Chapter Seven Once a Thief
CHAPTER SEVEN
ONCE A THIEF
Six weeks later
I stepped from the strange tunnel of greenery into an open field.
There, hundreds of brightly dyed tents stood in lines like beams of light reaching from the sun.
Thousands of folk moved about, trading wares in their stalls, and not even the thin slit in my visor could diminish their vibrancy, the buzz of shouts, the sharp ting of coin, the thrum of instruments abounding.
In the distance, a castle waving purple banners was cloistered by a moat, and in front of it, in the heart of all those tents, its bright, central sun—
An arena.
Maude moved to the side of the bustling road, waiting for me as I took it all in. “Well, boys,” she said, her voice muffled beneath her helmet. “We’re almost there.”
A loud hmpf sounded behind me. I pressed my lips together and kept my gaze forward. It was better, not looking at the gargoyle. Every time I did I laughed, something I quickly learned he did not appreciate.
“At least the arduous journey has ended and I can take my feet out of these vile torture devices.” The gargoyle sighed wistfully. “Oh, to feel the grass on my bare toes once more.” He bent, fumbling at his feet. “I will take them off.”
“Ah, ah. Keep those on.” Maude wagged a finger at him. “It’s like I said—no one in Traum is made of stone. They can’t see your body yet. Not any part of it. Those cost me an arm and a leg and ten years off my life getting them onto your wiggling toes. Don’t take them off.”
He was quiet a beat too long. I peered over my shoulder.
The gargoyle, like all of us, was hidden by his attire.
But while Maude wore armor, and I leathers and a helmet, it had taken Victor less than a second to size up the gargoyle and name him unfit for even a breastplate.
The gargoyle had begun to cry, and Maude and I had shouted at Victor, but the blacksmith had merely smoked his pipe and said, “Those cracks in his body can’t bear the weight. ”
The gargoyle had stopped crying after that, but his head had hung low. He’d looked down at himself, limestone dust floating around him in a cloud, and said, in a very little voice, “Just as well. It has already grown difficult to lift my left arm.”
Maude had hugged him fiercely. Two days later, we were in the Cliffs of Bellidine, and she was paying a weaver an ungodly sum of money to make the gargoyle any kind of frock he wanted.
The damn thing was pink.
Dyed by thrift flowers, with billowing sleeves, his robes fell to his ankles.
But it was his headdress—a two-corned hennin with a pink wimple—that really got him excited.
Then Maude paid another weaver for a hefty strip of gossamer, had it dyed pink as well, and the gargoyle wore it as a veil beneath his wimple, obscuring his face entirely.
“You look like the abbess,” Maude said when he studied himself over a stream. “If she’d have worn a whit of color.”
The gargoyle leaned close to the water and whispered conspiratorially to his reflection. “I’m prettier than that bitch ever was.”
After that, he wore his clothes day and night, never minding if they got muddy or frayed for rubbing against the jagged pieces of his broken wing. He loved every bit of them—save the wool slippers Maude had commissioned for his feet. Those, he hated unreservedly.
I was still wheezing from looking at him.
He pouted but left the slippers on, and we moved with the crowd like fish in a stream into the bustling mercantile organism of Coulson Faire.
“You may give them to me later, when I am not so busy,” he told Maude with an air of generosity.
“The arm and leg and years off your life that I am owed.”
Into the tents we went, following the crowd down a grassy walkway lined with purple banners.
A minstrel sat in a purple stall, strumming his lute and singing, actors in bold colors and costumes dancing around him.
The minstrel sang of the evil of sprites; how they were hungry, thoughtless creatures who had destroyed the cathedral.
How clean the kingdom might be without them.
“A colorful dream, the bright land of Traum, where the wind on the moors hums a tune. Where the holloways lead you awry and along, and the gowans are always in bloom. The knights are all noble, and the ladies so fair, and the merchants all set in their trade. The ware are all sold, copper, silver, or gold—and the Brigand, through coin, lends us aid.”
