Chapter Seventeen The Records and Findings of Benedict Castor the First #2
Rory’s lips parted, steam, like smoke, billowing from his mouth. “I’d tell you I like you so well that I don’t have words for it.” There was pain, and pleasure, in his voice. “But that’s not true. I have the exact word.”
He leaned in, swallowing the little sound that fluttered out of my mouth. Hands fast as a thief’s, he lifted the veil from my face. “If I were to ask for a token,” he said, looking into my eyes—
“Yes.” I shoved my fingers into his hair. “Kiss me.”
Our lips collided.
Rory pressed me against the carriage and I wrapped my arms around his neck so hard his armor groaned. Rain fell over us, wetting our faces, and we fought with our mouths, pushing and pulling and gasping.
I threw a leg up around his hip and Rory caught it, pressing kneading fingers into the flesh of my backside. He nipped my bottom lip, then ran his tongue over it, my name shattering out of him. “Sybil.”
I answered in kind, my hunger and desperation caught in the notes of his name. “Rory.”
A low, desperate sound clawed up his throat. Rory put his hands on the carriage, fumbling for the door. When it opened, he took me by the waist and I grasped him by the shoulder, both of us hauling the other into the cramped space and slamming the door shut behind us.
I landed with my back on the carriage floor with Rory on top of me, my leg still hooked over his hip.
He ripped off my veil, my crown, tossing them like conquered foes onto the floor.
He hadn’t donned his gauntlets after sparring; when he touched me, it was with bare hands.
Calluses scraped up my right leg, his palm so warm it put heat in my entire body.
I pressed my tongue over his, panting into his mouth.
His hand rose up my thigh, pushing my woolen tunic up with it.
I arched up. Rolled my hips against his pelvis—felt a sharp pain.
Cried out.
Rory pulled back, searching my face. “Did I hurt you?”
My abdomen. A biting, snapping agony had begun just beneath my wound, radiating all the way up to my breasts. “No. It’s just my—where the spear…” I was loathe to say it. “There’s stone in my body.”
The pulse in Rory’s neck jumped. He looked down at my abdomen. “May I?”
I bit my lip and nodded.
He raised himself to his knees. Reached down. Wrapped his fingers around the hemline of my tunic, wool snagging against toughened skin. With arduous slowness, Rory pulled the fabric up over my legs, past the crook of my thighs—breath shuddering out of him—all the way up to my pelvis.
A scar waited there. Even in the dim light of the carriage, the skin showed its damage: a violent reddish hue where the spear had impaled me. The surface was aggravated, the skin swollen and raised and angry.
A hiss fled Rory’s mouth. He looked at my wound the same way he’d once looked at the Omens. With so much hate I felt it on the back of my tongue. But then he bowed forward, dropping the faintest kiss upon the scar and murmuring against ruined skin. “You’re in pain?”
“Near you? Always.”
His eyes rose to my face. Martyr, I waited for him to call me, but he didn’t. No derision or disappointment or admonishment flittered between us. Rory simply nodded, pulled back from my scar, lifted my leg.
And dragged his lips up the inside of my thigh until his mouth was on my sex.
I swallowed an utterly base sound, my hands dropping like anvils and flexing possessively in Rory’s hair. “What are you doing?”
“Taking my token.”
He kissed me between my legs, sending my eyes rolling so far back I painted the carriage ceiling with stars. Then he took me by the hips. Kissed me again with an open mouth, moaning into me—
Three loud thumps shook the carriage. “Time to go,” Maude called from outside.
Rory swore, the gravel in his throat vibrating up my spine. “No.”
“The knights are doing a head count. Get your lovesick ass out here, knave.”
Rory raised himself off me, shot out a furious sigh, cupped my face, and pressed my cheeks, making my lips part and pucker. He kissed me wetly. “I’ll find you when we reach the Peaks.”
He fixed my tunic and kicked open the carriage door, turning to give me one last agonized look, then stomped out of sight. I peeled myself off the floor, climbed onto the bench, and attempted to breathe.
A moment later, the gargoyle was there, holding his hennin and wimple to his head as he scuttled into the carriage and shut the door. “What vile weather. All this rain is not good for my clothes—Oh dear, Bartholomew. Are you sick? You look positively feverish.”
I scrubbed my hand down my face, and Maude snapped the reins. The carriage jolted forward. “It’s entirely likely.”
The gargoyle squeezed onto the bench next to me, found a blanket balled up near his feet, and threw it over both of us.
