Страница 64 из 90
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO FEEL, BUT CANNOT SEE
I did not leave my bed for days.
I couldn’t move without pain. And my mind was dark. Violent. I imagined Diviners, lying still like they once did on Aisling’s chancel, only now their cheeks were wan with death. Omens loomed over them, fingers curling greedily over gossamer. When I slept, I dreamed of bodies, broken apart. Of wet, horrible sounds. Of blood and flesh and bone. Then I’d wake, hoping, in the brief sliver between sleep and consciousness, that I was back in the Diviner’s cottage, in bed next to One.
But she was gone. They all were.
Awake or asleep, I felt sick.
On the fourth day in bed, I became too overcome to cry, to eat. The gargoyle sat in my room and hummed to himself. “Would you like me to tell you a story? The one with the tragic begi
“I have no use for stories.” My eyes grew unfocused behind my shroud. “Tragedy and desolation are right here with me.”
“Yes.” He went back to humming to himself. “But I am here, too, Bartholomew.”
At midday, there was a gentle knock on my door. I heard Maude’s voice on the other side. “What, Benji?”
The king’s tone was fraught. “It’s not our place to intrude upon her grief.”
“She needs to eat.”
“If you treat her like she’s fragile,” Benji said pointedly, “she’ll start to think that of herself. Let her remain as she is, strong and fearsome—”
Rory didn’t say anything. He just opened the door and came in. When he saw me lying motionless on the bed, his entire body went taut.
I rolled onto my other side. “Go away.”
“No.”
“Bartholomew is in the throes of despair.” The gargoyle kept on humming. “A rather undervalued state of being, if you ask me.”
No one issued any questions. They scattered themselves around the room, like it was natural that they be there. The gargoyle asked the king for a sip of wine, then coughed into his cup while Rory paced in front of the window and fidgeted with his coin, turning every minute or so to look at me.
Maude sat on the bed. She rubbed my back, soothing my shoulders, ru
Eventually, I did. Neither grief nor fury let go of me, but being tended by Maude and Rory and the gargoyle—even Benji—not simply because I was useful to them, but because they cared for me, tempered some of my sickness. I ate. Slept.
On the sixth day, I rose from my bed, putting all the transportive stories I’d told the Diviners of things we’d do in the wild world of Traum away. The only story I told myself now was a hard-hearted tale of vengeance. Of destruction.
I’d find the Faithful Forester’s lost chime. Go to the Cliffs of Bellidine, kill the Heartsore Weaver. Then I’d return to where it all began. The tor, the cathedral upon it—
And face the abbess.
Mother, I’d once thought her, back when I’d spent all my strength trying to please her. But she was not a mother. She was an insect, weaving false stories, feeding upon my pain—working Aisling’s machine for her own glory, her own power, her own timelessness. No. She was not a mother. She was the sixth Omen. The moth. And for what she’d done to me, to the other Diviners, to Traum itself—
I’d take the tools she’d given me. Then, with hammer, with chisel…
I’d a
Petula Hall had been in Maude’s family for centuries, the Bauer name prominent in the Chiming Wood. Indeed, Maude herself was the jewel of the Wood, and I came to realize as we traversed into the hamlet and the village within that it wasn’t always me or the gargoyle folk would stare upon, but her. Maude, whom they would offer their hands, calloused from wielding axes, in greeting.
The air smelled different in the Chiming Wood than it had in the Fervent Peaks or the Seacht or Coulson Faire. Here, within the embrace of birch trees—where the houses were all made of pale wood and every man, woman, and child wore charcoal around their eyes and an axe on their belts—the air smelled sharp, hinting of idleweed.
Folk spoke under the ba
“I heard a terrible noise on the wind this morning. Was it a sign of bad things to come?”
“A fine gale blew, and I felled a great tree, but its insides were rotten. Is the Faithful Forester trying to tell me something?”
“What do you see behind your shroud when you look upon the Wood?”
My only answer was silence. There was nothing to say. I’d become molten iron, hit so many times by everything that had happened since the king had come to Aisling Cathedral that I no longer recognized myself. The Ardent Oarsman’s bite had taken my faith, my obedience, clean out of me, and for the first time in my life, I felt rage to be revered. Venomous vitriol that the story of the Omens, of Aisling—of me—was a lie.
Nothing felt holy anymore, except maybe the dead.
“The Wood is so vast,” I said, tripping over bramble as I walked with the others into the village. “Where do we even begin to search for the Forester’s chime?”
