Chapter Fourteen The Body Remembers
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE BODY REMEMBERS
Flaw that it was, that little prick was highly practiced in the art of performing. Benji was the picture of magnanimity when his gaze turned from Sybil to me. “A Divination… by all means, my queen. Give the knave his due.”
Even the sound of his voice put an inferno in my chest.
But then Sybil kept looking at me like no one else existed, and Benedict Castor the Third was eclipsed.
I hadn’t looked at her too closely yet—hadn’t wanted to risk anyone seeing my upheaval: I remembered everything, and it was essential to Maude’s plan that neither Benji nor his men should know it.
But it was essential to me that Sybil did.
She stood before me, her hair beneath her veil like moonlight and she the moon, eternal and ethereal and arresting in a vast darkness. “Forgive me.” I wasn’t playing at piety anymore. Not with her looking down at me like that. “But what is a Diviner, anyway?”
“A girl kept safe from the world, made mythical and strange, then commodified for it,” she murmured. “Once, I lived in a cathedral. Drowned in a magical spring. I was a harbinger. Holy chattel. Being a queen is not so different.”
Tory, good ole Weasel Face, cleared her throat. “Would you like the use of your hands for the Divination?”
Sybil’s hand dropped in front of my face and I saw what I’d noted earlier. Wrists, bound by silk. “He can untie them.”
It’s not a good thief who lets his hands tremble, and my gauntlets were shaking with bruising force. There was no untying anything.
I reached down. Yanked loose the straps around my right arm, then wrenched off my gauntlet and dropped it with a clang upon the floor.
Next came my glove; I bit it by the finger and stripped it off.
Then I did that to the other gauntlet, the other glove.
When I touched Sybil’s wrist, my hands still trembled, but they were bare.
For the first time in weeks, I felt her skin against mine.
Sybil exhaled, breath stirring her veil. My fingers worked the knots of the tether. It came undone, slithering off her wrists like a serpent. “Stand,” she told me.
I could feel the others watching, their gazes sharp as wire.
I rose to my feet. Stood at full height. “Now the veil,” Sybil told me.
So vividly came the memory of the first time I’d seen her eyes—when she’d come to my room at Petula Hall and I’d taken off her armor and kissed her and unraveled her—that I found myself just the same: anxious and rearing to obliterate any remaining barrier between us.
Cheeks burning, my fingers dropped to the bottom of her shroud, the gossamer snagging against my calloused fingertips. Tightness found my chest, and when I lifted the veil and looked into her face, neither of us was breathing.
But then I saw Sybil’s beautiful stone eyes, and it was not like it had been in Petula Hall—there was still something in the way. A new, cloudy strangeness in her gaze, a wall I wasn’t breaching.
Doubt. It sat like a second veil over her, giving her the mollified effect of someone sleepwalking—of looking but not seeing.
“Tell me, knave.” Her voice was so quiet the others behind her leaned in. “Do you have faith in portents?”
The pretense’s yoke cut into my skin. I know you, Sybil Delling, hammered my voice against the inside of my skull. I remember every second. I was still holding the veil, the storm of my pulse roaring. I tucked it back over her head. “Do you?”
“I don’t have faith in anything anymore.” Sybil shifted her weight, the chainmail of her coif singing an eerie tune. “You should know, to receive a Divination, you must acquiesce pieces of yourself.”
“Take anything you want.”
And I knew, because I’d studied them closer than sky or land, book or body, that Sybil’s stone eyes had fallen to my mouth. “Your blood,” she murmured. “Just a little will do.”
I lifted my thumb to my mouth and dragged it over the cut in my bottom lip. Blood, warm and viscous, coated my fingertip, and when I held it out like an offering, Sybil’s nostrils flared. She grasped my wrist. “What name, with blood, would you give me?”
“Rodrick, knave, nobody. Whichever you please.”
Sybil looked at the blood on my thumb like her own fate pooled within it. “Rory,” she whispered. “Once, I called you Rory.” She opened her mouth. Shut her eyes.
And pressed the bloody swirls of my thumbprint over her tongue.
A low sound reverberated in her throat. Sybil’s brow furled, and when she dragged my thumb over the surface of her tongue, I felt it in all the places her tongue had been before.
My exhale came out hot and hurried, and Sybil opened her eyes.
She ran her tongue over my finger once more, holding my gaze as she wiped me clean.
I watched her throat work as she swallowed.
And there must have been a fissure within me, an irreparable strangeness or depravity, because all I wanted to do was to press my thumb over her lips again and wipe my blood all over her mouth.
I understood, better than most, what it was like to be hungry, and I knew as assuredly as I felt the flying beat of my heart that Sybil Delling was hungry.
