Chapter Eighteen A Cold, Yawning Castle #2
The knights circled the table. “Over here, sire.” Avice led the king to where a cold shale throne waited like a beatless heart in the center of the room. The place the Ardent Oarsman had once sat. “The seat of honor.”
Sybil was placed between Avice and Maude, and I sat between Maude and the gargoyle.
Folk of the Peaks stared at me, then again at the gargoyle, clearly flummoxed to see a creature like him among knights and nobles and champions.
They whispered behind their hands, words like knave and Aisling and magic abounding.
Grumbling, I confronted my plate—gamey gray meat. I took one bite, thought of the dead sprites upon the stairs, and spat it onto the floor.
“Which is worse,” the gargoyle pondered. He was watching Benji, alone at the head of the table in the Ardent Oarsman’s chair. “A sword through the side from a friend? Or the slow, agonizing degradation of a thousand nicks upon he who has none?”
I glanced at the king. He was fiddling with the stone coin.
Rubbing it beneath his thumb and gazing upon it with a kind of adulation I’d seen the Artful Brigand tend.
It was easier to think of Benji that way—a new version of the Omen who’d used me.
Hurt me. Hurt her. Sometimes it took all I had not to close the distance between us with a blade and end him the way I had the Brigand.
But then I’d remember the little boy I’d carried in my arms, the one I’d spent my life trying to protect, and I was filled with such a wretched sadness I could barely hold myself up. Benji had been right about Aisling and the stone objects and the Omens—all that power had to go somewhere.
But what became of love when it was reduced to ruin?
“Either way,” I told the gargoyle. “He’s on borrowed time.”
Down the table, Hamelin was loudly explaining to Sybil the feats of strength. “There will be three,” he said, chewing his food. “The breaking of stones, the throwing of stones, and the lifting of stones.”
“I understand you intend to compete, Diviner. Commendable.” Warmth touched Avice’s chilly voice. “My son, of course, will be competing as well. Hamelin was lifting stones since before he could stand.”
“Dropped a few on his head, too, I imagine,” Sybil said.
I laughed into my cup. Maude elbowed me under the table.
“Think you’re stronger than me, Diviner?” Hamelin said. I could hear the challenge in his voice.
“I know I am,” Sybil answered.
I peered around Maude. Hamelin had placed the stone oar on the table and was leaning over it, smiling, my fucking gold rings glimmering around the wrist of his gauntlet.
And while his teeth were white and straight and nothing like the Ardent Oarsman’s jagged smile, I saw the Omen plain enough in the way Hamelin was looking at Sybil.
Like he was hungry for a bite. “You are bodied,” he told her, “I’ll give you that.
But let’s give credit where it’s due.” He scratched the corner of his mouth.
“I handled you well enough in the glen outside of Coulson Faire at the end of summer. A few heavy stones are nothing to that.”
My hands splayed on the table.
Maude gripped my elbow and held me in place the same moment Avice turned and snapped at her son. “Go sit by the king. Make sure he’s comfortable.”
Hamelin smiled one more time at Sybil, took the Ardent Oarsman’s oar, and sauntered to the head of the table.
Sybil hardly noticed. She was looking at the food on her plate.
Dragging a finger through it. “There are folk in your hamlet who might eat better at this table than you or me, Fischer. Folk of the Peaks are strong, I know. But muscle, like your mountains, erodes.” She looked up at Avice.
“If your people cannot fish, they will grow hungry.”
Avice was as unflagging as ever. “Commerce will come on the heels of this tournament. My son will triumph, and the winnings shall return to the Peaks, just as the king promised.”
“Things,” Sybil said slowly, “do not always go as promised.”
“Spoken from experience, I gather.” Avice set down her fork and knife. She spoke closely to Sybil, her thin voice putting prickles on the back of my neck. “Hamelin told me how you tried to take the king’s life before the wedding. How you were brutally wounded in his care.”
I was practically sitting on Maude’s lap, trying to eavesdrop.
“If it is still your wish to be rid of the king,” Avice whispered to Sybil, “I will make it so. And after—” She looked out into the Ardent Oarsman’s hall.
“All this can be yours. You are a strong woman. You will like it in the Peaks. If you are here, folk will come. Bring more coin. We will restore what has been damaged. Begin again.” She clasped her hands together.
“And if it suits you both, you may have the hand of my son in marriage.”
I bit down so hard my jaw popped.
Sybil had not lifted her veil to eat or drink.
She stirred the wine in her cup, speaking to the dark swirls.
“When I was a girl at Aisling Cathedral, the abbess told me I would never be safe beyond the tor because I was holy, and people wanted holy things for themselves. She told me many things that made me hold still and kept my world small. But that did not always make them untrue.”
