Chapter Five My Queen, the Last Diviner #3
Finally, the king turned to Regius Ormsby, who was watching us with thin lips and an expression sewn of two distinct threads—interest and irritation. “If you would say the words, Regius.”
“Of course, Majesty. Take your bride’s hands.”
Benji’s gaze flickered to my hands, tethered beneath my sleeves and wrapped in my Divination robe. “That won’t be necessary.”
“Neither, it seems,” Regius muttered beneath his breath, “is my presence.” He ran a hand over his brow, smoothing oily strands of hair into place, and looked up, smiling. “Wine, then.”
A woman with a tray holding two silver goblets stepped forward. She placed one cup to Benji’s mouth and the next to mine. When the wine touched my lips, it was bitter.
“Repeat after me,” Regius told the king. “I vow to be your king, your ruling hand, but to also keep my knightly virtues. To be a witness, pupil, visitor…”
His words began to bleed together. It was the wine. I knew it the moment it slid over my tongue, sharp and acrid; it had been laced with the same draft forced upon me an hour ago. Ox-eye.
My stomach rolled.
Benji finished speaking, the silence in the great hall thick as wool. Then, on impulse, the king reached up. Took me by the shoulders and turned me toward the audience. Caught my veil in his uncalloused palm, and lifted it.
Cries echoed in the hall. Folk looked upon my uncovered eyes, ensorcelled by amazement. Rapt—wanting a good show. It was the same way they’d looked at me since I was a girl, always wanting a peek beneath my Diviner shroud.
At last they’d been offered a glimpse at what lay behind it.
“Stone eyes,” Benji called above the noise.
“Perhaps you glimpsed them uncovered when she was my knight. Look into them long enough, and you may see your future. Together, the queen and I will protect the hamlets, banishing sprites and reading portents. In time, Traum’s most sacred story will not merely be one of a spring upon a tor”—Benji’s voice perforated the great hall—“but of a king from Coulson Faire, and his holy, Diviner queen.”
Applause swelled through the hall—but it did not reach me.
I was suddenly far away.
Ox-eye burning the inside of my mouth, my eyes rolled back in my head.
Images flashed across my mind—I saw water sprites splashing through the rushing waters of the Tenor River, passing into dozens of streams and canals as they swam beneath the bridges of the Seacht.
Next, the scraping rock faces and the enormous mountain sprites of the Fervent Peaks—the vibrant yellow tops of the Chiming Wood’s birch trees, and the birke that tarried between them.
There were pink thrift flowers that grew along the Cliffs of Bellidine, then I dropped through the earth, following their roots into darkness, into the dank, intricate cave system beneath the ocean cliffs.
Every hair on my body was a needle, every pump of blood a torrid rush. I soared above the Stonewater Kingdom like I was a bird, my vision stretched a thousand miles wide, the weight of my mind as immovable as a mountain, as inconsequential as an insect.
My vision tilted. I was lying on my back, looking up at Aisling Cathedral’s reaching cloisters, unable to move, despair an anvil upon me, the stone ceiling a lid to my coffin.
My jaw fell open, a low, terrible rasp ripping up my throat.
“You look upon me,” I called, “but you do not know me. I am older than the world, younger than time, permanent as the sky, and temporal as a dream. It is I who measures Traum’s portents.
I who Divines what is to come, for naught but the past can foretell the future. ”
The clamor in the great hall snuffed out. I could feel Benji’s piercing gaze. “What are you doing, Six?”
“What happened before will happen again,” I said in that awful, rasping voice. “Tools will turn to weapons, and the stacked stones of faith and accordance shall crumble. The Stonewater Kingdom shall end as it began: Fractured. Bloody.”
Breath spilled from my mouth in hot, raging pants.
“The cathedral falls,” I gasped. “Run—and take heed!
History may be hewn of stone, but the future grows in its cracks.
Not all that are lost are gone. A heretic can defend faith.
The lowest creature can still reach the highest peak, and even death bears its flowers.
A martyr might yet defeat a tyrant, but none shall overthrow a god…
“Without becoming one themselves.”
The great hall was silent, its tongue in my fist. Color had fled Benji’s cheeks, a watery sheen coating his eyes. He opened his mouth, a choked voice coming out—
But no one heard him.
A whistling gale was coming from outside, growing louder by the second. Castle Luricht’s windows began to shake, and the knell grew louder, like a storm. Some of the guests put their palms to their ears, but the noise kept coming, kept raising.
Then the wind was not like a gale at all but a shrieking cry. It pressed over the castle like an iron helmet, echoing so loudly the walls trembled, the air vibrated—
The windows of the great hall shattered and hundreds of winged creatures soared into its depths.
The scream began.
“Sprites!”
Hamelin was shouting, hailing the knights. “Take up weapons!”
Regius Ormsby fled the dais, the ceremony reduced to bedlam as the guests ran for the entryway. Above them, the sprites—winged, like the ones I’d once seen in the trees in the holloway road—soared and swooped, taking bites out of clothes, hair, anything they could.
I stood leaden, watching it all.
Not all the sprites were small. Some were the size of eagles.
Like birds of prey, they maneuvered in quick, violent bursts, dropping teeth and talons and strange hooked hands into Castle Luricht’s arches and down upon its wooden chairs, grasping at the beech boughs and leaves, snagging guests and knights in the process.
Arrows began to fly. The knights, abandoning swords, which proved useless against their winged enemies, had taken up bows. They moved to every corner of the great hall, aiming, then shooting in dreadful volleys, taking down dozens of sprites at once.
“Fucking vermin.” It was Hamelin. He caught Benji’s arm. “Come, Your Majesties. Let us—”
A sprite soared by, knocking Hamelin off his feet. He shouted, stumbled, jerking Benji along with him; the king dropped his coin. And I was tethered. Sedated. Still, with uncanny speed, I lowered to my knees.
And picked up the Artful Brigand’s coin.
When I rose to full height, arrows humming all around me, it didn’t matter that my hands were tied.
The coin was small, the opportunity perfect: the time had come.
When Benji looked up and saw the coin in my hand, rough side turned up, the king’s eyes went wide.
And there was nothing else to do than what I’d set out to. Nothing more to add to the ceremony and nothing more to give, no choice left.
But to end it.
The coin sang through the air. When it hit the dais, it did what it always did when thrown rough side up: wreaked utter havoc.
The dais exploded. Benji and Hamelin flew off their feet and I stumbled back, debris shooting in every direction—
A brutal pressure bloomed near my pelvis. I looked down.
I thought I’d been struck by a sprite or a wooden piece of the dais. No. It was a spear. A spear, protruding from my abdomen, just below my navel. My Diviner robe and the wedding gown beneath it went a dark, crimson red. I teetered. Stumbled.
Fell.