Chapter Twenty-One Playacting
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
PLAYACTING
Avice Fischer stripped the Ardent Oarsman’s castle of purple banners and replaced them with black mourning cloths.
She did not bid the kings or his knights goodbye, nor did she tend Sybil a single respect.
The king and queen and knighthood—the tournament champions—were meant to stay another night under her hospitality, and yet she turned from the king like he was a gutted fish left too long in the sun.
Benji barely had time to present the gargoyle with his bowl of winnings.
When he asked Avice for the heralding sash she was meant to gift to the champion, she turned her nose up.
She hadn’t shed a single tear, her strength spent staring the king down with unmarred revulsion.
“The net he used to defeat my son is trophy enough.”
Benji was as gray as the shale he stood upon. “My aim was for his weapon.” Every time he said it, his back stooped more. “Hamelin would have struck my Diviner, after swearing loyalty to me and an oath to protect her. That is sacrilege. Heresy.”
Avice pressed her lips together, waiting for him to leave.
I worked the leather of Fig’s reins between my gauntlets, jaw aching.
I’d been pressing my molars down for the past hour.
The pretense of the knave was never going to be easy.
But to pretend I felt nothing when Hamelin slammed his oar into Bartholomew’s back, when Sybil rushed forward and tussled with him in the water, when he’d put his hand on her throat and raised that hammer above her head… I couldn’t do that.
Seems I was as bad a knave as I had been a knight.
The same powerlessness I’d felt as a boy, trapped by the Artful Brigand, had found me. Shaking, shouting, I’d pushed forward, aiming for the lip of the basin, for Sybil—
The stone coin had flown, ending the feats of strength and staining the crystalline water red. Every soul in the Fervent Peaks had turned to stare at their king, and Benji, who, absorbing the severity of what he’d done, had bent over and coughed out vomit on the stones beneath his boots.
I might have respected the prat, killing Hamelin that way, if it hadn’t been an accident.
But then, just as the king got on his horse and the knights turned to lead us out of the Fervent Peaks, Benji turned a final time and said, “Where will you bury him that I might return in commemoration?” and all my fledgling respect festered.
The little shit never came back to commemorate when he’d killed me.
“At the base of the Peaks,” Avice said. “The Fischer tomb is there. He will join his father and grandfather and all noble folk of vigor. Fear not: He will be remembered by more than just you, Benedict Castor the Third.”
Her message was clear enough. I will remember, too.
Once more, we took the untenable road down the mountains.
I rode behind Maude, who drove the wagon where Sybil sat closely with the gargoyle, the sounds of their voices soothing in the jagged mountainscape.
And while the gargoyle was wagging a finger in Sybil’s face and lecturing her in his usual way, things were not as usual with Bartholomew.
He’d lost a considerable amount of limestone.
Hamelin hitting him with the oar had done more damage than we’d initially thought—a chunk of stone the size of my fist had dislodged from his hip, and every time he tried to walk, cracks spread.
Sybil had filled their cart with blankets, restored him in his robe as he’d once fit her with armor—tried to make him comfortable on the jostling journey to the next leg of the tournament.
But she was biting her lip in a way that made my throat close.
Ceaselessly watching him, even when he dozed.
Benji rode ahead with his knights, Samuel and Tory like iron wings at his side.
I caught him looking back several times at Maude and Sybil.
Eventually, the road was not so rough, and when the caravan made its way back into the open moorland, a collective sigh of relief sounded, the journey south to the Chiming Wood straight and narrow.
The king stalled and bade his knights ride ahead. He waited along the road, his blue eyes never leaving Sybil in her cart. When he eased his horse back twenty paces behind them, he was in perfect step with me.
“Tell me, knave.” Benji drank from a flask on his belt with the same enthusiasm he used to, back when folk sometimes shouted at him, calling his grandfather a heretic. Gods, how I used to bloody my knuckles for this boy. “What have your fellow champions said about me?”
“Little,” I said, pressing my voice until it flattened like I did every time I lied. “They seem to be cradling what’s left of my mind. Strange how they take pains to care for me, knowing I’ve nothing to offer them in return.”
Benji chewed that over. “They knew you well.”
“How well did you know me, sire?”
The king looked up from his flask, startled. “Oh. I…” He swallowed. “We were rather close, once. Friends.”
