Chapter Three She Whom I Have Known
CHAPTER THREE
SHE WHOM I HAVE KNOWN
Maude Bauer and the stone bat took me away with a frantic kind of haste, peering over their shoulders and flinching like the landscape behind us bore a whip.
We hurried over rocks and through brambles, running and panting and tripping until finally the looming shadow of the tor was gone, and nothing stood before us but a great open moorland.
I fell onto cold ground and coughed up bile. I must have fallen asleep like that—keeled over, fisting the ground like it was the only thing keeping me from falling off the earth—because when I woke there were clumps of grass in my hands.
“It’s the spring water,” Maude told me, touching a silver flask on her belt. “It’s made you sick.”
“How?” I rasped, though I might have asked what or why or when, such was my bewilderment. “How am I dead?”
Maude put up her hand, silencing me. A moment later she was prone on the ground next to me, and so was the gargoyle. There was a sound like thunder, a heaving rumble, then several sharp shrieks. When I peered through grass, my heart caught in my throat.
A herd of creatures moved over the moorland, fifty paces away.
Dozens of them. Some looked like animals, deer or bovine, but there was always something uncanny in their slender limbs, their limping gaits, their hollowed cheeks and eyes that made them unmistakably other.
Some walked on all fours while others traveled on two legs or with none at all—there were treelike creatures who had nothing but roots to travel on—while others flew on feather-less wings.
Some were small as rodents, others the size of bears.
But none was as great as the boar with rocks and grass growing from its back that led them along.
“Sprites,” Maude murmured. “A whole lot of them.” Her brow knit. “Strange for them to travel together.”
“Stranger still that they should travel at all,” the gargoyle said. “Where do creatures go when nowhere is safe enough to call home?”
Maude didn’t answer. When the thundering and shrieking stopped, the earth and the sky clear of sprites, she helped both the gargoyle and me to our feet and carried on.
We passed over windswept hills, the breeze wet, the clouds dark, but it never rained.
Beyond, the moorland seemed endless, no trees, no road, just rocks and grass that slithered over my greaves.
That evening, when we stopped to sleep after hours of walking, Maude took to her axe, sharpening it to perfection, then staring down at its blade like she was swearing some kind of fealty to it.
And the gargoyle… I didn’t understand exactly what he was doing, but he went off to his own little corner of our rock and dirt and grass camp and simply cried.
The whole world unnerved me, his sadness most of all. “What’s wrong with him?”
Maude did not look up from her axe.
“He doesn’t even have real eyes,” I muttered. “How can he weep?”
“He has his reasons.”
The next morning, I jolted awake from a dream that left no imprint upon my mind.
But my eyes were full of tears, and I was panting and shivering and curled in on myself, both hands pressing against the left side of my waist, where old blood upon my chainmail had turned brown and dried and begun to flake away.
The gargoyle sat beside me. “Hush, Bartholomew.” He patted my shoulder. “There is no pain now.”
We walked in silence, stopping occasionally to eat meager berries and other flora that did nothing to sate me. On the morning of the fourth day, I heard a rushing sound. An hour later, a large river came into view. When Maude saw it, the strain in her shoulders eased a whit.
“I suppose you’re not going to tell me where we are or where we’re going,” I said, kneeling, my stomach rumbling as I shoveled river water into my dried-out mouth.
“We’re between the Fervent Peaks and the Chiming Wood,” Maude said. “That there is the Tenor River.”
She moved upstream and crouched by the water, dropping her hand into its depths in quick intervals, trying to catch a fish, the rest of her answer as clipped as it had been the ten times she’d previously given it.
“We’re going to my house, Petula Hall, where it’s safe.
After that—” Her hand darted into the river with a splash and returned empty.
“There’s a stone object. A magical loom stone.
It will bring your memory back. I’ll find a way to get it.
Everything will make sense after that.” Not even the steady rush of water could mask the tremor in her voice.
“No need to tell you the whole bitter story twice.”
My stomach rumbled. “Difficult to have faith in a knight who can’t even catch her own lunch.”
Maude flinched, and the gargoyle slapped his foot against the river like a petulant child, making an enormous splash. “Don’t be a donkey! Can’t you see she’s in anguish, puzzled with guilt?”
