The Knight and the Moth

CHAPTER THIRTY THE END OF THE STORY

We returned to where Traum’s most sanctified story, its most crafted lie, began.

The tor.

It had taken all day to get there. I was on horseback, holding tightly to Rory, and for once Fig cantered with urgency, as if she felt our turmoil. Benji rode behind us—without the rest of his knights. What we meant to do was not for them to see. Above, still too injured to ride, Maude flew in the arms of the gargoyle. Our pace was unrelenting, our brows slick with sweat as we hastened through Traum’s hills upon the holloway road, hungry to lay all our rage upon the cathedral’s door. To collect the last stone object—to kill the final Omen.

To end the story.

We reached the tor at nightfall. Aisling Cathedral was coated in moonlight. I stared up at its looming edifice, its wall. It was not so long ago the Diviners and I had perched, watching the king come, on that very spot.

The path felt steeper than it ever had.

We reached the cathedral gate and found it shut. Locked. Benji held the Harried Scribe’s inkwell and the Ardent Oarsman’s oar, and Maude bore an axe with her uninjured arm. The gargoyle held tight to the Faithful Forester’s stone chime, and Rory the Artful Brigand’s coin, which he raised, rough side up—and threw.

Aisling’s iron gates exploded, a

I pushed ahead of the group. “Abbess!” Gravel flew as I marched into the courtyard. “I’ve come back.”

The statues in the courtyard watched me, and so did the cathedral’s stained-glass eyes. The night air was cold, fluttering out of my nostrils on misty tendrils. I raised my hammer. “Abbess!” My arm, my fury, was exact. I struck the statues, hitting them again and again, unrelenting until all five were cracked and crumbling. “I’ve come back!”

Nothing.

Then, like the moths I’d watched rise from cocoons, she came.

Out from the shadow the abbess crept, coming to stand before the cathedral’s colossal wood doors. Behind her, six gargoyles trailed. Chimeras of human and animal features, entirely hewn of stone.

The wall of Rory’s chest hit my spine, and the gargoyle’s—Bartholomew’s—stone hand slipped into mine. Even Benji looked fearsome next to Maude, the two of them standing at my wings. We were but five in number, but we felt like an army, come to storm the gates and rip a wicked foe from their towering pedestal.

But if our arrival, our appearance, our promised violence touched the abbess, she made no indication of it. She hid behind her shroud, her voice entirely distant. “Six.” Her chin dipped as she took me in. “You’ve come home.”

I’d forgotten her effect. How pale her dress and gloves were. How mesmerizing her shroud looked when the wind rippled over it. I came forward like a beast of prey. When I stood before her, our heights were the same. I’d never noticed that. “I wanted to see you,” I told her. “One last time.”

I struck out—grasped her shroud.

Tore it off.

And gasped.

It wasn’t just the abbess’s eyes, like Omens, like Diviners, that were hewn of limestone. All of her was stone. She had no hair, her skin—lips, cheeks—just as pale as her eyes. Only she was not a gargoyle. Her face was still that of a woman. She was beautiful. Mythical. Fearsome.

Entirely inhuman.

The abbess never turned her gaze upon Rory or Maude or Benji or even the gargoyle. Her pallid eyes remained ever fixed on me. First the left, then the right, she stripped her gloves, revealing smooth, unblemished stone arms. Were she a carving—a statue—she would be declared perfect, her craftsman named a master.

Her lips spread into a lavish smile. “Am I all that you imagined?”

She reached into her dress. From its neckline, the abbess extracted a stone circle upon a thread. A loom stone.

“Kill them,” she told the gargoyles. She reached out, catching my wrist with bruising strength, then slid a finger into the hole in the loom stone—

And the two of us disappeared.

I was falling, my body nothing. The abbess and I passed through darkness, into the cathedral, down the nave, over the chancel—where she dropped me.

I fell like a stone and collided with water, sucked into the cold womb of the spring. I put out my arms, churning water, trying to reach the surface.

A hand found my throat, just above my chainmail, and yanked.

I breached the water, gasping. High above me, the night sky touched the cathedral’s rose window, painting it blue. But then the abbess loomed over me, blotting out the light. “You poor thing.”

Beyond, echoing down the cathedral’s throat, I could hear the clash of weapons—Rory, Maude, Benji—fighting against the gargoyles in the courtyard. There were gargoyles near the spring, too. Seven of them, closing in from the shadows of the ambulatory.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” the abbess murmured, pressing my neck. “Out there, beyond my wall?”

“If you mean the truth, Aisling, yes. I did.”

Her chest heaved, low, contemplative noises sounding behind her lips. “Then you know why you have no memory before this place. No memory of being taken from the gutter, too sick even for the foundling houses in the Seacht to keep you. No memory of my gargoyle, carrying you into my cathedral.”