She turned to Avice. “You don’t want a wife for your son any more than the king wanted one for himself. You want a holy object—someone to distract folk when they are frightened and hungry. But you of the Peaks should know stone does not make for good nourishment. And I am full of stone.”
Like the mountains after the quake, Avice Fischer’s stoicism began to fissure. “You don’t understand, Diviner. I do not want you to remain here to distract folk of the Peaks. I want you to remain to give them hope.”
Sybil’s laugh was strange. Resounding and entirely empty. “I won’t be remaining anywhere in the Stonewater Kingdom. Least of all here.”
My brow went low.
Whatever happens, she’d said in the Seacht, in this tournament or after, if I cannot find out who or what is causing these visions, keep searching. Do what you once promised. Take care of Bartholomew.
I hadn’t liked it then, and I hated it now, and I’d yet to understand what it meant. “Bartholomew?”
The gargoyle was finger painting with his food upon his plate. “Yes, Bartholomew?”
“Something’s wrong.” I didn’t know what it was, only that the not knowing made me feel disgustingly useless. “How did she seem to you in the carriage?”
“I am her squire,” he said plainly. “I know when she bears armor and when she does not.” He peered up the table. “There is a burden upon her shoulders. Pain that the strange draft of eye-ox cannot dull.”
Ox-eye.
Perhaps I did not have to be disgustingly useless.
I took the gargoyle’s hand and pushed from the table.
“Where are we going?” he asked, hugging his robe to him as we walked.
We passed columns, our echoes abounding down a long stone corridor. “To help lighten her burden,” I said. “We’re going to find some ox-eye.”
Gods I hated this castle. Of course there’d be no kitchens, no larder, because that Ardent Oarsman didn’t eat anything but Diviners and their blood. It took the gargoyle and me nearly an hour to find where Avice Fischer had stashed the poor sods responsible for tonight’s feast.
“Oi!” I said, barking at three fishermen cleaning dishes over a trough and feeding a dying fire. “You got any ox-eye?”
“Ox-eye?”
“Eye-ox,” said the gargoyle.
“It’s a sedative,” I said.
The fishermen shook their heads. “Try Medkel, our physician.”
Medkel was a man with skin like leather and knuckles so swollen it was a miracle he managed to put on his own trousers let alone thread a suture through a needle. “Ox-eye.” He sucked his teeth and spat out a fishbone. “What’s that?”
“A sedative made of gowan flowers.”
He shook his head. “Sounds right awful.”
“I’m a sick man.” I pulled a copper from my belt. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got.”
He eyed the copper. “I’ve got nothing to give you.”
I left him the coin anyway, then went to find one of those assholes the king had replaced me with. For every corner we turned, I prayed we’d find Hamelin Fischer on the other side. A splash of red in all this gray would really liven the place up.
“I do not like it here,” said the gargoyle, peering up at stone buttresses. “A crude imitation of the cathedral.”
“That’s all gods ever are,” I muttered. “Crude imitations.”
We found Samuel Eichel instead, smoking idleweed and coming out of a hallway garderobe. “Knight.”
He jumped, then stared, mesmerized, into my eyes.
“Ox-eye. Do you have any?”
It took him a moment to catch up. “Is the Diviner unwell again?”
“Yes.” I put on an atrocious smile “Get it.”
“Pith, haven’t forgotten your pompousness, have you? If you want ox-eye, try the king’s saddle bags.” Samuel paused. Looked at me, then the gargoyle, like he could not decide which of us was less trustworthy. “On second thought, I’ll get it.”
Twenty minutes later, the gargoyle and I were in a stay-room, crouching over a fire, pouring shit-brown ox-eye from a glass bottle into two cups. As I handed one to the gargoyle, I caught a sharp, pungent odor.
The gargoyle sniffed his. “Lovely. Smells like death.”
“What are you two idiots doing?”
I jumped and the gargoyle shrieked. When we turned, Maude was there, hand on her hip.
“Bartholomew!” The gargoyle nodded at the cup. “Care for a libation?”
I straightened. “Where’s Sybil?”
“Still at dinner. I wanted to check on you two.” Maude’s nose wrinkled. “What’s that?”
“Eye-ox.” The gargoyle wiggled his brows. “I made it myself.”
“Ox-eye?” She stomped to the fire. “That’s a bloody sedative.”
“It’s more than that for Sybil,” I said. “Let’s see what it actually does.”
The gargoyle took the cup and raised it to his mouth. “I confess it has been a long while since I’ve had any visions. Bartholomew said this draft gave her quite the rattle—”
“Ah, ah.” Maude put her hand over the rim of his cup. “Maybe I should try. We don’t need you shaking loose any more pieces of yourself.”