The Knight and the Moth

For a time there was nothing, just silence and the occasional sound of Rory in the water. The air in the tu

Still, I saw it.

A shadow, darting past my periphery.

“Gargoyle?”

He was next to me, eerily still as he looked down the tu

“Is someone there?” I called out.

Is someone there? my echo answered.

I rubbed my eyes and tried to see into the impenetrable darkness.

There was a clacking—so near I felt it in my chest. Clack, clack.

Clack, clack, the echoes sounded. Clack, clack.

Prickles rose on the back of my neck. “Rory.” I leaned over the pit and tugged the rope. “The Heartsore Weaver, Rory.”

But my voice never found him under the water.

The gargoyle gasped. “Look, Bartholomew.”

Out of the darkness, a shadow shifted. It came toward me, and I saw that it was small and on wings. Pale and delicate as gossamer.

A moth.

It fluttered to my face, so close its wings stirred my lashes, then withdrew, fluttering back down the tu

“Wait for Rory,” I told the gargoyle, and stole after it.

The tu

There were more, I realized. Dozens of moths on the walls of the tu

I expected more darkness. And there was. But there was also the night sky. An opening in the cliff, roots and moonlight pouring in. I was in an oblong chamber, with walls of crude rock. Hundreds of weavings hung like tapestries around me. And from the weavings—

Little white sacks hung. Cocoons. Beneath them was a stone bench, stationed against the wall, and upon it—

A woman.

A naked woman, who lay supine and still, a shroud over her eyes.

The world went still. “One?”

I stumbled forward. Banged my knees upon the stone bench. “One.”

Mottled skin. Gray lips. Hands folded over her breasts, One lay upon the bench, her short brown hair fa

She looked like she was resting, but it wasn’t rest. Whatever dream One walked in now brooked no awakening. She was lost, adrift, gone. No, it wasn’t rest.

It was sleep, eternal.

A cry ripped up my throat.

“Shhh,” came a woman’s low, craggy voice. “Not all have woken.”

I reeled.

Out of shadow, slow and rigid, a figure came, her steps an ominous clack, clack against the cave floor. “It’s been a long time since anyone’s tripped my little snare,” she said. “Or made it out of my pit.”

She didn’t wear a cloak like she had when she’d come to my room last night. It was the same face I’d seen.

But it wasn’t a woman.

She looked like one of Aisling Cathedral’s gargoyles—hewn entirely of limestone. She had wings, tucked against jagged shoulder blades. A head like a goat, with gnarled four-digit paws for hands and hooves for feet. And her eyes, wide and pallid…

Were just like the other Omens’. Just like my batlike gargoyle’s.

Just like mine.

“You—” My armor clattered as I rose to my feet, standing in front of One. “You’re the Heartsore Weaver?”

“Weaver, I was. Heartsore, I am eternally.” The Omen came forward, looking at neither me nor One. She was peering upon her wall. Staring through stone eyes at the white silken cocoons attached to the thread. “You must be quiet. My moths are still sleeping,” she rasped. “Frail little things, they are.”

She began to hum. Tuneless, cacophonous.

I watched her, skin crawling. I did not want her to know how well she terrified me. “Where is your loom stone, Omen?”

“No loom. No loom stone.” She nodded at the tapestry upon the wall. “Once, I wove the finest garments in Traum. Silk robes, I made. But that was a long time ago.”

She kept staring at her tapestry, and I followed her eyes. The cocoons had attached themselves to one particular weaving, as if the sprites favored it. It was fashioned in a beautiful braid that ran along the wall. Not woolen, but fine. Thin, sheer, and pale.

Gossamer.

Diviner shrouds.

I let out a wretched sound.

“Hush,” the Heartsore Weaver rasped, looking down at One. “They come to me every ten years, Aisling’s Diviners, brought by gargoyles. Naked but for their shrouds, and always, always, dead. Still, they smell of spring water.” Her throat hitched. “Taste of it, too, I imagine.”

I drew my hammer and chisel, blocking One with my body. “If you touch her, I’ll—”

“I said be quiet.” The Omen showed her teeth, rows of cracked limestone. “I do not touch the Diviners. I lay them down here in my caves, my own little underworld, where the sea air has its way with them. It is the best burial I can offer.”

She looked over my shoulder at One’s lifeless body. “She was your friend?”

Tears burned my eyes, the cracks in my heart growing irreparably deeper. “Yes.”

“Is that why you have come? To see with your own eyes the fate of Diviners like yourself?” The Weaver’s eyes fell to my hammer and chisel. “Or have you been sent from your master upon the tor?”