He strummed his instrument with fervor. “But wherever you ramble, from woodland to sea, pray find the young king on your way. I lent him my lance, and he lent me his faith, and to his queen, the Diviner, did I pray.”
“Obscene,” said the gargoyle. “Never trust anything written in rhyme.”
Castle guards bearing spears and helmets and chainmail waved us onward, calling to the crowd. “Participants of the joust, take your horse and your ten gold coins to the registrar on the west side of the arena! Everyone else—get your asses into the stands!”
When we reached the registrar, a large stall that housed a merchant, three castle guards, and a knight in full armor, the line stretched almost fifty yards. We joined, and I planted my feet, eyes straining behind my visor as I searched the sea of faces, looking, looking…
Maude cleared her throat. “Did you hear me?”
No. “Yes.”
Her sigh echoed in her helmet. “Remember: Choose a guard out of sight. Once you’ve changed, meet me on the other side of this tent.
Anyone stops you, don’t give them your name.
” She nodded at the arena. “We’ll go in there together.
Bartholomew and I will head to the lists, and you’ll make your way up to wherever the king is and look for my signal. ”
My stomach turned. “And if I can’t get close to the king?” I blamed the helmet for how thin my voice sounded. “If the loom stone isn’t there? If I can’t reach it?”
“It will be, and you will, too. It’s like I said. You’re good at getting things.”
“And Sybil?”
“The less she knows up front, the more convincing the ruse will be.” Maude tapped my chest assuredly. “We’ll approach her when it’s safe. First let’s get that memory of yours back.”
The line ahead moved swiftly. The gargoyle elbowed Maude. “Put my name down to compete, will you? I’ve always wanted to win something.”
“What—no.” Maude shoved us both out of the line. “Go.”
I took the gargoyle’s hand, and the two of us hurried through the field, between stalls, rushing past canvas, coins clinking around us, purple banners—gods, so many purple banners—snapping in the wind.
“What exactly does she mean when she says I’m good at getting things?” I asked.
“You’re light in the toe,” the gargoyle answered. “A picket pocket.”
“So I’m a thief.” My heart beat in my throat. “I suppose it doesn’t matter to her that I have no memory of being one?”
The gargoyle shrugged. “The body remembers what the mind forgets.”
We kept going. When we breached the last row of tents, grass turned to cobblestone.
I followed it through a maze of brightly painted houses until it, too, gave way, this time to the steady oak planks of Castle Luricht’s drawbridge.
My gaze swung in as many directions as I could aim it.
We were meant to be looking for a castle guard.
One roughly my build—tall, slender at the waist, broad in the shoulder.
Maude had said there would be some on duty in Castle Luricht, away from the crowd. And I was looking for a guard.
But I was also just… looking. Wondering if I would know her face if I saw it.
The gargoyle waved at the castle walls. “There is some very interesting ivy here. No guards, though.”
We moved over the drawbridge and through the bailey. Whoever was meant to watch the door had abandoned their posts, so into the castle we went.
My neck strained as I looked up the throat of the grand stairwell. “The size of this place.” I had no idea where to go. And still I moved forward, ignoring the corridors I might lose myself in, opting for the stairs.
“I told you: The body remembers.” The gargoyle began to hum. “Our feet always take us where we need to go.”
Not likely. I was a newborn creature in the Stonewater Kingdom. My feet, like all of me, were entirely unsteady. I kept going, up one flight then another, eyes peeled for a guard, for anyone—
“Someone there?”
I froze halfway up a flight of stairs. From my vantage, I could glimpse the top of a looming door that waited at the platform above. I reached for the gargoyle’s arm to still him, but it was too late. He was already trudging up the stairs.
“Who goes there?” the voice called again.
“’Tis I!” the gargoyle answered.
I made it to the top of the stairs just in time to see a guard, his chainmail rattling, levy his spear at the gargoyle. “This room is closed.”