“There is a glen,” Maude said. “It’s sacred, because some nitwit from the Eichel family claimed he saw the Faithful Forester there some decades ago, and the elders have used it as a place of meditation ever since.”
Rory spun his coin between deft fingers. “That’s where they have their ceremonies when a new king comes.”
“Which means as soon as the knighthood gets here, we’ll be permitted inside.” Benji kicked rocks. “Your king will be a useless spectacle for the Wood’s nobles, leaving the rest of you to search the glen for the Faithful Forester’s stone chime.”
“I wouldn’t call you a useless spectacle,” Rory said, throwing his arm over Benji’s shoulder. “Just a happy little distraction.” He mussed the king’s hair. “You’re getting good at it. Looking all doe-eyed, practically weeping reverence to the Omens, Mr. Ever But a Visitor.”
“The kingdom’s finest actor,” Maude offered.
“Or her best liar,” the gargoyle said pleasantly.
Benji’s blue eyes shot to my face, as if to say, They don’t know what it’s like to have to perform. But you and I do.
I was still angry at him for the secrets he’d kept about lost Diviners. But I could see in his blue eyes how eager he was to find the stone objects. To take up the mantle and succeed where his grandfather had not. To prove his worth. I’d been like that not so long ago. Of all the faces I’d seen since I’d left the tor, I feared I saw my own in Benedict Castor’s the most.
It took effort, but I smiled at him. “You bear it well.”
On the seventh day in the Chiming Wood, we received a falcon that the knights were near. On the eighth day, we came to the village to receive them. I sulked beneath a birch tree, picking yellow leaves off a branch, waiting.
Across the square from me, leaned up against a tree next to Benji and Maude, Rory spoke to a pair of woodsmen. He was listening to them, but u
Thief.
“You’re making a face at the knave,” the gargoyle said, startling me. He was playing with the fuzzy seeds of a dandelion, peering around me at Rory. “Why are you giving him the cold mouth?”
“It’s ‘the cold shoulder,’ gargoyle.”
He blinked. “What would he want with your shoulder?”
“What would he want with my mouth?”
Amazing how, even with a face entirely of stone, the gargoyle could admonish me with a single look. He’d been giving me that look for days now. Maude and Benji, too—though they’d taken to ru
It had begun the night I’d told Rory my name. Maybe earlier, if I was being honest with myself. But I’d noticed it distinctly when he’d changed the bandage on my neck.
He’d peeled old linen away with such poignant effort, you’d think he was removing my skin. One hand on my chin, the other on my shoulder, Rory had turned my head, tendering the teeth marks in my neck a pointed look.
“Well?”
“Getting better.” I’d smelled something sharp, then the sweet, aromatic scent of beeswax. Rory spread wax over the punctures the Oarsman had left.
I’d shivered when his thumb had grazed the hollow of my throat. “Just a chime and a loom stone left,” I’d said, “and your king will have successfully taken up the mantle.”
“Couldn’t have done it without you,” he’d murmured, eyes on his work. But then they’d lifted, darting over my mouth. His cheeks had gone red, and my heart had cantered, and I’d felt his do the same in the pulse of his thumb… two beats, arguing for dominance.
Rory had dropped the linen. Cursed. “I’ll get more.”
Left the room in a rush.
And that was how it went. He’d change my bandages, applying balms and ointments and honey, and I’d hold so still I imagined myself carved of stone. But no matter Rory’s precision or my stillness, we were always flushed and breathless by the end.
I thought it would stop once I’d healed. But telling him my name—grieving in front of him—had changed something between us.
It felt like a fever, looking at him. I was dizzy and thoughtless for it.
The gargoyle tutted. “You two have been posturing long enough.” He shouted at Rory. “I say, Bartholomew! Won’t you come over here a moment?”
“What are you doing?” I seethed.
Rory’s dark eyes swung my way. His throat hitched, and then he was coming over, looking bored but for the telltale red in his cheeks. “Help you with something?”
“For the sake of my sanity—” A dandelion seed flew up the gargoyle’s nose. He leaned back. Cried out. Sneezed in Rory’s face.
I barked a laugh, and Rory shut his eyes. “That’s why you called me over? To sneeze on me?”
“A thousand apologies. What was I saying? Ah, yes.” The gargoyle put a stone hand on my shoulder. “For the sake of my sanity, put Bartholomew out of her misery. Tell her you’re in love with her.”