiling and nodding, like he’d paid her a compliment.
“When I dream of the Ardent Oarsman,” I murmured to the sky, “I fall onto rocks. There’s a basin of water nearby, surrounded by seven jagged mountains. That’s where I see the stone oar.”
Maude ran the edge of her axe over a whetstone. No matter the jostling of the cart, her movements remained controlled. “This basin of water. Are there dwellings around it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What is around it?
“Rocks.”
Her eyes lifted. “Helpful.”
I threw my gaze out over the landscape—rolling moors covered in bromegrass and craggy rocks—and tried not to sulk. “I’m afraid I’m of little use. I have no idea where the Ardent Oarsman is. No idea where anyone is.”
“None of that.” Maude’s tone was firm. “You being here is enough.”
“I’m surprised King Castor’s grandfather didn’t document the precise locations of the Omens in his precious notebook.”
“Trust me, he tried. But the Omens have been doing this for hundreds of years. They obscure themselves beneath hoods or use their stone objects to vanish at whim. They know how to hide in plain sight.”
“I say, Bartholomew.” The gargoyle was leaning over the lip of the cart. “Is a road still a road if no one rode upon it?”
“Road and rode are two different words, gargoyle.”
“Really?” A wayward branch swatted him over the face. “Perplexing.”
Maude stared.
“You’ll get used to him,” I mumbled.
She cleared her throat. “Right.”
“Why not find the Ardent Oarsman the same way you found the Harried Scribe? Leave a bit of pilfered spring water lying about. See who comes for it.”
Maude nodded at her axe. “That’s exactly what we’ll do. But first—the ceremony.”
“What ceremony?”
“The noble families host a ceremony when a new king comes. And since this is Benji’s first time in the hamlets as king, they’ll be wanting to put on a bit of a show. Faith requires a display. The greater the spectacle, the greater the illusion.”
“So I’ve heard.” I paused. “Maybe we can use that to our advantage.”
A brown horse came up next to the cart. Fig.
Rory wasn’t wearing his helmet—his black hair a mess. He pushed it out of his eyes. “Anything of note?”
I plastered a smile over my mouth. “Benji and Maude will be at the ceremony, which leaves you and I to sneak off with the spring water and watch for the Ardent Oarsman like good little soldiers.”
Maude’s gaze lifted. “It’s not a bad plan.”
Rory’s eyes flickered to my face. We hadn’t spoken since he’d measured me for armor.
You want to throw me down. And I, prideful, disdainful, godless, want to drag you into the dirt with me.
“If you wanted to get me alone, Diviner, all you had to do is ask.”
Maude gave him an exasperated look. But Rory just smiled, his stupid words wi
I shot air out of my nose. “Idiot.”
“He riles you.” Maude gri
“We’ve made an art of it.” I sat up straighter. Appraised her. “How old are you, Maude?”
“Forty-one.”
“How did you grow so close with the brute and the boy-king?” She wasn’t just older than Rory and Benji. She was more rooted. No derision, no drinking—less at war with herself. “Maybe I’ve only been around women, but you seem better natured than the two of them combined.”
“Don’t be mean.” Maude rubbed the flat of her thumb opposite the axe’s grain. “Benji’s plenty good-natured.”
I chuckled.
“Benji’s grandfather and my mother were knights together, our families close.” Her gaze went soft. “I was already in armor when the little shit was born. His parents passed, and his grandfather was too occupied hunting down information about the Omens to mind him, so we Bauers—that’s my name, by the way. Maude Bauer. We took Benji in.” Maude looked up the line of knights. “It was hard for him, being a Castor. Especially after his grandfather was killed. And Benji can be shy. It took him a while to get good with his sword. The other knights kicked him about. I put a stop to that.”
“So you’re like a mother to him?”
She snorted. “Don’t know a thing about being maternal. But I suppose there’s a pinch of tenderness under all this armor. I do love a stray.”
“Which brings us to Rory.”
“Rory.”
I thought Maude entirely beautiful in that moment, her green, charcoal-rimmed eyes catching sunlight, the lines around her mouth—the crow’s feet around her eyes—deepening as she spoke. “King Castor brought Rory, a scrawny boy of eleven, to Petula Hall when I was the exact age he is now. Twenty-six.” She looked into my shroud, into my eyes, swearing me to secrecy with a simple gaze. “He’d lost all faith in gods and men. Needed a purpose. So I made him my squire.”