I was grateful for the iron cage of my helmet. He could not see the pain stamped over my face.
“You must think me reckless,” Benji hedged, “killing my own knight. Did Maude tell you Hamelin wasn’t the first friend to die at my hand?”
Were I not a cynical man, I’d have guessed he felt guilty. But I knew better. Benedict Castor the Third was but a collector, his tokens of choice wealth, magical objects, and powerful friends.
And I had every intention to rob him of all three.
“I’m sure you had your reasons then as you did now,” I told him. “Like you said. You were protecting your Diviner.”
“Would that Avice Fischer and the other nobles saw it as clearly as that.” Benji drank, then looked up at the sky, his gold crown dull in the gray light. “Three events lost, three stone objects destroyed, two knights dead. None of this has gone to plan. But I think—”
He turned to me. “Suppose I might convince you to gift me your winnings, knave? Seven hundred gold coins is more than any one man needs—imagine how magnanimous I would be if I were to give your winnings back to Regius Ormsby and Otto Lange and Avice Fischer?”
“To help their hamlets recover from the earthquake, sire?”
“They can throw the gold into a vat and make new statues of their precious Omens for all I care, so long as it gets me back into their good graces. The only god of men,” he said plainly, “is coin.”
I could tell by the way he clutched the Artful Brigand’s coin, harder than his flask or even the reins of his horse, how desperately Benedict Castor the Third needed that to be true.
“I could write to Otto when the tournament is over,” he offered, “that he might release your gold from the Seacht vault and send it to mine in Castle Luricht.”
I paused, making him wait. Then, sickly sweet, “Of course, sire. Write to him now, if you like.”
Benji sighed. “Very good.”
A root sat in the road. When Maude drove over it, the cart jumped. The gargoyle, wrapped in blankets, hardly budged, but Sybil jostled against the side of the cart. She let out a sharp cry. Put her hand to her abdomen.
An anvil dropped from my chest into my stomach.
“It was my fault,” the king murmured, studying me. “I wanted to show everyone the vileness of sprites after the cathedral fell. She was grievously injured. Don’t let her posturing fool you, knave. The queen’s strength is like Traum after the earthquake. Breaking apart.”
He said, urgently, “That is why I cannot let this quake or the fucking nobles and their winnings derail my tournament. The more that goes wrong, the harder folk will look for signs that things might improve. Let them see her with me while she is fearsome and useful. Let them be inspired. Folk always need something to believe in.”
All I could think of in that moment was the abbess and how she spoke in the cathedral. Affected, virtuous—all the while pressing down on Sybil’s shoulders and drowning her. “And when she isn’t those things? What will become of the Diviner then?”
“People will not forget the cathedral just because it fell. I will find a way for her to still leave her mark on the Stonewater Kingdom.” Benji lifted his reins.
“Oh—one more thing, knave. We’re entering the Chiming Wood.
Maude Bauer’s hamlet. There is a reason I asked you for your winnings and not hers or the gargoyle’s.
I am quite certain your fellow champions do not have my best interests at heart.
You will tell me, won’t you, if they try to undermine me? ”
“What schemes would they have against their own king?”
He waved a hand. “History is a murky translation. So are right and wrong. Maude and I are of different minds regarding all three. No doubt she considers there to be unfinished business between us.”
She isn’t the only one.
“Thank you,” Benji said. “And not just for the gold. It is not easy, being a king. One never knows who to trust. Perhaps this is a second chance for the both of us.”
“A second chance for what, sire?”
Benji did not note how tightly I held Fig’s reins. The king was looking at me like I was a blank page in a notebook, and he yearned to scribble his truth upon me. For some reason, it made his blue eyes narrow. “To be friends.”
It wasn’t a great distance between the Fervent Peaks and the Chiming Wood.
Nary twenty miles. By late afternoon, we saw yellow trees on the horizon.
By dusk, we traveled beneath them. And while there were no sinkholes in the road—no crumbling rock faces or cliffsides—the Wood was not the hamlet, the haven, we’d expected to find.
Birch trees had fallen on the road. Some bore the serrated markings of having snapped, others had been ripped up by the roots, the dirt and bramble and earthen floor around them ripped up, too.
So many of the leaves—that brilliant canopy of yellow—were on the ground, as if something had taken the Chiming Wood in its fist and given it a brutal shake.