Chapter Thirteen The Mind Forgets
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE MIND FORGETS
It happened quickly.
I was staring down at Rory from the king’s box, and he up at me—
And then Benji shouted, “Take him!”
Hamelin and Tory and Samuel drew their swords, and so did the rest of the knights in the lists. The crowd began to holler. I was shoved back, caught by guards—dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the stands and back into the barracks, Rory disappearing from view on a tide of armor.
They put me in the first room they could find with a lock—a privy. I threw myself at the door, imagining I was the Artful Brigand’s coin, powerful enough to shatter any surface I encountered. But then the pain in my abdomen seized, and I had to lie on the floor to keep from being sick.
Outside, I heard the rumblings of footfalls; the arena was being cleared. They’d have taken Rory somewhere private by now. That truth alone got me back onto shaky feet. I had to get out. Had to get to Rory before Benji killed him again. Had to—
I went still. Again.
His eyes. No longer so brown they seemed black, but pale. Lifeless as a statue’s. The truth was plain enough, its signature strange, special, new.
Rodrick Myndacious was dead.
Which meant he, the best knight I’d known—the knave—would not recall a single thing. He wouldn’t remember his life, his loves or revulsions. He wouldn’t remember his own name, and he wouldn’t remember me, unless he’d gotten his hands on the loom stone.
The loom stone I’d slammed my foot upon and destroyed.
There was no holding the sickness back. I coughed bile onto the floor.
But then—that name. Scribbled upon the king’s registrar.
One name that made me think, for the barest moment, maybe.
Maybe Rory had found the loom stone. He’d been a guard at Coulson Faire.
I hadn’t known it then—I’d given up on looking for the people I’d lost—but I knew it now.
There’d been a disturbance in the king’s box during the joust. Rory could have slipped the loom stone over his finger.
Remembered all the wonderful, horrible things that made up a life.
With just one name upon paper, the faintest light of hope had flickered within me.
Bartholomew.
I slapped the privy door. “Let me out, you fucking rats. Let me—”
A key clicked into place. When the door opened, I rushed forward, knocking over one, two knights, but not the third. Hamelin caught my arm.
“Get her wrists,” he said to Tory, who bound my hands with silk. “Sorry, Diviner,” she murmured. “King’s orders.”
Together they took my jaw. Forced ox-eye, burning, down my throat.
We exited the barracks into an alley. Armor rustled, and boots clomped over cobblestones.
The street sloped downward. The city was alive—music, voices, and the opening and closing of doors a lively pulse.
Not so far away, I could hear the rush of water—the longing call of the Tenor River as it moved rapidly through the Seacht’s many canals.
Over a bridge, down an alley. We slithered this way and that until we reached a square building four floors high with smokestacks on its roof. A factory, closed for the evening.
Tory shoved its doors open, leading us to an unlit stairwell, then down we went. I heard the slosh of water—smelled the dank scents of decaying wood and crumbling mortar.
At the bottom of the stairs, a wide chamber opened into a canal. The room was dim, lit by open torches along the wall. There were crates. Boats, tied to wooden docks. This was how the factory likely transported their wares through the city. Wares not mean to be seen, given the location of the room.
The wares weren’t the only thing meant to be kept out of sight.
They stood in crooked lines through the chamber.
Benji. Samuel. Dedrick, sporting bruises on his face and bandages on his wrists.
A dozen other knights were there as well, along with Otto Lange, hood up, face drawn.
In front of them all, clad in armor but for his helmet, leaned up against a wooden worktable like it was too much effort to stand straight—
Rory.
He’d been given a wide berth. His skin was damp with sweat.
The cut Benji had dealt his face the night Aisling fell was gone.
The only marks Rory wore now were a split in his bottom lip and the shadow of hair along his jaw, giving him a roguish mien in a room full of clean-shaven knights.
Black hair spilled over the bridge of his nose, and the charcoal around his eyes fell in long streaks to his chin, giving him the grotesque appearance of a man who’d wept ink.
Floorboards creaked beneath my feet and Rory’s gaze snapped up. His dark eyes had never been easy to read, and now that they were stone—I could hardly tell where he was looking, but I knew it when his gaze crashed into me. It was like falling, my body so weightless I might spit out my heart.
He was life and death. The before, and the now, disgraced and degraded by combat. Strange and eerie with those pale, indiscernible eyes. He was exquisite.
I couldn’t look away.
Rory’s chin lowered. And I knew what he saw. My wrists, bound. And when my hands dropped protectively over my searing, aching abdomen—
He saw that, too.
Benji stood opposite him, pale, his voice unsupported, his grip on the hilt of his sword white-knuckled. His shoulders eased when he saw me, a whit of rigidity finding his spine. He was always braver with me at his back. “Look at her, knave,” he said to Rory. “Do you know her?”
Rory’s gaze washed over me. Just like he’d been in the arena, he took his time answering the command, silence his only remaining weapon.
Then he spoke. And it was weapon enough—the wicked edge of a blade. “We met in Coulson Faire before the joust.”
“Bullshit,” Hamelin spat. He turned to the others.
“He met her upon the tor when we came at the end of summer for the king’s Divination, and he’s been licking and barking after her ever since.
Pathetic.” He waved a hand at Rory. “This knave is a man we all know: Rodrick Myndacious. He did not wake under the stones of Aisling Cathedral with no memory as he claims—he’s a foundling who entered the knighthood on the cuffs of prominent families.
A nobody, save a thief, a shit knight, a misbeliever—and clearly a practiced liar. ”
Rory watched him through those pale, eerie eyes. “Don’t forget the king’s champion: winner of the melee.”
