Chapter Eleven The Difference Between Heresy and Ingenuity #2
All five of them sparred, Dedrick with a mace, Tory with a spear, Samuel and Hamelin and Benji with swords.
It was immediately clear this was a common affair for the quintet—they moved with precision, quick with their weapons, quicker with their feet, ever wary of the others in the arena. And Benji—
He had been training. His hits were exact, his footfalls sure, the ring of steel a knell announcing his improvement. He even managed to knock Samuel off his feet, surprising him with an elbow, then a shove, and he turned with verve through the yard.
“Save your strength for the qualifications tomorrow, Dedrick,” Otto Lange called.
“As if he’ll need to.” Hamelin patted Dedrick’s back, and the knight pulled away from their session, kicking up dirt with his heavy steps. The others continued to spar, Hamelin and Tory taking on Samuel and Benji.
Dedrick Lange came and stood beside me, close enough that I could feel the chill radiating off his rerebrace. He set his mace on the ground and reached into a small leather pouch on his belt and retrieved the Harried Scribe’s inkwell.
“These stone objects of his are quite the marvel,” he said. “Limestone, I think. The kind Aisling Cathedral was built on—what the gargoyles are made of, what the spring leaches from. Not so different from your eyes, is it, Diviner?”
I peered over my shoulder and found him watching me. “Why is that?” he asked. “What is it about the limestone on the tor that gives it magic while the rest of Traum has none? What makes that spring and all the girls who drown in it so special?”
I told him what the Harried Scribe had once told me and tried not to stare at the inkwell. “Knowledge is mine to bear and yours to beg.” I wondered how it would break. Would it surrender beneath my heel like the loom stone had, or would I need that hammer I’d asked Tory for?
“I’d be careful if I were you, knight,” I said to Dedrick. “The king does not like probing questions about the spring. Not so long ago, questions like that were taken as heresy.”
“The only difference between heresy and ingenuity is timing. Benedict has chosen his well. This tournament, giving folk their spectacle while quietly raising his banner above the flags of Omens, is not something his grandfather could have dreamed of achieving. There is no danger in questioning the cathedral’s practices now that its warden and her guard-dog gargoyles aren’t there to throw stones. ”
His tone was conversational. His gaze was not. “All that is true, and yet you are right. The king does not like questions about the spring. Why is that?”
In the yard, Benji had faltered, his rapid steps churning dirt, his blade ringing as he blocked Hamelin’s downward cut.
Dedrick kept his gaze on me. “What exactly is it about the spring water that turns your eyes to stone? Does it alter you in other ways? Are you stronger for it? More fortified? Is that what you wish to prove in the arena?” He sucked his teeth.
“You certainly seem to feel pain like the rest of us. And I know you bleed.”
I said nothing, watching the inkwell as he looked me up and down, his gaze lingering over my abdomen.
“It’s a game of strategy, the melee. War tactics in the arena.
Far beyond your scope, I’m afraid. Or did you and your fellow Diviners practice tactical stratagems against the gargoyles up there on the tor? ”
His bluntness was a slap to the cheek. “No,” I replied. “I simply hit my hammer upon granite, over and over again. I imagine a human head is far softer a target. Even one as swollen as yours.”
“Whatever it was the spring water did to you, I will know it. We of the Seacht like our knowledge on the page, and our chess pieces on the board—or back in the box where they belong.” Dedrick smiled for the first time.
His teeth were long. A little gray. “Stay out of the melee, Diviner.” He turned, following his uncle and several scribes out of the arena. “For your own good.”
I had three days until the melee, and not one of them would be spent on qualifications.
There were more important things to do—a city full of books to take advantage of that I might learn something about ox-eye.
Tory was my shadow, the two of us wandering cobblestone streets with the rest of the folk who’d come to watch the melee.
Chimneys bloomed with smoke, blacksmith forges roaring.
Scribes sold and bound books, their windows and factory doors flung wide for visitors.
Children ran through the streets, playing with toy weapons, stopping like everyone else to stare at me as I passed.
The city was full of verve and excitement.
I couldn’t stomach it.
I didn’t wear my veil. No one had tied the damn thing around my head with an irrefutable knot—why keep it there?
