Chapter One The Night Aisling Fell #2
But then he struck me again, his fist finding the crook of my arm. Benji hit me once, twice, thrice, until my conviction fell away. I let go of his throat, and for a moment neither of us did anything but struggle to breathe.
“You should have killed me, too.” Despair pressed itself upon me with bruising force. “You should have killed me.”
“You’re already dead, Six,” Benji whispered. “That’s what makes you so special.”
The king pulled a stone coin from beneath his pillow. Tossed it into the air—
And vanished.
The door burst open.
The guards from my room and the two from outside shoved their way into the chambers. Behind them, armor glistening, stood a pair of knights. A woman with a pinched face and dark eyes, and a man with sand-colored hair and perfect teeth.
Tory Bassett and Hamelin Fischer took in the room, then turned their gazes on me. Tory’s dark eyes narrowed, and Hamelin held out his arm, the guards around him cowering. “Lost, Diviner?”
The two of them returned me to the top of the castle. Tory did not touch me, but Hamelin reached out every ten or so steps to softly graze my elbow. A reminder that he was there. A threat.
They led me up the final stairs to the highest floor. “You were as docile as a lamb all the way here.” Hamelin’s laugh rumbled behind me. “A ruse, I see.”
I stepped into the Artful Brigand’s room, keeping my back to him. Hamelin slammed the door shut, closing the three of us in together.
“That was foolish,” Tory said, clipped. “Waltzing around the castle. You’re an important woman—what if something had happened to you?”
I gave them nothing but my rigid spine.
“Benedict gathered the knights and told them everything a few hours ago.” Hamelin’s voice was close to my ear.
“He told us that sprites attacked the cathedral, killing its abbess, its gargoyles, its Diviners. He said, before she died, the abbess gifted him five magical objects, all different in variety; tokens of gods that he used to reduce the sprites to pieces.”
His voice went low. “He also said that with Aisling gone, the spring buried, the only way to reach the Omens now is to look into your stone eyes.”
My stillness must have aggravated him, because Hamelin’s tone turned goading. “A shame about your pet gargoyle. About Maude and Myndacious. The lot of them, crushed by rubble.”
My entire body locked.
“Too easy a death for a prick like Rory if you ask me—”
I turned on my heel, shoving Hamelin so hard he hit the floor. “Get out.”
His armor groaned as he struggled to a stand. He stared at my stone eyes, fear wafting off him like smoke. Tory picked him off the ground and led him to the door. “Get some sleep, Diviner,” she said. “The ceremony begins in the morning.”
“What ceremony?”
Hamelin closed the door. I heard the click of iron, and then… nothing.
I hauled myself to a dark corner of the room and lay with my arms wrapped around my knees as well as my armor allowed.
So this would be Traum’s new story, then.
Its new lie. That sprites had destroyed Aisling Cathedral.
That the only magic that remained in the world was the stone objects the Omens had once held—coin, inkwell, oar, chime, loom stone.
And me.
Amazing how the boy-king could take everything from me and make me holy in the same hour.
I lay on the floor of the Artful Brigand’s chamber, weighed down by certainty.
All that I loved was gone, and all that I’d done ridding the kingdom of false gods had been for naught.
The cathedral had fallen, but its shadow remained over Traum, and not even the tallest building or birch tree or mountain peak could pierce its darkness to reach the light.
I was a failed Diviner, and barely even a knight, but I knew well enough how to make a vow.
There in the Artful Brigand’s chamber, tears journeying from my eyes, I swore that for what he’d done, Benedict Castor the Third would die.
Tonight’s failure was a gift; death in the dark was too good for him.
Whatever tomorrow promised, I’d kill the king of Traum the same way I’d Divined for him at Aisling Cathedral.
With a ceremony.
I shut my eyes. When I wept, the noise in my throat was the same as when I’d drowned in Aisling’s spring water, and when it finally faded, I spent the night listening for things I would never hear again.
The rhythm of the other Diviners, breathing in their sleep.
The gargoyle, humming out of tune. Maude’s steady laugh.
Rory’s voice.
Tears dripped from my jaw, wetting the chain netting of my coif and then slipping into the cavern of my breastplate, where they pooled and chilled me until I began to shiver.
When sleep finally came, I was wondering at stories—at truths and falsities and how neither kept me company, but both kept me wondering. What had become of Maude? Would the cracks in Bartholomew’s body spread until he was nothing but shattered stone?
Had Rory succumbed to his wound?
Was it a lie if I told myself that, before he slept the endless sleep, Rodrick Myndacious, the heretic, the beautiful rogue—the best knight I’d known—hadn’t bothered calling out to gods or men? Was it wrong to hope that, just before he died…
… He’d said my name instead?
The Artful Brigand’s chamber opened and gray morning light poured in. Above me, four silhouettes loomed.
Hamelin Fischer from the Fervent Peaks, Tory Bassett from the Cliffs of Bellidine, Dedrick Lange from the Seacht, and a fourth knight with short, dark hair and copper skin and charcoal around his eyes.
Samuel Eichel, I remembered. Son of Helena Eichel, the noblewoman from the Chiming Wood who had presided over the king’s ceremony.
The one we’d stolen the Faithful Forester’s chime from. The one who’d been eaten by a birke.
“We’re to take off your armor,” Tory said to me.
They tried not to touch me as well as the task allowed, but their eyes were upon me, searching mine, as if they might see an Omen in the pallid nothingness of my gaze.
When breastplate and cuisses and greaves and all the other pieces were off, all four led me away.
The last thing I saw in the Artful Brigand’s chamber was my armor, crumpled and spineless upon the floor like it was my own dead body.
They took me to a washroom, where women scrubbed my skin until it was pink. And while they each searched my gaze, nothing in their own indicated they even saw me. They, like the rest, had undoubtedly been told they might glimpse an Omen if they peered long enough at my eyes.
My scalp was cleaned and my hair combed. Tory returned then. In her arms, long and white like a sallow eel, was a silk dress.
And I understood why the armor had been left behind. The ceremony that had been intimated. Today, I would not be a Diviner or a knight, but a martyr. If not the holiest, then surely the most tragic—the unwilling bride.
Today was my wedding day.