Chapter Ten Where the Wind Whispers a Minor Tune #2
“Steady with the compliments.” Rain pinged over his helmet. He pointed at the hem of my Diviner robe. “You do realize you’re bleeding, don’t you?”
I looked down. The hem of my robe was dark with blood. When I lifted it, a shard of stained glass, so sharp I hadn’t felt it slide into flesh, was lodged in the bare arch of my foot. “Oh.”
“May I?”
I waved him away. “I’m fine.”
He exhaled, steam shooting from his helmet. One step and he was directly in front of me, leaning forward and whispering in a rough voice. “Please. Permit me.”
I went rigid. Nodded.
He dropped his spear. Went down on his knees. Lifted the muddy hem of my dress. The wet leather of his gloves grazed the back of my calf, and when he drew closer, his breath swept up my leg, putting pinpricks over my skin.
He cuffed my ankle. Urged it off the ground. I heard a low hiss—hot and sharp—as he took the bloody shard of glass between his fingers, retracting it from my foot with slow, gentle precision.
Still pitched low, distorted in his helmet, his voice carried none of the coyness I’d heard in Coulson Faire.
How it sounded now… I didn’t know what to call it, only that every word he spoke seemed to cost him something great.
“The queen wears a gold crown, a gossamer veil, a silk robe—and still they don’t give her anything for her feet. ”
They had. But to bend and tie the laces of boots or slippers had hurt too keenly, and I’d be damned before I asked anyone in Castle Luricht for help. “I prefer it this way.”
“Do you.”
When the glass slid from my foot, a noise of relief escaped the line of my lips.
The knave looked up, holding me in the dark slit of his visor as he flung the glass away into stones, then lowered my foot back onto the ground.
Slowly, he rose, standing before me, blotting out the sky and its cold, heavy rain.
He held the scrap of silk from my robe out, the VI shaking in the wind. “This is yours.”
“Keep it,” I told him. “For meager services rendered.”
“If I was going to ask for a token, it would hardly be silk.”
This again. “I already told you. I’ve nothing left to give. If it’s a kiss you’re after”—my mouth thinned behind my veil—“you’ll die waiting.”
A low laugh echoed in his helmet. “You think I wouldn’t?”
Benji began calling out in fervid whispers. “Keep a knight stationed here at all times,” he told Samuel. “The castle guards will remain. The ruins must be left as they are—don’t let anyone or anything near that fucking spring. The rest of you”—he churned his hand, beckoning—“we ride south.”
“You heard him.” Hamelin aimed his sword toward the horses on the far end of the tor. “Quickly.”
The knave took a step back from me. “It’s been a pleasure, Diviner. And to think”—he was breathing hard, his voice like gravel in his helmet—“it might have all been avoided had you been wearing shoes.”
I froze.
Then Tory was behind me, grasping my elbow and pulling me with her, the knights fleeing the tor just as quickly as they’d ventured upon it.
“What of the sprites, sire?” one of the guards asked, gazing upward.
“As you see,” the knave deadpanned behind me, “they are easily frightened away.”
“Perhaps it would be more prudent,” said Dedrick Lange, “to simply let them dig up the spring that the Diviner might dream in it again.”
My back went rigid, and so did the king’s. Benji reached into his pocket. Withdrew the Artful Brigand’s coin and tossed it, rough side up, directly at the mountain sprite.
There was a horrible squelching sound. Wet and loud.
The mountain sprite shrieked, its body fracturing into a thousand pieces, blood spraying across loose stone, watering the tor like the rain.
The poor creature opened his orange eyes only a second, its final cry a terrible sound of anguish that caught the wind and rode it, echoing near and far and burrowing in the walls of my mind.
The sprite shut his eyes. Went still.
“The spring will not be defiled by vermin.” The king waded through blood, found the Artful Brigand’s coin in the broken body of the mountain sprite, and wiped it clean on grass.
He didn’t look at the carnage he’d exacted.
He just got on his horse. “Destroy any creature who deigns to move a stone upon the tor,” he told the castle guards, pointing to the sprites circling above.
Then he signaled the knights, spurred his horse, and rode away.
My hands were shaking when I entered my carriage. Tory slammed the door behind me and took the box seat. When the wheels began to roll, I looked back. The castle guards had dispersed, all of them taking up weapons, some throwing spears, some shooting arrows, at the sprites in the air. All—
But one.
The knave stood away from the others, silhouetted by storm clouds, an inky blot in the darkness, menacing and corporeal among all the ghosts I’d left in the ruins. There was no seeing his eyes. No way for him to glimpse mine. Still, I felt his gaze as he watched my carriage ride from the tor.
Even when the road dipped and ruins fell from sight I stared back, pulse pounding, an invisible hand pressing over my chest. You’re a fool, I told myself. Pain has made a dreamer of you again.
It had. Because, rain in my hair, the smell of spring water in my nose, the knave, tall and broad in the shoulder and hidden beneath his helmet… he’d almost been familiar. Voice full of gravel, I’d have sworn he’d sounded, if only for a moment—
Exactly like Rory.