The gargoyle kept coming, still humming to himself, arms out like he was going in for an embrace, then knocked the guard so hard on the head the poor sod’s helmet dented.
“Well done.” I stood over the unconscious man and shrugged. “I don’t mind being rendered useless.”
“As you’ve proven many a time.” The gargoyle smacked his hands together, dusting them of violence. “Shall we avail ourselves of his wares?”
I kicked open the door the guard had been posted at and dragged him after me. Leathers and helmet, I already had. What I needed was his spear and his gaudy purple sash—I worked up a sweat getting them off him and onto myself.
I didn’t think about what the gargoyle was doing until he’d stopped humming.
He was standing along the wall of the room, staring up at a large painting of an uncanny ox, its body pierced by weapons, chunks of bloody stone falling from its chest. Its eyes were wide, pale—small orbs of limestone, just like the gargoyle’s. Like mine.
“It’s a dream,” the gargoyle whispered. “I feel as if I know it, and yet I cannot place it…”
He blinked. Turned to me. “The purple sash should be worn on the left arm.”
We quit the room, but the gargoyle turned back. He took a ratty old leather notebook off the table under the painting, giggling to himself. “Always a thief, once a thief.” He tucked the notebook into the neck of his robes, took my hand, and together we fled the castle.
Maude was waiting behind the registrar stall, back straight, voice choked. “Anyone see you?”
I saluted her with the spear. “Just the bloke we took these off.”
She nodded absently and was silent.
The gargoyle put his hand on her arm. “Something the matter, Bartholomew?”
Maude’s armor rattled. She drew in a long breath. “The loom stone isn’t here.”
I choked on air. “What?”
“The men behind the registrar were talking. One was telling the others about his convoy into the Fervent Peaks to deliver the magical stone oar to Avice Fischer. A knight had done the same in the Seacht, delivering the inkwell to a prominent noble, and another had delivered the chime to the Wood. An enticement to get folk excited for the tournament. The objects are going to be used in the events.”
“Which means the stone loom has been sent away to the Bellidine of Cliffs,” the gargoyle murmured.
My heart plummeted into my boots. I looked down at my spear, my sash. “This is for nothing. We came all the way to Coulson Faire for nothing.”
Maude looked up. “Don’t get despairing on me. There are things to do yet.” She looked up at the arena. “I’ve a joust to win. Coin to take off the king’s hands. After, we’ll go to the Cliffs of Bellidine. Find that loom stone. Get your memory back.”
“You really think you can win? Some of these blokes look thick in the arm. Familiar with a lance. You’ll be competing against other knights?”
Maude beat me to the point. “Ones who haven’t had broken bones in the last two months, either.”
“For pity’s sake, Bartholomew.” The gargoyle waved a finger in my face. “Have a little faith.”
There was a surge of noise—a large party on its way to the arena. I had to shout over the noise. “Forgive me my pessimism,” I snapped. “I’ve yet to see a single bloody sign that we might actually succeed against—”
I stopped midsentence. Noise swelled in my ears, Coulson Faire melding into a low buzz that echoed discordantly against the sound of my pulse.
A woman was walking by, following the large party, most of whom were knights.
She was tall, wide in the shoulders, wearing a gold crown, a gossamer veil, and a long white robe with sleeves that hid her hands.
When sunlight danced over the top of her head, I glimpsed silver-blond hair through the gossamer.
It shone like nothing I’d ever seen, save the moon in the night sky.
She must have felt me watching because she looked over her shoulder, her veiled gaze crashing against my helmet like a weapon thrown. And I didn’t know anything, only that I’d been full of fear and doubt since waking in the Stonewater Kingdom.
But there was no fear in me now, and even less doubt. I knew exactly who she was.
“Bartholomew,” the gargoyle whispered.
Maude’s voice was choked. “There she is.”
My lips, my tongue, were already familiar with the shape of her name. “Sybil.”