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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE ARDENT OARSMAN
The Oarsman’s stooped posture straightened. I saw then that the object he was leaning on wasn’t a walking stick at all.
It was a stone oar.
The Omen sighed a great, rasping breath, dropped the flask, and returned, like the sprites, into shadow.
Rory tugged my sleeve. “Come on.”
The mountain path was wet. Precarious. One wrong step and I might slip—fall and splat upon rock like I did in my dreams. But I kept my balance, and Rory his, and the two of us followed like specters over the ridge, careful not to step within the moon’s silver glow, watching the Ardent Oarsman as he maneuvered through shadows.
We were getting closer to the roaring waterfall. Far in the distance, I could see the shapes of the nobles—the knighthood, standing at the lip of the water, watching Benji in the nets. And while everyone was looking at the king, no one was watching the waterfall.
No one saw the Ardent Oarsman lift his oar into the waterfall’s roaring froth—and vanish.
Rory and I stopped in our tracks. “The oar,” I said. “He can travel through water with it.” I threw my head back and measured the roaring waterfall, its mist wetting my hair. “We need to get up there. Can you toss your coin?”
Rory was scowling. “It’s too high.”
There was no climbing—the rockface was sheer, slick. And the mountain path ended at our feet. The only way to scale this peak… was not to scale it at all.
“I have an idea.” I turned to Rory. “He might not like it.”
Five minutes later, Rory reappeared with a flash of his coin, holding the gargoyle by the wrist. “Unhand me, you brute!” he wailed, thrashing. “Oh, Bartholomew, thank heavens you’re here. I’ve been abducted!”
I pressed a hand over his stone mouth. “Stop yelling, no—no, do not bite me.” I looked up at the waterfall. “We need you to fly, gargoyle.”
He was not pleased. He was not pleased when I flattered him, calling him brave, and he was not pleased when Rory gri
“Well?” Rory stopped pacing. “What did you see?”
The gargoyle yawned. “Nothing of import.”
My shoulders fell. “There’s nothing up there?”
“There’s a flat tableland nestled within the peaks and a body of water upon it, and an assortment of rocky beasts that lie at the mouth of an ugly stone castle. Like I said—nothing of import.”
Rory’s head tipped back, like he was praying to the night sky for patience he did not possess.
I put my palm to the gargoyle’s stone cheek. “Take us up there.”
He was still sour to be ordered about. But then the gargoyle put one arm around Rory, one around me, and pressed us together so tightly I let out a sound. Rory’s front slammed against mine, and when he looked down at me, dark lashes fa
I nodded, and he wrapped his arms around my waist.
I remembered flying with Benji. The pain, the exertion, of keeping someone else from falling. “Tighter,” I told Rory, slipping my arms up and around his armored shoulders.
His eyes flared, and his grip around my waist grew firmer. “I’m not going to drop you, Diviner.”
The gargoyle sprang into the air.
Rory swore, tightening his hold on me, and we met the sky, battered by wind and the waterfall’s dampening mist. The gargoyle held fast to us, his wings beating with impressive strength, and when we reached the lip of the waterfall, he glided up and over it, landing us upon a flat tableland that had been impossible to glimpse from below.
Our feet hit stone, and the gargoyle’s arms retracted from around me. Rory’s didn’t—he was taking in our surroundings, his cheeks full of color, his eyes alight, his hair windblown. He looked so—so—
His gaze collided with mine. He let go of my waist, and I his shoulders. I heard the shaky sound of his exhale, and then we both looked away. Fast.
Around us, the peaks were indeed like claws fixed upon a seven-fingered hand. And in the palm of that hand, smooth as glass, was a basin. Rory and I and the gargoyle stood upon rocks and looked out over the water. Fed by mountainous snowdrift, this basin was a mother to the waterfall—a mother to the entire Tenor River. And yet it was vast enough to be unmoving, still as the surface of a mirror. Even in the darkness I was struck by how clear it was—so pure it was as if we’d sullied it just by looking upon it. Only I had looked upon this water—this basin—before. Thousands of times.
But always in my dreams.
Reflected upon the water, next to the wrinkling visage of the moon, was a castle.
Tall and ancient and crude, it was the same gray hue as the mountains, as if whoever had carved it had harvested shale from the Peaks themselves. Its entry was lifted, and upon the stone stairwell, leading to a great stone door—
Sprites. At least ten of them, the same shale variety that we’d seen earlier. They lay curled around themselves in sleep, their rocky chests rising and falling.
My hands fell to the hammer and chisel upon my belt. “Should we get the others?”
“Benji will still be in the water. Wouldn’t want to give the Oarsman time to vanish,” Rory whispered, stepping forward. “No sudden movements, all right?”
“I say, Bartholomew—”
“No talking, either.” He nodded at the stairs. “We go very, very quietly.”
