Chapter Nine I Think I’ll Call You Rory #2
Months later, after all my attempts to run away had failed—after I’d been thrown out of the castle by guards only to be brought back inside by my captor—I caught sight of my reflection.
My skin was gray, my cheeks hollow, my lips chapped.
My dark hair had grown back brittle, and my fingernails were wrinkled and cracking.
Gone was the boy who’d come to Coulson Faire on that blooming spring day, and gone was his belief in portents.
This boy—the one who looked back at me now—was a ghost.
“I’ve got a job for you,” my captor told me one day. “It’ll earn you a good meal.”
He held out his coin. “Aisling Cathedral,” he murmured, the same ecstasy on his face as when he watched me eat. “There is a spring there, blooming from the heart of the chancel. The water…” He handed me a gold flagon. “Take my coin. Go to the cathedral. Come back with the water.”
I reached for the coin, but his gnarled hand closed around my throat.
“If you run, I will hunt you. Cut out your heart. Eat it. Then I’ll rip a new foundling off the street to replace you.
” He threw me down onto the floor and tossed his coin—with far more delicacy—down beside me. “Watch out for the gargoyles.”
And so I made my first journey to the tor.
It was night, the moon a mere sliver. The road steepened, and my underfed muscles ached, and then I was there. Standing before a towering stone cathedral.
I wrapped my fingers against the closed iron gates and looked into the courtyard at the five hooded statues that waited there. I knew who they were supposed to be. Gods. Omens. Masters of the future, of fate—of portents and promises.
But all I saw was stone.
I tossed the coin, smooth side up, like I’d seen my master do hundreds of times. The first toss got me into the courtyard. The second, into the cathedral.
I landed in the aisle, and my mouth fell open.
How tall the sanctuary walls reached. How brilliant the stained-glass windows shone in the moonlight.
Small and tired and hungry as I was, I had the sudden clarity that this was why people believed in gods.
They felt small against beautiful greatness; a tiny speck in a much larger design.
This is what power is, I decided then and there. To incite wonderment—and fear.
I tiptoed past pews and down the nave, but no matter how tender my feet, Aisling’s wide, cavernous mouth spat my echo back at me.
There, where I knew it would be upon the chancel, a limestone rock rested. From it, a spring leached. The water was dark, like swirling black paint. When I dipped the flagon into it, some splashed upon my bare hand. It smelled of rotten flowers. Viscous, like oil. Like blood.
I left the cathedral emboldened. Delirious from hunger and lack of sleep, I imagined returning to my master’s room and spilling the spring water upon the floor, then turning his coin over—rough side up—and tossing it straight at him.
But when I got back to the Artful Brigand’s room, I did not use his stone coin to kill him. I just handed him the spring water he asked for, returned his stone coin.
And ate.
Every time after that, it was the same. He’d tell me, “If you run, I will hunt you. Cut out your heart. Eat it.” He’d always laugh at that part.
Every time, I’d take the coin, walk by moonlight to the tor.
Sneak into the cathedral, steal water, and bring it back to Castle Luricht.
And every time, I was sure this would be the time that I killed him.
That I’d turn his own coin against him and obliterate the motherfucker.
But I didn’t. I was always too hungry for the meal he had waiting for me.
I was his puppet for years. Stole spring water, starved and gorged myself and was sick over and over. I did as he told me. I would have died, doing exactly as I was told—
If I hadn’t met the king.
It was one of those rare days my master gave me free rein of the castle grounds.
I didn’t have the coin, just empty hands, when a man stepped into my path.
I didn’t know he was the king. I’d stopped looking at faces a while ago.
Admittedly, the crown and the purple sash should have given him away, but he was lurking in an alley and scribbling madly in a notebook, and that is not a very kingly thing to do.
“Lost, scribe?” I sneered, hitting his shoulder with mine.
The man looked at me with piercing blue eyes over the lip of his notebook, cleared his throat, and said, “As a matter of fact, I am. Not locationally, understand.” He tapped his graphite stylus over the page. “Philosophically. Conscientiously.”
Drunk, I decided. “And you’re looking for answers here? In Piss Alley?”
“Is that what you call it? Piss Alley?” He eyed the stone walls. “I’ll have the official map labeled accordingly.”
I took him in. Especially that gaudy gold crown. “Who are you?”