“That boy in the golden crown cares a great deal how his knights look upon him. If I’ve taught you anything, Bartholomew—and I hope I’ve taught you a great many things—let it be never to care what others think of you.
Oh, he is clever not to trust us, but to let us remain beneath his pointy little nose simply for the wealth, the awe, we afford him…
” His fingers drummed excitedly on the carriage bench.
“I am a cuckoo in the nest of my enemies.” He paused. “A cuckoo isn’t a bird, is it?”
The carriage began to roll. “His grandfather didn’t care how his knights looked upon him,” I said quietly. “And they stoned him.”
“Perhaps that is the cost of faith in one’s own integrity.”
“There is no faith in the Stonewater Kingdom,” I said without thinking.
The gargoyle turned. Looked me in the face. “You know, I think there is something different about you, Bartholomew. The light in your eyes has dimmed.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I put a protective hand over my abdomen. “There is no light in stone.”
A minute later, the gargoyle was snoring, and I began to doze.
For the first time in weeks, I slept well.
I woke with my arms locked around the gargoyle. The sky was dark now, daylight held captive by a heavy mist that sat over the moors.
He was awake. When he saw that I was, too, he let out a breath, like he’d been trying to hold very still. “Oh.” I smiled and withdrew my arms. “Was I smothering you?”
“Yes,” he said happily. “I must tell you it is good we are back on our adventure together, Bartholomew.” He looked me up and down and wrinkled his nose. “I shall take up my duties as your squire immediately. You look…” He trilled his fingers in my face. “Ugh.”
The forgotten song of laughter hummed in my throat.
It lightened me so well I opened my mouth and began to talk, and we rode another hour before I stopped.
I told him everything. Of the wedding, the king and his knights and the stone objects he’d gifted them.
I told him of the ox-eye—of the strange visions of the tor and the rasping voice that came from my throat.
He talked, too, telling me of how he and Rory and Maude had returned to the Chiming Wood.
How they’d learned of the tournament and fitted themselves in new armor and disguises—he spent at least ten minutes telling me about his wimple and corned hat and pink robes—and how they’d managed to slip into Coulson Faire.
How Maude planned to turn the noble families against Benji. How Rory had gotten his memories back.
When he was done, the gargoyle was so heartened by his own approximation of, as he put it, “the important matters of state,” that he began to clap.
“Tell me,” I said, sudden and serious. “That piece of limestone you threw at Dedrick Lange. Was that a piece of your body?”
“A very talented bit of violence, I must say.”
“But it came from your body?”
He stared, like he found me prodigiously dim. “Obviously.”
“You should not have done that! Benji broke off your wing—there are cracks in your chest.”
Again, like I was a truly singular idiot, “Obviously.”
I dove for his robe. Flung up the hem.
He screamed. “Have a care for my virtue!”
My heart plummeted. There were fissures down his chest. Chunks missing from his left shoulder and a thousand more from his arm. Even now as we sat in the jostling carriage, tiny fragments of limestone broke from his body, catching in the fabric of his clothes.
The gargoyle ripped his robe away.
“You need to be more careful.” I waved an admonishing finger in front of his face. “I won’t have anything else happen to you.”
He stuck up his nose at me and faced the wall for several moments, peering over his shoulder only after whatever he deemed a punishing amount of time had passed.
“If you are willing to speak to me, I have questions for you still, Bartholomew. What do you know about ox-eye?”
“Eye-ox? Nothing.”
“Ox-eye. The sedative that gave me those visions. Apparently Benedict Castor the First made it from the gowan flowers on the tor. An attempt to dream like Diviners did—a failed experiment, leaving a hundred unanswered questions.” I sighed.
“A pity the only good king the nobles ever suffered was the one they killed. But kings come and go.”
“Don’t they just.” The gargoyle reached into his neckline. Extracted a notebook with a beaten leather cover and yellowing pages. “But let us be optimistic and hope that knowledge is slightly less fleeting. The art of thievery, too.”
I snatched it from his hand. Kissed his head. “Oh, you beautiful, beautiful creature!”
We pored over the pages, I reading aloud, the gargoyle nodding along and tracing the tip of his claw over the illustrations.
And while it became immediately apparent that Benedict Castor the First was a prolific writer, a talented artist, an astute topographer, an indisputable scholar, his notebook was absolute rubbish.
We didn’t learn a damn thing about ox-eye.