Chapter Five My Queen, the Last Diviner
CHAPTER FIVE
MY QUEEN, THE LAST DIVINER
Five days earlier
Drink this, Diviner.”
A woman held out a silver cup. In it, a murky liquid sloshed, emitting a sharp, uninviting scent.
I didn’t take it. I was looking at my wedding gown.
Grayish white, silken, entirely without flaw.
It clung to my muscles, my breasts, my stomach, my hips, the effect like a sculpture—a meticulous marble bust. Then, as if it were water as well as marble, it fell in long, unrestrained waves down my arms and legs.
“Diviner?”
The woman was still holding the cup out to me.
Like stones scraped together, my voice came out a rasp. “What is it?”
“A tonic, my lady. From the king.”
I reached for the cup, sniffed it, and emptied its foul contents onto my wedding gown.
An ugly, rust-brown streak spread over pale silk, staining it the color of old blood. It was a child’s rebellion, sullying the white. A tiny bite upon an enormous, calloused hand. Still—it pleased me to have ruined something so perfect.
The woman gasped, then backed away, and so did the others who had dressed me, leaving me alone.
The room was large. Not so vast as the one I occupied at the top of the castle, but finer.
Curtains covered the windows, velvet and drawn.
There were shelves, laden with books and gold trinkets and finely carved busts.
A massive painting hung on the wall and below it stood a table, books and maps sprawled upon it.
I recognized one of them. An old book, its leather cover cracked and worn, its pages wrinkled.
Benji’s grandfather’s notebook.
It was splayed facedown upon the table. When I turned it over, the parchment was laden with slanted script, inky portraits of winged sprites drawn in the margins.
I read the open page.
The tree sprite, most often seen in the glens near Coulson Faire, is thought to be the smallest variety of sprite in the land of Traum, with a diet consisting almost entirely of beech leaves.
Small and winged and often iridescent, they are often mistaken for hummingbirds, but some can grow as large as crows, as vultures.
If you stop to listen, you will hear the distinct sounds of their voices—which always ring on a trill. A strange type of giggle.
Once, I’d heard that giggle. Knights had escorted the Diviners and me from our cloister on the tor and delivered us to a sparkling night at Coulson Faire.
Moonlight had flickered through treetops, and sprites had called from the boughs.
The grass on the holloway road had taken the imprints of my bare feet and held them, as if welcoming me onto its walk, and I’d dared to dream, in that moment, that I was a free woman.
Like the rest of my dreams, it had been untrue.
I slammed the king’s notebook shut. The only part of the room I had yet to examine was the painting above the table.
What a painting it was. Opulent, fixed in a gilt frame. Ten feet tall, and just as wide, it was a mural of vibrant color: purples and blues and greens and white.
Upon a nocturnal backdrop, a creature was rendered.
A great pallid beast—an ox, with long spiraling horns shooting from its skull.
Its body was long and wide and pale. Bromegrass and slender trees and gowan flowers grew from its back.
Its tail was that of a snake—it had claws as well as hooves.
Its eyes, pale and entirely without pupil, were made of stone, just like mine.
The creature was on its hind legs, rearing up against a horde of hunters, who stood so much smaller than it.
They wore crude breastplates and were armed with axes and swords—many of which were lodged in the creature’s blood-soaked chest. Its eyes were wide, and though it was only crafted of paint and canvas, I could feel this creature’s fear—its rage—to be so brutally attacked.
A door clicked behind me, footsteps sounding over creaking floorboards.
“My grandfather painted that.” Benji’s voice was more raspy than usual.
“Der ewige Mond, he called it. The Eternal Moon.” He drew closer.
“A great, fearsome sprite, the first, and last, of its kind. A monster. Some claimed it could shape-shift. That it was large as a mountain or as small as a thimble. Most said it did not eat, did not sleep, and for a long time, everyone said it could not die.” His tone was almost longing. “Not so.”
I did not look back at him. “I wonder how your grandfather would paint you, Benji.”
“Like every other sovereign in the history of the Stonewater Kingdom, I imagine. A man in a crown, small against Aisling Cathedral, her abbess, her Omens, her Diviners.” He paused. “Though perhaps my portrait might look different had my grandfather seen me last night.”
“You’ll always be small to me, boy-king.” I stared at the painting. “Do you truly think folk will believe sprites destroyed the cathedral?”
“They’ve believed stranger lies than that.” He spoke slowly. “Do not suppose I have not been purposeful in my actions, Six. All that has happened is the product of meticulous preparations.”