Maude kept her eyes on the river. She did not look like how I imagined a knight would—weapon down, kneeling by the water, cheeks red with shame. “He means riddled,” she murmured. “I’m riddled with guilt.”
“Why?”
“Really, Bartholomew. I’ve explained this already.
” The gargoyle sat near me at the river’s edge, patting my head with exaggerated slowness like I was his dim-witted pet.
“We are running away from that boy in his big gold crown, because he broke my wing and killed you and stole our beloved Bartholomew from us.”
He hadn’t explained that. Neither of them had. “And in this scenario, Bartholomew is… who, exactly? Me? You? That stump over there?”
The gargoyle stuck his nose up and made a hmpf sound. “Bartholomew is Bartholomew and I am her squire.” He reached up as he spoke, idly petting the crumbling root of his left wing. A chunk of limestone the size of my fist fell from his back. “I don’t see how I can be any more clear.”
Perhaps his injury had addled his mind. I waved at the cracks in his body. “Do they hurt?”
He faced me. Said, in a wistful voice, “No. And also, terribly.”
Maude called from upriver. “We’re not catching anything today.” She picked up her axe. “Let’s go.”
On we walked, three tiny specks in a vast, windy land.
Hills dropped into valleys, and both were covered in clumps of granite.
We strayed back into the moorland, never far enough that we couldn’t hear the song of the roaring river, never near enough to anything that might be remotely mistaken for a road.
Up and down we went, Maude ever at the lead.
Then, upon the grassy crest of a knoll, she stopped mid-step.
The gargoyle came to stand next to her, and I followed. We looked down into a valley, and for a moment I didn’t know what we were looking at. There were rocks and bromegrass and a few patches of pale gowan flowers. But then I looked harder—
And saw a face.
An enormous animal face. It looked like a boar, only it was made of the earth itself. Rocks and grass grew from its back, and its tusks were giant pieces of granite. It blended into the landscape, lying so utterly still there was no mistaking the creature for anything but what it was.
Dead.
Slowly, Maude began to walk again. And while I was certain she, too, understood the creature had departed this life for the next, she walked on tender feet, tiptoeing through grass, as if not to wake it.
We stood before its snout. “A sprite?” I asked.
“A mountain sprite,” Maude answered. “Killed weeks ago.”
I had no memory. Still, there were things that, deep down, I knew. That dead things rotted, for instance. That they stank and bloated—if they were not made into carrion for crows and other hungry creatures first. But this enormous grassy boar had no stench. No bloat, not even any rot.
Its only sign of decomposition was the newly budded gowan flowers growing from its body.
Awestruck, I circled the beast, swearing under my breath as I admired the sprite’s size, its composition—the power it must have held in life. But then I saw protruding ribs, the telltale mark of hunger. Far worse, there were dozens of open wounds. Lesions. Deep punctures.
“Who did this?” My disgust had an acrid taste. “Another sprite?”
“Murder is a human enterprise,” said the gargoyle. “This is the knighthood’s work.”
I looked down at my own armor. “Why?”
Distant, Maude’s voice. “To protect the hamlets.” The same wind that moved her dark hair moved the petals of gowan flowers. “I’ve never seen a sprite left to lie. They’re almost always burned. I didn’t know they bloomed…”
A hush fell over us, and for a long moment we were as silent and unmoving as the dead sprite before us.
Then Maude reached for her right gauntlet.
Removed it, then her glove. Her steps grew labored, like she was more weighted, more pained, and when she came to stand before the creature, the fierceness in her eyes was gone.
“I am a knight like my mother and her mother and her mother, too,” she said.
“Kings and craftsmen put their faith in me. I took up the mantle. Killed Omens and erased false portents and bloodied my axe shattering Aisling Cathedral’s corruption.
I changed the Stonewater Kingdom, even if no one realizes it. ”
She looked up at the sprite, her voice quieting. “But in how many ways have I kept it the same?”
A tear fell from her painted eye, leaving a path of wet charcoal down her cheek.
“It’s my fault.” Maude turned to me. “I should have seen it coming. Only I didn’t think him capable—” She was wan, her words rough.
“The sword cut into your intestine. Without a surgeon, there was no stopping the bleeding. You were gone in minutes, and suddenly nothing I had fought for mattered, because I had not seen the danger right in front of me.” Again, she said, “I should have seen it coming.”
“Some signs cannot be read,” whispered the gargoyle.