She gri

She shoved me back under the water, showing me just how strong she was as she held me down—down. I clawed at her. Thrashed. Spots bloomed behind my eyes—

She yanked me up, air punching its way back into my lungs.

“After,” she said, like my coughs and splutters were nothing, “I put water to your lips, and you awakened, as if reborn. But just as you came, so too must you go. I learned with Bartholomew that no Diviner should dream forever. You tend to spoil with time, your loyalty fissuring. You begin to yearn for a life beyond the tor.”

She signed. “That is why, when you, my most perfect Diviner, broke my rules and left the tor for a night of impiety at Coulson Faire, I knew it was time to replace you.”

She leaned over me, her loom stone dangling from the string around her neck. “I began with Four. Slipped the loom stone over my finger, whisked her away. I kissed her brow, held her closely—then broke her neck. That’s the beautiful thing about my spring water. It only brings you back once. Four died, and this time, it stuck.”

She seemed proud when my eyes grew wide with loathing, a smile upon her pale mouth. She always did love telling a story. “I sent her with a gargoyle, who brought her to the Artful Brigand. One by one, I retrieved the Diviners with the loom stone. Held them in my arms. One by one, I broke their necks. Stripped them of their robes; sent them out into the hamlets that the Omens might have their fill. Terribly inconvenient, as I have yet to find new girls. But it had to be done, because you decided to break my rules and lead the Diviners off the tor. So really, my dearest girl, you might say this entire misadventure began”—her lips curled—“because of you.”

I struck her with a closed fist. Hard, just beneath the jaw. Her head snapped back, but her grip remained tight over my throat.

The gargoyles rushed forward, stone hands catching along my head, my shoulders, my knees—pressing with brutal strength over my armor. I writhed. Screamed.

But I couldn’t get away from them. Couldn’t get out of the spring. Couldn’t move but to barely hold my mouth above the water’s fetid surface.

“What about the Faithful Forester? She’s been dead decades.” Spring water slipped between my lips, choking me. “Are you such a monster that you would kill one of your own Diviners for an Omen nigh thirty years gone?”

For the first time, emotion touched the abbess’s unflinching coolness. Her stone brow twisted, her eyes narrowing.

“You did not know she was dead? Killed by one of King Castor’s knights?” I coughed. Laughed. “You stand here upon your chancel, upon your tor, and look down at everyone, looming like a god. But you know nothing of what really goes on in the hamlets. Nothing of the real Traum.” I choked on water. “It will be your undoing.”

She squeezed my throat. “Diviners and kings come and go—and so will Omens. Traum is but five hamlets and me. If my gods are killed, I will make new ones. A Diviner’s blood is never wasted, so long as someone is fed.” Her lips peeled back in a smile. “I’m sure their carcasses were a fine feast for sprites.”

I thrashed in the water. “You could have let us go after our service, like you promised. If the Omens needed spring water, you could have given them spring water. But blood…” My voice ripped up my throat. “How could you be so monstrous?”

“To the faithless, a god is a monster. And I am certainly a god.” She touched her stone skin. “I was born in this very spring, a hundred years before Bartholomew came to the tor. I was a babe—a stillborn. I have never tasted humanity, nor food, only sweet, rotten water. My infant flesh fell away, leaving only stone.” She smiled. “And there is nothing to stone.”

She looked down on me, pitiless. “But you… flesh and hair and blood… you’re young. Guileless. You do not understand the weight a god must bear, or that, sometimes, we must do the wrong thing for the right reason. You do not know what it takes to rule this tor, and you do not know the responsibility of controlling that which you have created. Starving things make for loyal pets, so long as you feed them just enough. It’s how I control my Diviners, starving them for love, and it’s how I control the Omens. They craved spring water, and so I gave it to them, diluted in blood, that they’d always heed me, hungering for more.”

I’d never heard her laugh before. The sound bubbled out of her like boiling water. “They could have stopped drinking—the Heartsore Weaver did. They would still be eternal, like my gargoyles. But when you tell someone they are a god long enough, they stop believing they should have to give anything up. All they do is take.”

Again, she pushed me into the water. Held me down, longer this time, yanking me out just before I lost consciousness.

“Was I not like a mother to you?” she whispered over my soaked face. I couldn’t hear the noise in the courtyard anymore. My gasping lungs, my pulse, were too loud. “Did I not care for you, clothe you? Make you wondrous? I would have kept you, Six. You would have made such an obedient gargoyle.”

She ripped my hammer and chisel from my belt. “You have been a witness to the wonders of the Omens. A pupil to their portents. Ever but a visitor to their greatness.” When she looked down at me, I could tell she thought it was for the last time. “Now sleep.”

She kept one hand on my throat, and raised the chisel with the other. The gargoyles gripped me harder, holding me still.