Chapter Three She Whom I Have Known #2
Maude’s hand fell to the silver flask on her belt.
“This brought you back,” she said. “It was meant to lure out the Heartsore Weaver. Only a few of us know what the tor’s spring water can do for the dead.
” She glanced down at the gargoyle, more tears falling as she measured the cracks in his body.
“Only I’ve seen the kind of pain that befalls those who live past their time, and, well… ”
The breeze, a woeful hum, found a harmony with Maude’s pained voice. “I don’t think we’re meant to come back, Rory. Death is the only thing we all truly have in common. Human or sprite—we have but one life. There are no gods, but perhaps, perhaps, there is sacrality in our impermanence.”
My fingers began to fidget. “If it was so wrong to bring me back, why’d you do it?”
Finally, a smile on Maude’s stoic mouth. Small, forlorn. “Because you asked me to.”
We left the mountain sprite where it lay, until the great beast in the distance was but another hill upon the world’s grassy body.
Every second I was awake I seemed to know less than I had when I slept; there were moments when I asked myself if I was alive at all. To walk through a great, windswept world with no one save a forlorn knight and a strange, fissuring gargoyle seemed the sort of hazy dream afterlives were made of.
But then, just before sundown, a rabbit wandered across our path.
“Look, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle cried. “Hair!”
I yawned. “A hare?”
“Not one hair, a great many, and all upon an adorable little creature.” His fingers trilled excitedly. “I want to catch it and put it in my mouth and let it build a nest there.”
Maude and I shared a glance. She shrugged. “Dinner?”
“Adorable dinner.”
The gargoyle gasped, then began to run after the rabbit. “Don’t worry, Bartholomew, I will save you from these heathens!”
I chased after him, and he after the terrified rabbit, Maude limping behind. We ran through a valley and up a knoll, then down again to a small wood where a road and a bridge stretched over the Tenor River.
Three elderly women in brightly dyed gowns stepped onto the road.
When they saw the gargoyle sprinting toward them, and I behind him, all three opened their mouths and shrieked.
The hare, the smartest of the bunch, heard the clamor and pivoted, darting into a deep bramble.
The gargoyle followed, screaming as he plowed through vines and underbrush, and, damn me, I should have gone after him, but I was in armor, a knight in appearance, and wasn’t it a knight’s duty to be civil?
I dug my heels into the dirt road and skidded to a halt.
“Erm, begging your pardon, we were just—”
The first woman broke a basket over my head, the second kneed me in the groin, and the third shoved me. I hit the ground and let out a burst of language so obscene it caused the women to shriek anew before all three took off running, leaving me writhing and swearing upon the road.
A minute later, Maude was standing over me. “Good thing you’re already dead. That basket might have killed you.” She was hiding a smile. “What was it you called them? ‘Toady fucking twats’?”
I coughed. Groaned. “I was trying to be nice.”
“Out of your depth, my boy.”
She handed me off the ground, and together we found the gargoyle twenty paces away, balanced on his heels, ass in the air, peering into a dark rabbit hole. “Bartholomew! Can you hear me? Barthoooolomewww—”
“Shh.” Maude waved her hands in our faces, signaling silence, her green eyes wide as she gestured at the wood beyond.
Voices echoed. More than three.
“They came from the road,” a woman called. “Dorothea and Elda saw them, too! A strange squat sprite and a foul man in armor, weren’t they?”
Foul? I mouthed.
Maude shook her head and the gargoyle nodded.
More voices came. “I don’t see anyone. You likely scared them worse than they did you.”
“And broke my best basket in the process.”
“A bad portent, if you ask me. I’m never leaving the Cliffs again.”
One of the voices was sharper than the others. “A bad portent? Are you two mad? Did you not see his eyes?”
Maude inhaled, and so did the gargoyle, a grating silence taking hold of the wood.
When the woman spoke again, her voice was no longer sharp but weighted with reverence.
“They looked just like the Diviner’s eyes when she came with the knights for the king’s ceremony.
Pale, inhuman; touched by some holy magic. ”
More silence. Then—
“Oh dear. Does assault count as sacrilege?”
“We should search for him.” There was a rustling of hurried steps. “He may know things. Of the Omens, of our futures! He can’t have gotten far.”
Their outcries blended after that, too eager to make out except that they were getting quieter.
The group of women were headed in the wrong direction.
When the noise of them was barely a murmur, Maude led us out of the bramble.
There were thorny vines stuck in her greaves.
Berry stains on her boots. Dead leaves in her hair.
She didn’t notice any of them. Her green eyes were near and far, narrow and focused on nothing. “Come on,” she said in a slow voice. “Let’s go.”
The sun went down. We sat in the hills near the river and had no fire, just the blue-violet sky and its stars and mother moon for light.
The gargoyle snored, murmuring in his sleep. “Mutton makes a lovely summer hat.”
I sat next to Maude. “Those women spoke of Omens.” Every thought was a lonely candle in the hollow of what I’d once known. “What’s an Omen?”