Chapter Fifteen The Many Names of a Common Flower
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE MANY NAMES OF A COMMON FLOWER
I’ll do anything you ask of me.
Rodrick Myndacious.
The knave. The foulest knight in all of Traum.
Rory. My Rory. Back from the dead.
And if he was here, and he remembered, Bartholomew and Maude couldn’t be far.
Fingers locked in my coif, it took effort not to smile as I moved with the king and his knights down the winding streets of the Seacht, the burden of loneliness and despair lightening—I practically floated as we made our way through the city.
I’d barely been able to hold myself up this morning, the pain in my abdomen insurmountable. Now, it had dulled to an ache. I could stand, walk—maybe even run—without buckling.
The spring water in Rory’s blood. It had tasted smoother, sweeter, more satiating, than anything I’d ever put on my tongue.
Next to me, the king was heavy in his walk, taking comfort in the flask on his belt and arguing with himself. “Maude,” he muttered. “This is her doing, and good ole Rory is a much finer actor than I ever credited him to be.” He grimaced. “Or he’s not acting at all.”
He eyed me over his shoulder. “Which was worse? My kiss, or the fact that he did not care about it?”
He’d dug his own grave hiding my face behind a veil—I gave him nothing. “Go to hell, Benji.”
“The latter, then.” He looked like an anxious dog when he smiled like that, teeth on display. “For better or worse, the loom stone is gone. If he has truly lost his memories, there will be no remembering for him.”
I said nothing.
The knights led us past roaring canals and over bridges, following the sounds of music, of laughter and jovial voices, our footsteps against cobblestones a counter beat against the clamor.
“Where is it?” I asked. “This fete?”
Benji rolled his shoulders. “You’ll know it when you see—”
The street began to shake, rumbling so violently I felt it in my teeth. I caught my hand on a brick wall, and the knights steadied their king, armor rattling.
The rumbling stopped.
“Another earthquake.” The king looked up, as if the answer was writ upon the twilight sky. “I don’t like it, Six.”
“Perhaps it’s a portent that your tournament is doomed.”
He shot me a narrow look. “Don’t be funny. It doesn’t suit.”
The streets grew more and more narrow until finally we entered an alley laden with ivy. I looked around. Laughed. “You’re kidding. Here?”
There was a guard in the alley. When he noted Benji—and me at his side—he pulled back a sheet of ivy, revealing a small wooden door in the reaching alley wall.
He swung it open, a long, dark corridor waiting, music and voices echoing beyond.
The knights led us down the corridor, their boots, and my bare feet, making no sound against dark woolen carpet.
There were paintings on the walls. Portraits of pale bodies, twisting. The ghost of Aisling Cathedral was upon me—the animal urge to run. Yes, I knew this place. I’d been here before.
In my dreams.
I was back in the Harried Scribe’s lair.
Light slipped beneath a door. Benji shoved it open, and I was assaulted by the glow of torches, the sharp knell of fiddles—the raucous sound of hundreds of folk gathered in celebration.
They stood in the heart of a circular room, the space as vast as the melee arena.
Soaring, book-laden shelves reached upward to the room’s only window—a glass dome, where glimpses of the twilight sky peeked.
When the audience began to applaud at the sight of the king, the sound echoed against the dome, and Benji brightened.
A quartet played their instruments. Dancers moved in measured steps, and a pair of actors, one wearing black, the other blue, feigned combat with paper weapons.
A minstrel sang. “A colorful dream, the bright land of Traum, where the wind on the moors hums a tune.
Where the holloways lead you awry and along, and the gowans are always in bloom.
The knights are all noble, and the ladies so fair, and the scribes all set in their trade.
The books are all read, and the folk are all fed—and the gods, through dreams, lend us aid.
“But wherever you ramble, from woodland to sea, pray find the young king on your way. I lent him my hammer, and he lent me his faith, and to his queen, the Diviner, did I pray.”
An ancient scribe came up to the king and me. “Over seven hundred gold coins won in the melee, sire. The funds are in the city vault—your champion is a lucky man.”
Others came up to us. They peered at my veil, searching, and Benji was offered congratulations on the melee. But for every compliment folk of the Seacht paid their king, so too did they tender a question: Who is he? Where does he come from? Do his eyes tell the future as the Diviner’s do?
Dedrick Lange and his inkwell had meant to inspire faith in the arena. But all anyone was talking about was the knave.
Benji’s response was but a strained smile. “Time for a dance, I think,” he told me.