“King Benedict Castor.” He grinned, like he’d delivered the punchline to a joke with perfect timing.
I felt what little blood I had left in my cheeks drain into my too-small boots.
The king merely smiled. “Ease up, my boy. Everyone deserves two chances in this life: the first to err, the second to rectify. Tell me, what’s your name?”
“I’m nobody,” I said without thinking.
“Everybody is somebody.” He wrinkled his brow and scrutinized me. “Haven’t I seen you scurrying about the castle?”
“I work for the cook,” I lied.
“A skinny boy like you? I don’t think so.”
“I… I do odd jobs.”
He nodded, his gaze returning to his notebook. “For the man in the upmost room?”
I froze. But the king remained idle, turning the pages of his notebook unhurriedly.
“I’ve suspected someone was living up there for some time, and that he had help getting whatever little thing he needed.
But whenever I unlocked the door to the chamber, the room was empty.
There have been rumors since before I was born, mind, that the castle is haunted.
” He looked up at me again. “But I rarely believe in things I can’t see with my own eyes. What do you do for him—this figure?”
My throat closed.
“Oh, don’t be frightened.” The king spoke to me with the chipper softness I’d heard grooms use to coax their horses.
“You’re not in any trouble. I make it a habit to ask questions.
It’s folk of the field or kitchen or beggars on the street who know how to read the signs of life—not those heavy-pocketed nobs who go to Aisling for a Divination. ”
“Says the king with pockets full of gold.”
That made him laugh. “How right you are.” He reached into the pocket of his wool cloak and extracted three gold rings.
“I just picked these up from a merchant I’m fond of.
I was going to give them to my grandson, but Maude tells me little boys prefer things like wooden swords over trinkets.
” He held out his hand. “So now, they’re for you. ”
I stared stupidly at his open palm. Said, sharp as a knife, “What do you expect me to give you in return?”
“Your name will do.”
I looked up at him, then. Really looked at him.
He was aged. Someone’s grandfather. And yet there was a brightness in his eyes that might have belonged to a boy.
A youthful shimmer of curiosity, of wonderment.
And while he stood opposite me, tall and stoic in his armor, looking so much like a conqueror and I like the conquered, I did not feel an ounce of fear in his presence.
Maybe, I thought, just maybe, there is power in kindness, too.
“My name…” What a shithead. There were tears in my eyes. “My name is Rodrick Myndacious.”
“That’s a fine name,” the king said. “You’ll grow into it nicely.” He took my hand. Dropped the three rings into my palm. “But for now, I think I’ll call you Rory.”
I told the king right there in Piss Alley what I knew about my master. About his stone eyes, his strange, magical stone—about his desire for Aisling’s spring water, and how I’d stolen it for him. The king listened. Summoned a carriage five minutes later.
And took me away.
That was how I came to know the truth about the Omens, and the name of the man—the Artful Brigand—whom I’d served.
It was also how I came to the Chiming Wood.
Where, at Petula Hall, I met the knight Maude Bauer and the king’s grandson, Benedict Castor the Third, who had the same blue eyes as his grandfather.
Maude was over ten years my senior, and Benji nearly ten my junior, but we fit together in the crooked sort of way groups of three often do.
With them, I ate without gorging myself.
Slept in a bed of my own. Muscle grew over bones, and the sallowness in my face disappeared.
When I peered into a looking glass, the helpless, hungry boy was gone.
There wasn’t hope in his eyes—not yet. But it would come.
I had to believe it would come.
And just as it was about to, just when my savior King Benedict Castor had collected enough proof of the Omens and their stone objects—of the conspiracy of Aisling Cathedral—just when he had taken up the mantle, the word heretic echoed through the knighthood.
I was sixteen the day the knights brought the king to the tor at the edge of their swords.
Gargoyles surrounded him, and the abbess, all in white, forced him to endure a Divination.
A Diviner was brought forth—a girl in a gossamer shroud, and she lay down and drowned in the water I’d once stolen for the Artful Brigand.
Five ill portents were named. When the gargoyles dragged the king to the courtyard, tossing him into the shadows of the five statues that lingered there, I ran to him.
Put my arms, no longer thin for starvation, around his shoulders.
“Fight,” I told him, knowing I was telling him to fight against the world.
“Don’t be such a fucking martyr—fight back. ”