I couldn’t imagine Rory as a boy, thin or small or vulnerable. He was none of those things, almost as if he’d taken pains to carve them from himself. “Why?” I asked. “Why help him, I mean?”
“Same reason you want to help your Diviners,” Maude said. “Because you care, and because you’re able to do something about it.”
I pondered that. “Was he a good squire?”
“The worst I’d ever seen.”
I smiled.
“He was raw and impatient and untrusting, and the other knights worked him hard because he wasn’t highborn and had no right being where he was.”
“Let me guess. You put a stop to that.”
“And enjoyed doing it. But Rory settled in time. Got stronger. Smarter. Meaner, too. Or maybe he just stopped thinking mistreatment was something he deserved.”
“Sounds like neither of them would be where they are without you.”
“They’d have found their way. They’re a good balance, those two. Benji wants to be resilient like Rory, and Rory wants to feel like the kingdom is worth changing the way Benji does.”
“Or maybe they both want to be just like you.”
Maude suddenly seemed battle worn. “The Bauer women have a stalwart reputation—a legacy of hunters. The Chiming Wood was once full of fearsome sprites, you know. My family slaughtered them. When I was knighted, I had massive boots to fill. Then Benedict Castor the First became my mentor. He directed my gaze to the kingdom’s greater issues—the corruption of the Omens and Aisling’s oppressive hand.” She tapped her axe. “I never understood what kind of knight I wanted to be until I struck down the Faithful Forester and discovered what a righteous kill was. Suddenly, I had a purpose, and it felt so good. But then Benedict took up the mantle, and the abbess called him a heretic, and the nobles in the hamlets echoed her.”
Maude shook her head. “We take vows as knights. To the kingdom, but also to our sovereign. I would have done anything for Benedict Castor, and he knew that. Which is why—”
She hauled in a breath. “Which is why he told me to deny him. That I could not go on, rooting out the Omens and their stone objects if anyone suspected I was complicit in his heresy. So when we knights brought him to stand before the abbess, and a Diviner proffered him five bad signs from the Omens, it was I who took him by the arm and dragged him into the courtyard. I, the first of his knights, to proclaim my withdrawal from his knighthood.”
Her green eyes found my face. “I, who threw the first stone.”
The gargoyle and I were entirely still. “That must have been horrible,” I murmured.
Maude nodded stiffly. “I made my own vow that day. That all Benedict Castor had learned, all he had taught me, would not go to waste. That I would bide my time, use my family name, my strength, to make another Castor the king. A king who would take up the mantle, and this time, succeed. That I would taste more righteous kills, and paint my blade with Omen blood. After all”—daylight danced over the edge of her axe—“that legacy of hunters shouldn’t go to waste, should it?”
I slept in the cart and dreamed of Aisling. Of my hammer, my chisel, working limestone. Of bells that kept ringing until I could not tell who was crying out—the cathedral, or the stones I’d split.
The cart jostled and I woke. I looked around for One—for Two and Three and Four and Five—but they were not there. The light was dimmer than before, the holloway road less deep, the trees more sparse—the landscape rocky and sprawling. I sat up. Took in the view. The king’s caravan was following the Tenor River, going upstream. Headed toward… “Oh.”
Looming far in the distance beneath heather-gray clouds that grew darker by the moment was a jagged mountain range. Stern and steep, its mountaintops clustered together, like claws on a gargantuan seven-fingered hand.
The Fervent Peaks.
I reached out, and the gargoyle’s stone palm was there.
“Could your friends be in that high, jagged place, Bartholomew?” he asked.
A terrible noise made me jump. A call, long and loud, starting as a resonant rumble and ending on the pitched notes of a shriek. It came from the north, and I looked out over the sprawling landscape. A nearby hill, grass and heather and rock—
Was moving.
The noise sounded again, so loud I slapped my hands over my ears. The horses cried out, and the hill raised itself onto four hooved feet.
No. No, it wasn’t a hill. It was a creature with the appearance of a hill, its back decorated by stone and bromegrass. It was only when it stood upon its legs that I realized it was like an enormous boar. It had granite tusks and wide orange eyes. Its mouth was full of dark mud, and that mouth was larger than the cart I rode in.
Not a hill at all. It was—