I sprang forward, leveling the tip of my chisel against her stone throat. “I have no master, Omen. I come on my own volition to challenge you at your craft and claim your magic loom stone.” A single strike, and I could split her like I had a thousand stones before. “To take magic, power, myself, back from false gods like you.”

The Heartsore Weaver did not withdraw her throat from my chisel’s tip. “But I’m not a god,” she whispered. “Once, I was not so different from you.”

She blinked up at me with wide stone eyes. “Strange, that you have no memory before Aisling, yet you still knew to claw yourself free from that horrible tor. How wonderful, how wretched, it must have been, stepping out into the world. Learning the story you’d been told was a lie.”

“Do not pretend you did not benefit from that lie, Weaver. Is not the gold wasting in your pit from Aisling’s coffers? Did Diviners not drown, that you might earn it? Do folk not look for your signs in every bit of thread?” I was a rabid dog, my words snapping barks. “If I am wonderful and wretched for learning the truth of the Omens, your hands are marked by the blood of my metamorphosis.”

The Heartsore Weaver pressed her neck against my chisel, iron scraping against limestone. “Then you need not challenge me to my craft, daughter of Aisling. You have already beaten me by it.” She held out an empty stone paw, as if to show me she had nothing to lose—or give. “Who better than a lost Diviner to learn, then conquer, love and heartbreak?”

Moonlight crept through the fissure in the ceiling, casting the Omen and me in an eerie silver glow. “Where is your loom stone?” I asked again, my voice dangerously soft.

“That, I fear, is a long story.”

“I have time.”

She gri

The Heartsore Weaver took a step back from my chisel’s tip. “You know by now there is magic in the world. The stone upon the tor, its water—the spring you drank from, drowned in—is the mother of that magic. From it, five objects were hewn. A coin, an inkwell, an oar, a chime.” She sighed. “And a loom stone.”

I waited.

“What you do not know, perhaps, is we whom you call Omens had no sway over that magic when the objects were made. I did not chose my loom stone’s power, and neither did she who carved it for me, yet, strangely, it suited me. Magic is like a god in that way. All-knowing, and most effective when not fully understood.”

I hated talk of gods. “What does your loom stone do?” I said, clipped.

“I could slip my finger into the hole in the center of it. If the stone’s face was pointed outward, I would be transported—made invisible. I could jump through the walls of this cave. Travel twenty feet in the air. All I had to do was know in my mind where I wanted to go. So long as the distance was not more than my line of sight, I could get there. Brilliant magic it was. But when I turned the loom stone over, its face pointed inward—”

How burdened she suddenly looked. Her head lowered, as if weighed down. Even her eyes seemed too heavy to lift. “I was transported not in body, but in mind. Perhaps it’s because I’m a weaver, and a tapestry is like a memory brought to life. I always know what I was feeling in that moment, what I was thinking, when I look back on something I’ve woven. The loom stone was no different. I’d slip it on my finger, and it gave me back the most important thing I’d lost.”

Her eyes lifted. Found my face. “My memory. If I wished to, I could recall who I was before I was the Heartsore Weaver.” Her head turned as she surveyed me. “Tell me, Diviner. Do you recall anything before you tasted Aisling’s waters?”

I could tell she already knew the answer. “No.”

She nodded. “Losing something is painful. Sometimes, finding what we’ve lost is just as agonizing.”

I looked down at One, lifeless beneath the tapestry. Whispered, like I was telling her a story before bed, “You can never really go home.”

“No. You ca

The Heartsore Weaver looked out into the darkness of her cavern. “But I did not want to look back at who I was. I was too enthralled with being an Omen. For many years, I did not use the loom stone in that way. I kept to my hamlet, as we Omens said we would. For decades I sowed the seeds of gods and signs within the Cliffs of Bellidine. Used my loom stone to appear and vanish. To kill sprites. I gave Traum something to rally behind. To believe in.”

She began to pace. “Then, on a year without mark, she came. The Omens and I—we all needed the tor’s spring water to live. Not much, and not often, but we needed it. Sometimes the water came in a flask at the hands of her little foundling, but this time she brought it herself. We drank it together, like old friends. Then she asked me to make her a silk robe.”

The Heartsore Weaver reached out. Pet the gossamer weaving upon the wall, its delicate fabric snagging against one of her stone claws. “‘A Diviner is not so different from a silkworm,’ she said. ‘That is what I will call my foundling—a Diviner. He came into the world vulnerable. Fell into dreamless sleep. I wrapped him in my arms, put water to his lips, and he awoke a moth.’” Her stone eyes flashed. “‘Strange. Special. New. I want him to look the part.’”

My throat tightened. “You’re talking about the abbess. The abbess, and the foundling child from her story.”