Chapter Nine I Think I’ll Call You Rory #3
“My death is not my surrender.” He looked up at me with those clear blue eyes.
Reached into his cloak. “It’s all here, my boy.
” He handed me his beaten leather notebook.
“Everything I know.” He looked back at the dark mouth of the cathedral.
“It begins and ends with that stone and the water that springs from it—I know it does. Look back,” he said, sharp and quick.
“Past Diviners, past Omens. Look all the way back, and maybe you can do what I couldn’t: change the future. ”
The knights closed in around him. Maude took my collar. “Go.” She knew, just as I did, what came next. “Be with Benji.”
I found him nearby, sitting among gowan flowers, crying.
“Don’t look, Benji,” I said when they began to throw the stones.
I took him in my arms—that blue-eyed boy—and fled the tor.
He’s wrong, I thought. There’s nothing worth looking back on.
There’s nothing behind us, or in front of us, but pain. “Don’t look back.”
A new king was chosen by the nobility. King Augur, and he was as dull as wood, but he garnered five good portents from his Divination at Aisling Cathedral—played his part well during his ceremonies in all five hamlets—touted the divinity of Omens.
Maude put me in armor, and I recited the names of the protective pieces for weeks to keep myself from feeling like a pretender when I wore them.
“Pauldron, rerebrace, vambrace, gauntlet, greave…”
Then I painted charcoal around my eyes like they did in the Chiming Wood and pierced the three gold bands King Castor had gifted me into my right ear. I became a knight of Traum. Years later, though he never did know how to hold his drink whenever someone mentioned his grandfather, Benji did, too.
That time was as blurry to me as chapters of my childhood.
But my armor kept me grounded—I was determined, same as Maude, to keep up Benedict Castor’s work and oust the Omens from Traum.
But the day-to-day muck made little impact.
I was not well liked among my fellow knights—I had no influence, no wealth, but I inspired fear, and there is power in that.
I trained. Traveled to all five hamlets.
Patrolled for sprites without killing one—I was an asshole, not a butcher. I existed, but I hardly lived.
But I had Maude, and Benji, and both of their names meant something in Traum when mine didn’t.
And it was their names that, when King Augur died of dullness—he fell off his horse and never got back up—solidified Benji as candidate for the next king.
The very thing we’d hoped to do since his grandfather’s death.
A new king, the same cause: to take up the mantle.
And suddenly, there was something to look forward to.
Something, besides my own festering derision, to keep me going.
I was the king’s sword, and Maude lent him the indisputable might of the Bauer name, and together we’d travel through the hamlets and rid Traum of its false gods.
But first, we needed spring water.
Hundreds of times I’d gone back to the Artful Brigand’s chamber to kill him. Hundreds of times, he eluded me. I needed something to draw him out. What was it the bastard had said? What a human thing to want something so badly you let it hurt you. For him, I knew, it was spring water.
And so to Aisling Cathedral we went to get it.
When I rode with the rest of the knights up the tor, I was thinking on death.
On killing the Artful Brigand—would I do it quickly or slowly?
—when my gluttonous horse decided to plant her feet on the side of the road.
I felt the looming presence of the cathedral bear down on me and didn’t meet its gaze.
I refused to once more be awestruck by that great, hallowed place.
But then the bells began to chime, noble and haunting in their ring. I looked up.
And saw a woman.
She stood on the wall, several feet above the road, looking down at me. The setting sun caught in her silver-blond hair, and the wind pushed it from her brow, pushing my derision along with it. I was, for a moment, undone. Struck by wonderment, by admiration, by fear.
Then I remembered myself. Pith, I remembered why I was there. I took off my helmet. Glared at her.
“Knight,” she called. “You lot make quite the spectacle. Is the king so fretful that he requires the company of his entire knighthood for a Divination?”
My face went hot. “Between our two lots, mine is hardly the spectacle.”
And even as she chastised me, and even as I rode away, I wore that moment like an overfastened belt. I couldn’t breathe correctly having looked upon her.
The next night, I slipped into Castle Luricht with a flask of spring water, Maude and a slightly drunk Benji at my side.
I took the right passages, stayed out of sight, muscle memory taking over.
When I reached the trapdoor and climbed to the door at the top of the castle, I opened the flask.
Poured a fifth of it onto the wood floor.
When the Artful Brigand appeared through the wall, he didn’t even look at me.
He simply fell to his knees and licked the spring water where it puddled near my feet.
I had a speech prepared about how he did not break me—how I’d become a knight—how a nobody could defeat a god. But all I did was step from shadow and put a blade to his neck.
He looked up. Laughed. “Is that you, boy? Not so skinny now—”
I slit his throat and took his stone coin, its weight perfect in my hand. “We should go,” I said to Benji and Maude. “I have to get back to the cathedral for my Divination.”