Chapter Nineteen Hit Me as Hard as You Can, Second Encore
CHAPTER NINETEEN
HIT ME AS HARD AS YOU CAN, SECOND ENCORE
Maude hadn’t returned to the table, and Benji had dozed off in his chair. Hamelin, wearing a grin, escorted me to my quarters.
“Where’d you get that?” he asked, looking down at the hammer in my hand. “Did the knave give it to you?” He shook his wrist, rattling the gold bands he’d taken from Rory. “Shame he likely stole it.”
“Which would make you and him the same.” We climbed stairs, stone leaching warmth from my bare feet. “Except the knave remains within the depth of his skill. You, on the other hand, think yourself competent enough to kill your king and steal his wife.”
“My mother told you, then.” Hamelin’s cheeks paled.
“You must understand, nobles are always looking for a reason to find a newer, more useful king. One that will serve their hamlet best. Kings come and go, and my mother is a pragmatic woman.” He tried to put on another smile.
“You must think me a poor friend to Benedict.”
“On the contrary. I think you’re exactly the kind of friend he deserves.”
We reached a long corridor, candles flickering from iron claws upon the wall. A dozen doors, like dark gaps in a long mouth of teeth, waited. “Which room is mine?” I asked.
Hamelin didn’t answer. He took a step toward me, the Ardent Oarsman’s oar swinging on his belt. “Will you take up her offer?”
Revulsion was like a fever. I burned hot. Turned to Hamelin. Considered ripping off my veil and showing him the contempt on my face. Would he even know it to look upon me how sick he and his mother made me?
No. Benji had been right. Sybil Delling’s faithlessness and despair never touched the hamlets or anyone in them, because Sybil Delling did not exist. No matter what I did, the only things people like Hamelin saw when they looked at me were their own ambitions and desires and beliefs; their own hunger, and the food to sate it.
Down the corridor, a door swung open, hitting the wall.
Rory ambled out, eyes unfocused, skin wan. He shook himself, looked up, saw me. The sound of his inhale echoed—it took him a decent moment to rearrange his face, affection smoothing into deference. The knave and I were supposed strangers, after all. He bowed his head low. “Diviner.”
“Keep walking, knave.” Hamelin’s mouth turned. “We were discussing an intimate matter.”
“Were you.” Rory straightened, his attention locking onto Hamelin. For a blissful second, I thought he’d crack the knight over the mouth.
He held out his hand instead, took Hamelin’s, and shook it heartily. “Good luck in the feats of strength tomorrow, knight. I’m sure you’ll do your hamlet proud.”
Hamelin grimaced, struggling to pull his hand away.
By the time he did, I’d already reached one of the chamber doors.
It was unlocked, the room empty. When I looked back, Rory was disappearing down the corridor, leaving Hamelin gawking, unsure where or to whom to throw his ire, his arms hanging dumbly at his sides.
The three gold bands on Hamelin’s wrist were gone.
I couldn’t sleep. There was pain in my abdomen—and an ache everywhere else.
The first of my clothes to come off was my woolen tunic. Next, my crown—and the veil beneath it. All I wore was a thin chemise that fell just above my knees.
The room I had was spartan. There was but a narrow bed, a creaking chest with a threadbare blanket within it, and a shuttered window that did little to lock out the sound of the rushing Tenor River.
I put my hand on my neck. A cluster of scars sat beneath my ear, markings from where the Ardent Oarsman had once bitten me.
I wondered if this was how the Omen had spent his long life: sitting in drafty rooms and haunting windows, listening to the mournful call of the water and imagining himself the master of it.
What a waste.
I waited for Maude or the gargoyle—for Rory—listening for a rattle upon my door. None came.
Three insistent raps, tap, tap, tap, sounded upon my window instead.
I sprang out of bed. When I slung the shutters open, Rory was there, still wearing armor, a new sword on his belt.
I pressed my lips together. “There’s a door, you know.”
He leaned in. “Guards in the hall. Too many bodies to drag away.”
“You always did need me for the heavy lifting.”
Rory grinned, caught my chin with his thumb, pressed it down until my lips parted, and kissed me. “Still got decent balance, or are we out of practice?”
“Does walking all over you count as practice?”
He laughed in his throat. “Get your hammer, you twit.” He kissed me again. “And come with me.”
He took my hand, and together we dropped out of my window and onto the wooden hoarding four feet beneath it.
It was a feat, keeping steady on the boards slick with rain, but the years strolling the length of Aisling’s wall hadn’t left me, and together the two of us worked window casements and hoardings alike until we were near enough to the ground to jump, both of us landing heavy on our feet.