“No doubt.” I looked down at the stain on my dress. “How else might you have arranged for a wedding in less than a day?”
“It’s merely a ceremony. The rest comes after. As for the marital side of things… I don’t ask anything of you. Only that you join me on a pilgrimage once more through the hamlets. There’s to be a tournament in our honor.”
Still I would not look at him. “A pilgrimage for heretics,” I murmured.
“My grandfather always did say that faith requires a display. The greater the spectacle, the greater the illusion.” His voice caught in his throat.
“It doesn’t matter what we personally believe, Six, only that Aisling Cathedral no longer controls the spectacle.
We do. The illusion will take care of itself. ”
The floorboards kept creaking. When Benji spoke again, his tone was harder. “They told me you would not drink the tonic.”
I opened my mouth, but hands caught me from behind. My arms were pinned to my sides and my head pulled back. My mouth was forced open, the same sharp, uninviting scent I’d smelled in the cup filling my senses, then my mouth.
The tonic tasted like sour wine. Like molding berries. The aromatic dregs of something that might have once been a lavish brew, but had been left too long to fester—bitter as rot.
I choked. Swallowed. Coughed.
The hands released me. I swayed, unmoored, the thrum of a headache already beginning.
“Ox-eye,” Benji explained. “It dulls the body considerably.”
“A sedative?” A laugh tore out of me. “You’d marry an unconscious woman?”
“Diviners are useful when asleep, are they not?”
When I finally turned to look at him, twenty men and women watched me, bearing weapons and armor, as if I were the creature they hunted—
No. I was seeing double. Worse than double.
There were only five bodies behind me. The king’s favorites—Hamelin, Tory, Dedrick, Samuel.
They’d been the ones to shove the tonic down my throat.
Beside them, resplendent, was the king himself.
Benedict Castor the Third, his hair, his crown, both incandescently bright as he stood before me.
He wore full armor, the gorget around his neck hiding his throat—and the bruises I’d assuredly left—from view.
“Just a precaution, same as this.” Benji clasped his hands in front of him, then reached into his left gauntlet. He withdrew a small knife, grinned at me, then put it back. “The dose of ox-eye won’t make you sleep. But you’ll be less… spirited.”
“Less murderous, he means.” Hamelin stepped forward, and so did Tory. They each held a sash as pale as the silk of my gown. “Which do you want?” Tory asked Hamelin. “Arms or legs?”
Hamelin looked me up and down. “Legs.”
Tory clasped my left hand, then my right. “Put your wrists together, Diviner.”
I didn’t, so she pressed them together on her own, then set to binding them with the silk sash in her hand.
“Knot it well,” Benji murmured.
Meanwhile, Hamelin had gone down to a crouch.
His hand struck out bluntly, pushing my dress up, revealing my bare feet, my ankles, my shins and calves.
He knotted the silk around one ankle, then drew it over the floor and tied the other end to my opposite leg.
I’d still be able to walk—but my gait would be stifled. There would be no running.
“You’re wrinkling my dress.” I nudged my knee forward, breaking Hamelin’s balance. He fell from his crouch, the sound of his ass hitting the floor so loud it made Benji jump.
It was a colorful room, and Hamelin’s cheeks were the reddest things in it.
Dedrick Lange stepped forward. Middling in every way, neither short nor tall, fair nor dark, burly nor slender, I’d taken Dedrick to be no more than a knightly decoration.
Yet he was clearly the most trusted of the king’s new favorites.
In his hands, like an altar, there rested a long velvet cushion. And upon that altar, stone objects.
An oar, taking up the width of the cushion, and in front of it—
A coin.
An inkwell.
A chime.
A loom stone.
One by one, the knights drew close. Hamelin took the oar, Tory the loom stone, Samuel the chime, Benji the coin, leaving the inkwell, which Dedrick took. The cushion fell, the altar discarded. I turned to the king. “What is this?”
His brow lifted. “All that power had to go somewhere, Six.”
Light shone over the knights. They were not as Traum’s false gods had been: grotesque, corrupted by time and a false notion of divinity, and yet as they stood there, clutching the stone objects, all I could think of were the Omens.
Your king is full of falsehoods, I wanted to scream. He made a fool, a mule, of me. He took away my faith, my love, my life. In the end, he will take away yours, too. But then I glanced once more at the stone objects in their hands. They’d been paid in magic, Traum’s most precious resource.
Why would they believe me when I had nothing to give them?