She needed spring water, however it came, even in the copper thickness of blood. It was hurting her, not having it.
“Does it repulse you?” I managed. “The taste?”
“Not yours.” Sybil withdrew my hand from her mouth. Her cheeks were pinker, her voice steadier. “You taste of the tor. Of the spring.”
“What does that mean?” Dedrick Lange asked behind my back. “What has the spring to do with it, Diviner?”
“What of portents?” Samuel demanded. “What do you see in her eyes, knave?”
My past. My future. For the first time since I’d opened my mouth, I did not lie to the king or his knights. “There’s light, like the moon. Unwavering. A kind of strangeness that lends an even stranger faith that”—I swallowed—“that things can be better than they’ve been.”
Sybil frowned, the sheen of doubt still masking her eyes.
Come on, Sybil. I’m right here.
Samuel Eichel was nodding, and a few others as well.
Benji said nothing. He was standing so still I wondered if he was breathing, his gaze scrupulous.
The little shit had always been meticulous with his allies, a bloodhound for power and those who amassed it—he was looking at me the way he’d often looked at Maude and almost always looked at Sybil.
Like he was missing something vital and he needed me to fill the void.
But then, he had his own doubt, too. Was I Rory, or was I the knave? His enemy, or his champion?
Ping, ping.
I looked down. Blood was falling, hot and slow, from my bottom lip down my chin, where it jumped—plunking onto my armor.
Sybil drew in a breath. “You’re still bleeding.”
“There’s a cloth in my gorget.”
Like five whispering ghosts, Sybil’s fingers traveled up my breastplate to my mail cuff. When she reached into the neck of my armor, something wet and frail came loose, and she pulled forth the piece of silk with VI embroidered upon it. “Hold still.”
She took my cheek in one hand and drew the strip of silk over my lip with the other, wiping the blood away. “There. You look the role of champion better now.”
She placed the silk back in my hand. “The signs are plain,” she said to the others, her voice hardening like it had during a Divination. “Your king is correct.”
Benji blinked. He’d been staring at me, unmoored to be called to attention. “Correct?”
“You once told me everyone deserves two chances in this life. The first to err, the second to rectify. This is Rodrick Myndacious’s second chance to be the man you always wanted him to be.
Faithful, loyal, useful.” She looked at me like she once did, like I was so far below her—like she did not, could not, care for me.
When she took a step back, my heart wrenched.
“A witness, pupil, visitor to the Stonewater Kingdom, devoid of memory but full of promise, your champion will certainly inspire faith in the arena. Just as you wished.”
I didn’t know what was true. If Benji believed Sybil, if Sybil believed me.
We were three liars; unbelievers, performing faith.
Still. The king suffered himself to smile.
“How right you are, Six.” He turned, whispering to Hamelin and Tory, then Samuel and Dedrick.
I heard the words fucking unsightly, then his attention returned to me.
“Attend the fete, knave. Swear fealty to me and collect your winnings. If all goes well, I will consider allowing you to remain.”
“Of course.” I kept my eyes on Sybil. Said, my voice full of gravel, the same thing I’d told her in life and would again in death. “I’ll do anything you ask of me.”
She froze.
Blinked.
Slowly, then all at once, the clouds of doubt fled her eyes, the barest hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
I exhaled shakily. That’s it, sweetheart.
The king flicked his wrists and the knights surrounded Sybil. Her veil fell back over her face, and they led her and Otto Lange from the room, Benji following swiftly behind.
Hamelin, Dedrick, Tory, and Samuel remained, fingers hovering over the hilts of their swords.
“That coin you won in the melee was promised to my uncle.” I don’t think Dedrick Lange had ever wasted a moment’s attention on me. Now, he was hardly blinking, as if the wider he made his stupid gray eyes, the more he’d know about me. “You’ve no right to touch it.”
“I’m decently sure I could drop one gold piece at a time into the Tenor and it would be within my right.
” I itched the corner of my mouth with my middle finger.
“It’s natural to have regrets. You’re thinking, ‘If I hadn’t blown my stamina strutting around with that inkwell before the match, I might have been able to put this prick in his place.
’ Hard losses being easy lessons and all that.
” I sucked my teeth. “The gold is mine to do with as I please.”
The bruises I’d dealt Dedrick’s face darkened. He looked like an overripe plum.
“And the Diviner.” This time, it was Hamelin, lips held in an ugly grimace over his horse teeth. “You’ve no right to touch her. Never have, never will.”
I dragged my tongue along the inside of my cheek and held his gaze until he dropped it.
The others exchanged glances. Samuel leaned down. Picked my gauntlets and gloves off the floor and threw them at me. “Put these back on. There’s a fete in your honor. You’ve got to look presentable.”
Then all four closed in around me.