But the longer I trod the streets of the Seacht, gazing up at its impressive buildings and water wheels and mechanisms of innovation, the more folk gathered around me, emboldened in a way my shroud or veil had not previously allowed.
Now, they came upon me quickly. Searched my eyes.
“What does the Harried Scribe say?” asked a woman wearing thick spectacles.
“I cannot see,” others complained, pushing one another to get to me. “Please, Diviner, hold still—I’d like a glimpse—”
Tory was not a harsh bodyguard, but she was firm. She did not let anyone touch me, but she didn’t stop them from crowding, either.
I managed twenty minutes without them before I returned to the barracks for my veil and crown, slamming both over my head. “You see it, don’t you?” I said to Tory. “They look at me like I’m not a person.”
That seemed to surprise her. “But you aren’t. You’re a Diviner.”
My eyes weren’t the only things of interest in the city.
Talk of the melee abounded, and folk had lined up outside the king’s barracks, hoping to catch an early glimpse of the arena.
Tory and I pushed through them. An hour later, in the south part of the city, I found a scribe selling pamphlets.
“Where might I find something on ox-eye?” I asked him.
“Ox-eye?”
“It’s a sedative. It’s given me the strangest dreams. I’d like to know more.”
“Sounds like a question for a physician,” he answered.
I found a physician on the first floor of a large brick house. “What’s its proper name?” she asked, riffling through her books.
“Is ox-eye not a proper name?”
She peered over her spectacles. “We deal in exact terms here, Diviner, not hokum.”
By now Tory had grown accustomed to handing me ox-eye for pain and carried it in a flask on her belt. I snatched it and held it out to the surgeon. “This is it.”
The woman wrinkled her nose, unstopped the flask, took a whiff, and coughed. “Smells rotten.”
“All I know is that it’s called ox-eye. The king’s surgeon administered it frequently.”
“Then you should’ve asked him what it was.” She snapped another book shut. “Try Josephine. She’s off the square.”
“Wonderful. Where’s that?”
Josephine, to my surprise, I already knew. She was the house mother of Pupil House II—a shelter for foundlings. I’d met her the last time I’d come to the Seacht. Back when I still thought I might find my Diviners.
“Aisling’s water,” she said, hand on her chest, when she saw me at her threshold. “You gave me a fright, Diviner.” She blinked up at my face. “Didn’t you come here the other day asking me something? You and that mean-looking dog?”
My throat clogged. “He was a gargoyle, and that was over a month ago.” I could hear the giggle of children in the house behind her. “Tell me, what do you know about ox-eye?”
“Who’s that?”
“No—it’s a sedative. It reduces pain and brings on visions and terrible dreams.” I held out the flask.
“Not heard of anything like that.” Josephine sniffed the flask and made a gagging sound. “Nasty stuff.” A loud bang echoed through the house. Josephine pinched her nose. “’Course, nasty tonics and bad dreams sound a right picnic compared to what I’ve got here—”
A low rumbling took hold of the Seacht, street signs swaying, windows rattling. Josephine braced the trembling doorframe and I gripped the door.
A moment later it stopped.
“What in Aisling’s waters?” Josephine’s mouth hung open. “Felt like an earthquake.”
“Not the first of late,” Tory murmured, scanning the city.
“You all right, love?” The house mother was watching me. “Got your moon’s blood?”
I hadn’t realized I’d been cradling my abdomen. “I’m fine.”
“Listen, I’ve got things for pain. Idleweed, if that’s your pleasure.”
I was already walking away.
There were books. Hundreds, maybe thousands.
I didn’t know where to look for a draft whose name no one recognized.
And even if I did manage to find information on ox-eye, I was growing more and more skeptical scribes of the Seacht would have condescended to chronicle its odd aftereffects—its visions and other such hokum. I found nothing.
“Keep back,” called the guards of the Seacht. “It’s the last round of qualifications. No one in or out.”
We’d returned to the barracks. Tory began to push, forcing her way through the crowd to the gates. I followed, broken pieces of conversations buzzing around me like wasps. “Never takes off his helmet and knocked down three men in as many minutes!”
“I wonder how the Diviner will fare against such ruthless—”
“Twenty coppers on the black team—Oi, what’s his name?”
“Goes by knave, I think.”