The king grasped my hands. Others joined the dance, swaying with the same sort of weightlessness I felt every time I thought of Rory. Merchants, folk of the Seacht—even scribes—all tugged like puppets across the vast room.
But then—a great noise. Another booming round of applause filled the room. Benji and I both turned, the king straining and I barely breathing.
The knave had arrived.
He came behind the king’s favorites, Dedrick and Hamelin and Samuel and Tory pushed aside so that folk might get to Rory, his teammates from the melee, scribes, even nobles waiting to speak to him.
Red in the cheeks, smiles on display, women gathered, too, their handkerchiefs at the ready.
I couldn’t hear what they were asking him—couldn’t hear Rory’s responses through his helmet.
He took their wine, retrieved their fallen handkerchiefs—he’d have been the picture of magnanimity were it not for that daunting black armor.
“Do you remember what you told me the last time we danced?” Benji was staring at Rory, barely touching me as we swayed through the room.
“‘You should be more concerned with the five bad portents you garnered than winning my esteem, King Castor.’ So frightening. So unwavering in your conviction.” His blue eyes shone.
“You were full of power, of promise. I thought I’d do anything to make you my friend. ”
“And we know how well you treat your friends, Benji.”
He pondered that. Slowly, he said, “Everyone deserves a second chance.”
The king let go of me, arms open and welcoming as he moved through the crowd toward the knave.
“There’s my champion,” he called, drawing the attention of the fawners.
When Benji stood beside Rory, the crowd’s adoration spread to him, and the king smiled, the last rays of daylight falling from the dome ceiling and catching along his crown.
Otto Lange was there as well, a deal less jovial.
He carried a long gray sash with an inkwell embroidered into its fabric.
Benji took it. Held it out to Rory. “Your champion’s sash.
” From his belt, he withdrew a single gold coin.
“And a token of your winnings—the first of seven hundred. You’re a wealthy man, knave. ”
The audience cheered.
“Tell us.” Benji held the coin out to Rory. “What do you aim to do with your winnings?”
Rory took the sash. Slipped it over his cuirass. “What anyone does with gold, King Castor.” He withdrew the coin from the king’s hand and closed it in his fist. “I aim to change things.”
Benji’s smile faltered.
The crowd swelled, scribes and nobles alike moved close. “My queen,” they called. Some drunk, some reverent, some curious. “My Diviner.”
Faces and bodies blurred around me until they looked like the paintings in the Harried Scribe’s corridor: strange, twisted figures. Men in gray robes, women in fine dresses—all of them eager to look at me.
“I came to Aisling a hundred times, but the abbess never accepted my fee.” A woman reached up. Tried to move my veil aside and look me in the eye. “What a blessed honor, what a fine sign, to meet you.”
“Diviner.” A scribe upended his inkwell on the floor, black ink sopping into floorboards, staining the hem of my dress. “Tell me, what do you see? What does the Harried Scribe say? What does my future entail?”
A man with a cut across his chin and a black streak of paint over his jerkin called me a beautiful mystic and asked me to dance. I refused, and he slipped away.
“Whore,” another called me, a scribe wearing a hood and pointing at me with an accusatory finger. “What business have the Omens in the affairs of men? Aisling is fallen—your gods have no power here.”
I shoved him. He stumbled back, knocking into more scribes. The crowd pulsed, holding me too tightly in its engorged stomach. The instruments were too loud, the air too close—
The crowd parted, a scar carved down its middle.
The room went quiet but for a perforating buzz, the sound of hundreds of conversations going quiet.
When I looked up, the knave was cutting through the room and didn’t stop until he was standing right in front of me, the layers between us, his visor, my veil—his iron, my gossamer—as restrictive as cuffs.
His voice low. Warm. “Diviner.”
“Knave.” I searched for his eyes. Needed to see them. “Take off your helmet.”
His gauntlets scraped together, his fingers trilling in a strange rhythm at his side. He reached up. Hooked his thumb beneath the rim of his helmet—
Then drew it right back out.
I raised my brows. “You’d tease me?”
“The king’s lackeys called me a lost cause and told me to keep it on.” A note of humor flickered through his voice. “Threatened me with another beating.”
“Another?”
Rory shrugged. “They tried their best. Then again—” He reached up. Withdrew his helmet and dropped it upon the floor, never taking his pale gaze from mine. “Fuck their rules.”
The buzz in the air quickened, gasps resounding against shelves and walls and glass. Everyone turned to look at Rory’s stone eyes.
But I was looking at his ear.