Chapter Fifteen The Many Names of a Common Flower #2
The gold bands were missing, the skin red and swollen. Rory had shaved, his hair wet, the charcoal around his eyes washed away. Someone had taken pains to make him appear less like himself and more like whatever a champion was meant to be.
Over his shoulder, Hamelin and Tory and Dedrick and Samuel, lingering at the edge of the dancers, watching us. Hamelin raised his hand, waving at me. On his middle finger were the three gold bands Rory wore in his ear.
My molars slammed together.
“It doesn’t matter. I have no memory of them, besides. No sentimental attachment.”
But you do. My eyes prickled with furious tears. “I do.”
The corner of Rory’s mouth twitched. His eyes returned to my face—he had no trouble finding my eyes beneath my veil—and for a time that passed too long and too short, we stood unmoving, the air taut.
Breastplate rising and falling, Rory’s breaths rushed and his throat hitched. His lips moved without sound. Sybil.
I’d have gone to him. Buried myself against his chest.
But I was the queen of Traum. A Diviner who moved through the hamlets, stoic and unknowable, that she might get her hands on the stone objects. And he, this subterfuge of the knave… he was fighting for his life to pretend he did not know me in all the ways only he had.
We stood inches apart. But the spectacle was a wall between us.
So was every person in the vast room who’d slowed their dancing to get a look at us. Fingers fidgeting at his sides, Rory cleared his throat. “Your turn,” he managed. “Take off your veil.”
I reached up. Felt thousands of eyes, pressing upon me. Let my hand fall.
Rory frowned.
“Wouldn’t want to give the impression of familiarity,” I said. “To the knave, I’m but a holy stranger in white. Still.” I leaned close. Watched as crimson spread over his cheeks. “Strangers still dance, don’t they?”
“Yes,” he said, a little breathless. “Strangers dance.”
A song began, slower than the others. Rory yanked loose the straps of his armor just like he had during the Divination, dropping his gauntlets, then his gloves, onto the floor atop his helmet. When he held out his hand to me, it was bare. “So dance with me, Diviner.”
The kingdom watched as I slid my hand into his. Our calluses dragged together, the pressure gentle but insistent. I let out a breath, and Rory did too, tucking his thumb over the back of my knuckles. I put my other hand on his shoulder, and Rory placed his into the curve between my ribs and hips.
We began to move.
“Stone eyes, then.” My voice hummed against his armor. “If only you were pretty enough to be a Diviner.”
Rory spun me, then pulled me back against his chest. “You’re pretty enough for the both of us.”
Warmth flickered through my stomach. “What of Bartholomew?” I whispered. “He’s all right? Maude?”
He nodded.
“I’ll see them soon?”
Another nod. Rory held tight to my hand and soft to my waist, and together we danced over the same marble floors where we’d once killed an Omen. “Those people out there,” he said, “knights and nobles—Pith, will you let me lead?”
I was trying to correct his path through the crowd. So far, he’d stepped on three feet and elbowed at least two scribes in the face. “You’re not very good at dancing.”
“Bad,” he rasped against the shell of my ear, “is the point.”
I glanced up at him and found him smiling.
“They see what I am,” he said as we turned.
“A knave who might have once been a bad knight but was always a nobody. And yet I beat their favorite in the melee. I have the same holy markings as you. Perhaps this tournament will prove even a nobody might yet be somebody in the Stonewater Kingdom. Contradictions are destabilizing things.” His voice turned wicked. “So is coin.”
I turned. Benji was still standing near the door, surrounded by scribes. Only now he was not touched by light or grinning and accepting praise—he was in an all-out shouting match with Otto Lange.
“How long do you imagine the noble families of Traum will suffer a king who handed them wealth—only to lose it in his self-aggrandizing tournament?” The muscles in Rory’s jaw strained. “The boy’s time is nigh. Kings come and go.”
How right he was. “I’m going to kill him,” I whispered against his shoulder.
Rory looked down.
“I never intended to win,” I said, the truth spilling out of me. “There is no winning anymore—not for me. It’s the stone objects.” My throat worked. “If Aisling’s final vestiges are gone… and Benji with them, perhaps Traum might finally change for the better. All I need is a hammer.”
I hadn’t realized our fingers had laced together. Rory’s hand was hot, the air in his voice thin. “It will change,” he said. I could hear his heart drumming in his armor. “Things can be better than they’ve been. If it’s a hammer you want…”
He brought our entwined hands to his belt. Pulled free the blacksmith’s hammer he’d used in the melee and clasped my hand around it. “Have mine.”