Rory nodded at the nearest cliff face on the north side of the castle. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere we can be loud.”
I knew where we were headed five minutes before we reached it. A plateau among jagged peaks. “You remember the last time we were here?” Rory asked.
Of course I did. This was where we’d trained for my match with the Ardent Oarsman. “History has a habit of echoing.” I sighed. “Though my strength may have lessened since then. I’ve been stagnant.”
Rory gave his usual half shrug. “The body remembers.”
He nodded at the blacksmith’s hammer. “Thought we could have another little encore. You, me—and hitting things as hard as we can.”
“You can’t participate in the event tomorrow. You’re already a champion.”
“But you can.” He looked me up and down. A drizzling rain had wet my silk chemise, making it cling just as my Diviner gown had that first night he and I had traded barbed words outside the Diviner cottage.
It took him a minute to haul his gaze back up to my face. “You’ll destroy the oar. Win the feats of strength. If you break Hamelin Fischer’s teeth in the process, well. I won’t shed a tear.”
“He’s a prick.” I spun the hammer in my hand, wrist flexing. “At least you got your rings back.”
“He really did try his best.” Rory’s pallid eyes rose to mine. “But he’ll never have what’s mine.”
Heat bloomed in my cheeks. I kept spinning the hammer, a low, appreciative hum in my throat. “Where’d you get this?”
“Victor gave it to me.”
I nodded at the sword, newly adorning his belt. “And that?”
“Maude.”
I extended my arm, pressing the head of the hammer against Rory’s dark breastplate. “The armor, too? Russeted, unknightly—fashioned for a knave.”
“He fashioned it so that when I came for you”—Rory gripped my hammer and pressed it even harder over his breastplate, just above his heart—“I’d be impenetrable.”
My gaze jerked to his side, where Benji’s sword had hit its fatal mark. Rory watched me. “Try the hammer out.”
“On what?”
“Anything. The cliffside. These rocks.” He ran his tongue against the inside of his cheek. “On me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Which implies you’re fast enough to do so.”
I swung at him and he danced away on his toes, grinning. Then he moved to the side of the plateau, lifting a rock the size of a boar and hauling it over. He dropped it in front of me. “Go on. Have at it.”
I stepped up to the rock. Squared my stance and bent my knees. Hauled in a deep breath—
And swung.
A resounding bang, like thunder, filled the air, reverberations jumping up my arm, catching in muscle. The rock, decimated by a ruinous fissure down its middle, broke open into halves.
I shattered them, too.
Rory watched, thumb tracing his bottom lip. When those stones were in pieces, he brought me another one.
I broke it as well.
But then the third rock came. I squared my stance. Bent my knees. Hauled in a breath—
And felt a white-hot pain shoot through my abdomen.
I dropped the hammer and bent over, eyes squeezed shut.
“Sybil?”
“I’m fine.” I fumbled for the hammer. Picked it up and slammed it back down.
The rock did not break. I tried again, then again, earning little but dust and a feeble cluster of cracks.
I choked the neck of the hammer. Swore under my breath.
“I drank ox-eye,” Rory said behind me.
When I turned, he was watching me, eyes keen as they traveled the length of my body.
“Everything you said—it happened. I lost my senses, my mind. There was a white light, then a voice, telling me the past was a portent.” Steam shot from his nose.
“It showed me the cathedral. You, drowning, beneath the abbess’s hand.
It showed me us, too. I was looking up at you and Benji and Maude and Bartholomew and myself, just before the cathedral fell.
Then stones fell on me, and I was in darkness, barely clinging to hope. ”
I waited, chest heaving.
“It reminded me of you. Of what you said in the Seacht, about me taking care of Bartholomew. It’s been chipping away at me, Sybil.” He took a step forward, then another. “Tell me what it means.”
The rain fell harder, ricocheting off stone and hitting me in the face. “Rory.”
“Tell me.”
I held my ground. Looked him in the eye. “Strange that you, a heretic, should suddenly have faith in visions.”
“I don’t believe in anything I can’t see. But I have seen such strange things…” When he reached me, he stood as he had upon the tor—a shield against the rain. “Tell me what you’re not saying.”
He might as well have taken the hammer to me.
After so long of being looked at and not seen, Rodrick Myndacious’s knowing gaze felt like an attack.
“Taking up the mantle, killing the Omens, searching for Diviners I would never find—it was for nothing. For all the lies she told, the abbess got one thing right: The story does not change. The Stonewater Kingdom clings to its signs, its hierarchies—its stone objects. History is a circle, and things don’t get better.
” I gestured to the fractured mountains beyond.
“The world falls apart, and there is nothing we can do about it.”