My feet were silent and so, so cold upon the castle’s stone steps. I held the gargoyle’s hand in a vise and Rory took the other, his right hand balled in a fist around the Artful Brigand’s coin.
The three of us walked in a silent, crooked line up the stairs.
The shale sprites slept on, their sleeping breaths low growls. A few stirred, others sniffed the air—rows of teeth peeking behind thin lips. One even stuck out a jagged tongue as I passed, nearly grazing my bare foot. I flinched, tasting my own heartbeat.
But none woke.
Rory squeezed my hand. Kept pulling me forward. Rain pinged against his armor, and then we were past the sprites, up and up until there were no more stairs to climb.
We stood before the weathered castle door. Rory tried the handle. Locked.
“Someone ought to knock,” the gargoyle whispered.
Rory looked back at the sprites. Swallowed—then pounded the door.
The clamor resounded in the palm of the mountains, as if he’d knocked on the peaks themselves, and then there was a shuffling of footsteps, a low, terrible creak.
The sprites sprang awake, and the castle door opened. From it, darkness spilled, a cloaked figure within it.
He was taller than me—taller than Rory—wide in the shoulders and tapered at the waist. From the long spool of his tattered wool sleeve was a hand composed of gray skin and jagged joints.
The Ardent Oarsman clutched his stone oar and looked down upon us.
I couldn’t see his face. The mouth of his hood was all darkness. Still, I could feel his gaze. When the Oarsman spoke, his voice was a low rasp that put a thousand prickles on the back of my neck. “Who comes?”
“The king’s knight.” Rory stepped forward, lazily hunched. Had I not understood his back, his shoulders tighter than a bowstring, I might have thought him bored. “With a Diviner and her gargoyle.”
“A Diviner?” The Omen said it sluggishly, as if all the surprise had atrophied out of him long ago. “There must be some mistake.”
“There is no mistake, Oarsman.” My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “I’ve come for answers.”
Rory’s voice was dangerously even. “And to take up the mantle.”
The Oarsman stood eerily still. Slowly, he lifted a hand—withdrew the hood of his cloak.
I swallowed a scream. The Harried Scribe’s face had been flesh, but the Ardent Oarsman’s face was akin to the mountain sprites—gray, smooth in some places and rough in other. His eyes were smooth, pallid.
Made entirely of limestone.
His lips pulled back in a smile, and I saw that his teeth were fangs. Shattered, sharpened stone. His gaze shifted between Rory and me and the gargoyle. He lifted his oar, pointing it into the dark castle, and that terrible serrated smile widened. “Won’t you come in?”
Not even a flickering candle lent animation to the castle. Dark and full of angles, with no carpet, no hearth, Rory and the gargoyle and I were led into a hall, the sprites stalking in our wake. The east wall was opened up to the night, a low breeze blowing. Through a row of columns, I could see out into the peaks—see the basin of crystalline water and the moon over it.
Cold and entirely inhospitable, the hall bore only three adornments. A pool, hewn into the stone floor, brimming with water. A throne, gray and lifeless as everything else—
And a mountain of gold.
There were piles of it, stretching like pillars to the lofty ceilings. Coins, gold trinkets. I even saw the rich colors of jewels. A king’s fortune, as vast as the Harried Scribe’s library—all of it covered by a thick layer of dust.
“Quite the banquet hall you have,” Rory said, the room throwing his echo back at him. “Though reaching it proved a bit of a task.”
“I built it myself.” The Ardent Oarsman rounded his pool and stood on one side while Rory and the gargoyle and I remained on the other. “Culled granite and shale from the Peaks. It took time—I’m no stone mason.” His eerie eyes fell to the hammer and chisel on my belt. “But I learned a few things from my time upon the tor.”
His gaze rose to my face. “Was it you who left the spring water for me to find?”
I nodded, staring at his heaps of gold. The shale sprites lay down at its base, like dragons protecting their plunder. “Where did you get all your coin?”
The Ardent Oarsman laughed. A rough, barking sound. “To be feared, to be venerated, to be an Omen, bears great influence—and influence is owed affluence. Aisling’s gargoyles bring me many riches.”
I turned to the batlike gargoyle, but he merely shook his head. “’Twas not I.”
“What will you do with it?” I asked the Oarsman. “Your great wealth?”
“Do with it?” He frowned, as if he did not understand the question. “Measure time by its growth, I suppose.”
Rory scoffed.
But the Ardent Oarsman kept his gaze, unmoving, unblinking, on me. “But you are not like that, are you, Diviner? You have not been brought to me like one of Aisling’s treasures. You’ve simply…” He opened his arms. “Come. Like a little insect, beckoned by a flame.”
“I’ve already said why we’ve come.” Rory’s voice was hot iron. “The new king is taking up the mantle.”