Chapter Six The Only God of Men Is Coin #3
Benji was nodding to himself and swaying, moved by the sounds of his own designs. “Firstly, of course, I will send your stone objects ahead of us, placing them in the firm hands of your noble families. Tokens of my good faith and an assurance that all is well with the Diviner.”
Hamelin made a noise of complaint, but the king levied a hand.
“You will see. Let the objects remain out of sight for a time, then bring them out to full effect in the arena. Their scarcity shall make them more sacred, their distance shall keep them divine, for only the privileged can access them by attending my tournament, thusly making the master of the object the most potent of rulers, and the tournament itself the most prosperous of markets.”
My stomach twisted. It was exactly what his grandfather had written in his notebook about the abuses of Aisling Cathedral.
“You will harness your objects, win your events, become my champions,” Benji told his knights.
“Faith, inspired in the arena. All the proceeds will return to your families, all the coin they spent in my honor handed back to them with interest and thanks, but first”—the king’s blue eyes darted across the table—“they will get on their knees as you did when I gave you those objects, and swear unmitigated fealty to me.”
The room went silent.
“Come now.” Benji peered around the table.
“Did I not pay a great sum just a few weeks ago for your mother’s death ceremony after she was killed by a birke, Samuel?
Did I not gift your mother that castle in the Peaks and all the gold therein, Hamelin?
How are all those newly acquired books in your uncle’s library?
” he asked Dedrick. “Is your mother enjoying her new stores of gold, Tory?”
And there it was. Every Omen we’d encountered we’d stripped of power—and power was not simply magical stone objects.
Power, especially to a man of Coulson Faire, began and ended with coin.
It was a knightly vow to reject pecuniary reward.
But every rule had its exceptions; the knights looked down at the stone objects they’d been gifted. One by one, they nodded.
Benji pressed the Artful Brigand’s coin to his chest like it was his own beating heart. “Good.” He turned to Regius. “We will continue with plans for the joust. Dedrick?”
The knight ran his fingers over the Harried Scribe’s inkwell. “The melee for the Seacht.”
“Very good. Hamelin?”
“What else?” Hamelin flashed a grin. “Feats of strength for the Fervent Peaks.”
“We of the Chiming Wood shall host the hunt,” said Samuel.
Benji raised his brows at Tory. “And for the finale in the Cliffs of Bellidine?”
The lines in Tory’s face tightened. “My mother will not like a show of violence in her hamlet.”
“Your mother’s wants are superfluous.” Benji flopped his wrist at her.
“She shall host the duel. The tournament will commence, you and your stone objects will win, and your families will bow prostrate to me and the Diviner in front of the hamlets. Now, the first event will begin as planned, on the third…”
I didn’t hear the rest.
The room was wobbling, remnants of ox-eye burning my tongue. When I shut my eyes, colors danced behind my eyelids. Gray. Violet. An incomparable shade of blue. I was looking up at the night sky again. At a full, pale moon.
But then shadows came—five of them, all blocking out the moon.
First a merchant with gold rings on his fingers and a stone coin in his hand.
Next was a scribe in a gray robe with no hair upon his head.
He bore a stone inkwell full of black ink.
The next was a tall man in leathers—an oarsman with a stone oar, followed by a forester with an axe on her belt and long black hair. She bore a stone chime.
Finally, a woman in a dyed woolen knit stepped forward. Around her neck was a piece of twine, and attached to it—a loom stone. She joined the others, and they spread around my body like the five points of a star, peering down at me through pale limestone eyes.
The Omens.
They were covered in blood.
All five lowered themselves to their hands and knees, put their mouths to my body, and sank their teeth into my flesh.
A voice tore from my throat. “This,” it said, I said, “is Traum’s oldest tale. Folk of the hamlets gathered around my body, held together not by craftmanship, but by hunger for power. How grotesque history is, always repeating itself, the past itself a terrible portent.”
And then I was back, staring down at the dregs of ox-eye in my cup. Around me, mouths had fallen agape, eyes had widened, and cheeks had gone pale. For a moment I couldn’t tell if I was seeing the Omens or the knights who sat with me at the table.
Regius Ormsby was the first to speak. He kept his hands knotted, but his ringing bracelets gave him away—he was trembling. “A Divination, Your Majesty?”
No. Yes. I didn’t know.
Ox-eye. That vile draft. It addled my thoughts the way dreaming in Aisling’s spring once did. It was either ripping away my sanity—
Or something, someone, was speaking to me through it. Wittingly toying with my mind the way the abbess once had, building upon the story that I’d lost everything to dismantle. Whoever it was, I’d root them out as I’d rooted out the Omens.
And if the king wanted a tournament? A second chance to impress his power upon the hamlets?
To inspire faith with his stone objects in the arena?
Let him have his spectacle and trade influence and affluence with knights like the abbess had once traded the blood of Diviners with the Omens—I’d get my second chance, too.
I looked out on the table and saw it—a way to end the story.
Power couldn’t go anywhere if it shattered.
I’d done it to the Omens, the cathedral, and I’d do it now to Aisling’s final vestiges; all five stone objects, destroyed.
It didn’t matter if the king touted their sacrality with scarcity and sent them away into the hamlets—they’d be in the hands of his precious knights during the tournament.
So into the tournament I would go, and face my adversaries one by one. Coin, inkwell, oar, chime, loom stone—
I blinked. No, not five. What had Hamelin said the night before the wedding?
The only way to reach the Omens now is to look into your stone eyes.
Benji had said the night Aisling fell that he’d make a god of me, but I was no god. I, reduced once more to a number, was but the king’s sixth magical object. Coin, inkwell, oar, chime, loom stone—and me.
I’d rid him of all of them.
Then, when Benji was bereft, I’d finish what I’d twice failed at: I’d kill the king of Traum and let the Stonewater Kingdom know what I knew—there was nothing to believe in. Not coin or inkwell, oar or chime, not loom stone, not knights or nobles, not Benedict Castor the Third—and not me.
Let it finally end.
The others at the table were still watching me. “A terrible thing,” I told them slowly, “the loss of Aisling Cathedral.”
They waited in the stillness of my pause, startled, as if accustomed to hearing a Diviner speak only after the grotesque sounds of her drowning had faded. “I would prove to the Stonewater Kingdom that though the cathedral lies in ruins, I, the last Diviner, still stand.”
The king folded his arms over his chest, suspicion thinning his voice. “And how do you wish to demonstrate that, Six?”
“With armor and chainmail and a hammer.” I stood from my chair, shaking and slick with sweat, peering down my nose at everyone seated. When my gaze reached Benji, apprehension flashed across his face. “Faith, after all,” I told him, “requires a display.”
Ox-eye festered on my tongue. I slicked my teeth with it and smiled, one by one, at the knights and their stone objects. “I’ll be joining each of you in the tournament.”