Dedrick Lange’s bruised face flushed. “Where’d you get the armor? The hammer? The coin to enter the melee?”
“Probably stole them,” Hamelin muttered.
“How can you fight if you’ve got no memory?” Tory snapped.
Rory shrugged. “My body remembers.”
It took Benji a moment to steady his voice. “Maude Bauer’s name was writ upon the joust registrar. She…” He swallowed. “Where is she? Where is the gargoyle?”
“Don’t know anyone by the name Bauer,” Rory answered. “Any gargoyle, either.”
“Forgive me, sire,” Otto Lange said. “But we seem to be neglecting the most important question. What of his eyes? Stone, aren’t they? Is the knave touched by gods like your coin or inkwell—like the Diviner?”
Benji bristled. It was plain as the freckles on his face that he had no wish to discuss Rory’s stone eyes or Aisling’s spring, and he certainly didn’t want to encourage knights and nobles to find commonality between a Diviner and the knave. Nothing stains the mythical more acutely than humanity.
But then, with arduous slowness, Rory stopped leaning on the workman’s table and got to his knees. When he did, a familiar scent drifted from him, strange and pungent, sweet and fetid, like rotten flowers. The unmistakable scent of spring water. Only now, the smell did not make me sick.
It made my blood race. Put saliva on my tongue.
Rory looked up at the king, his voice flat, as if pressed down by molten iron.
“When I woke, the world was a strange, perilous place. I stumbled from hamlet to hamlet, lost, aimless. Folk spoke of portents, of gods called Omens, but no portent or god gave me shelter when I had nothing. But then I heard of the king’s tournament.
I made my way to Coulson Faire. A guard was careless, so I took his spear and sash and went to the arena, where valiant knights and a brave young king offered games and wealth—”
He hauled in a breath. “I saw a woman in white, whom everyone looked upon with reverence and wonder, and I thought, maybe there are things besides portents and gods worth putting my faith in. I followed you to the Seacht, King Castor, that I might be of use to you, and saw my chance. I entered the melee. And now that I’ve won—”
What happened next, even in a land as pious as Traum, was beyond belief. Rodrick Myndacious shut his eyes, sucked air into his lungs, lowered his head.
And bowed to his killer. “It’s an honor to be your champion, sire. However best I can serve you, I will.”
The room went still save for Otto Lange, whose hands twisted in his robes, his brows falling low as he scowled.
He turned to Benji, no doubt waiting for the king to refuse the offer and repay him the gold he was due, but Benji said nothing.
He was staring at Rory with a bald fixation, as if the knave was another magical stone object and had the power to transport or destroy him.
“He’s lying,” Dedrick said in the king’s ear. “Ask him again about Bauer. I’d bet my left arm she’s the one who got him that armor.”
Benji’s stillness broke. “I’ve a better way to tell if he’s lying.”
He stepped to me and brought his face close. I reared back, but the ox-eye made me sway. The king caught my cheek, and Tory grasped my arm. Pain in my abdomen spiked—I was the insect, caught in the spider’s web.
Benji’s voice was strained. “Kiss me or I’ll have Hamelin cut his head from his shoulders.” His hand slid from my cheek to my jaw, cupped it, shut his eyes tightly.
And pressed his lips over mine.
The king’s mouth was hot, but the inner lining of his lips were cold—tasting of old wine. Revulsion washed over me, his kiss as sickening as the blood I’d swallowed from his hand when we’d first met at Aisling for a Divination.
I shoved him back. Benji’s crown went crooked, his blue eyes low and apologetic before whirling accusatorily upon the knave.
Rory was as he’d been before: on his knees, utterly still. Only now he seemed etched that way.
“Well?” asked Otto Lange, unimpressed. “Are you affected by the king’s display, kissing his own wife?”
There. Right there. At the word wife. The barest jump in Rory’s throat. It was gone in a flash, no one the wiser.
But my heart was pounding.
Rory’s gaze found my face. His voice was like gravel scraping beneath the heel of a boot. “To remember nothing is still to know how and when to kiss a woman.”
A deafening silence answered, then—noise. More music. The call of the Tenor, the clamor of voices, beyond.
“The fete begins soon,” Otto Lange said. “Half the Seacht will be there, King Castor. Awaiting you, your Diviner.” He glowered at Rory. “And the winner of the melee. Especially one with such an interesting gaze.”
The king hesitated. Not so long ago, he’d promised Rory that if he ever showed his face again, he’d be executed.
But Benedict Castor had built a trap for himself on the very pedestal he’d erected for me when he deemed stone eyes holy.
Now, he was looking between Rory and me, then casting his gaze out onto the others, measuring their reactions to this spectacle—the knave, and the Diviner.
“Nothing can be done yet,” I said slowly. “Not until he’s claimed his prize.”
Benji went rigid. “The winnings will be gifted during the fete.”
“I’m not talking about gold.” I took a step forward. Tory’s arm slipped away, and then there was nothing but half a room and silk tethers holding me back. I drew closer to the knave, the smell of spring water stronger with every step I took.
Rory stayed on his knees, lowering his head in another bow. Even when my shadow fell over him, he kept it down, denying me his gaze.
“Look at me, knave.”
His chest heaved once, twice. When Rory’s eyes finally rose and his gaze collided with mine, the impact was indeed that of a magical stone object: transportive and destructive. I was whole, and I was in pieces.
Let him remember. There was no one left to pray to. But he’d known me. In gossamer, in armor, in nothing at all, he’d known me. He knew me now—he had to.
“Congratulations,” I murmured. “You’ve won yourself a Divination.”