I clutched the handle like it was a rope thrown down to me.
A new tune began, the sound of the revelry continuing on and echoing into the cavernous room and ricocheting off the glass above.
We moved through the crowd, I with practiced smoothness, Rory like he was trying to crack the stones beneath our feet.
Dedrick, Hamelin, Samuel, and Tory never stopped watching us.
“Tell me,” I said, low enough only Rory could hear. “What do you know about ox-eye?”
“It’s a draft. A sedative, I think. Saw plenty of it back when I lived at Castle Luricht. Why?”
I leaned in close and told him about the visions I’d had. Of the Omens, the abbess, the Diviners—the tor. How there was a rasping voice, and that voice spoke through me, telling me the past was a portent, showing me Aisling’s crumbling ceiling, then darkness.
“It’s like a dream. A white light. Shadows, moving in and out. But in dreams, I fell through the hamlets, and in these visions I cannot move at all. I’m stuck on my back, forced to see whatever happens above me, and my thoughts… I don’t know. It’s like someone else is seeing. Feeling. Remembering.”
Rory listened without interrupting, his hand tightening over mine. Neither of us was trying to lead now. We were like water, swaying in perfect rhythm, two bodies familiarized with each other in motion.
“Whatever happens,” I said, “in this tournament or after, if I cannot find out who or what is causing these visions, keep searching.” I took a shallow breath. “Do what you once promised. Take care of Bartholomew.”
Rory’s brow furled, his voice dangerously soft. “You say it as if you will not be there to do it yourself.”
The song ended. Two seconds later, the king’s knights were upon us. “What remarkable partners you make,” Samuel said.
“Agreed.” Dedrick was holding Rory’s helmet. He slammed it against Rory’s chest. “One would think you danced before.”
Hamelin’s teeth were bared. “I told you not to touch her.”
Rory slouched forward, positively bored. “The queen bade me to dance. I’m a good little soldier—I do as I’m told.” His fingers trailed over my long silk sleeves, shifting the fabric until it fell over my hand, hiding my fist—and the hammer within—from view.
He let go of my hand. Tendered a final glance. “Diviner.”
Then he slipped away into the crowd.
“Prick.” Hamelin watched him go. “Might have the king and everyone else fooled—but not me.”
Tory reached for my arm. “Come, Diviner. The king would like you to—”
She began to tremble. So did Hamelin and Dedrick. So did I, the scribes, the candle flames. Books danced on their shelves, and the ground shook.
Shouts sounded. “Earthquake!”
The Harried Scribe’s lair shook so violently it upended, books raining down upon the king’s guests, clunking them on their heads and shoulders and knocking them off their feet.
Bows scraped over fiddle strings, the instrumentalists stopping mid-note.
The shaking grew until it rattled my teeth, the horrible sound of wood splintering echoing in the room.
High above, the glass dome shattered, raining thousands of shards down upon us.
I don’t know who ran first. But there was a sudden, screaming rush for the door. A tide of bodies.
“Get outside,” Dedrick shouted. “Before we’re crushed.”
More knights joined us as we pushed out of the door into the dark corridor, Benji among them. I lost sight of Rory, the crowd dense as it fled the Harried Scribe’s dwelling, the room emptying out like blood from a split artery.
Dedrick caught me by one arm, Benji by the other. “Come, Your Majesties.”
He ripped us away from the crowd. Down alleys, left then right, we turned, disappearing like ink into the dark well of the Seacht, tripping over ourselves as the earth continued to shake.
A minute later, the world was still again. Only the rushing sound of the Tenor River and the echoes of distant screams remained. When I looked back, a great cloud of dust was rising, a gap sitting among the buildings like a mouth newly shy of its front tooth.
The Harried Scribe’s lair had fallen in on itself.
“All those books.” Benji was spitting. Slurring. “Pith! When is that damn quaking going to stop?”
“It has stopped, you bungling drunkard,” I hissed.
Dedrick brought us over a narrow bridge, and I heard a noise. A low hum. Not the rush of the Tenor or the call of water sprites. This was a soft, eerie song, slightly out of tune. I looked behind me.
There was nothing there.
“Gods, what a disaster. And I know what Samuel will say.” Benji pinched his nose and spoke in a stuffy voice.
“‘Another terrible portent, sire!’ Shut up, you old windbag.” He turned, remembering me.
“You don’t happen to have any of that flower on you, do you, Six?
I could use a little sedation right about now. ”
We stepped onto another bridge. “It’s ox-eye,” I said. “Not a flower.”