Chapter Twenty-One Playacting #2
“That earthquake.” Samuel Eichel was fretting at the front of the caravan, gawking at his home hamlet. “A terrible portent.” He spurred his horse. “Come, sire. Let us see if Eichel House is unharmed.”
The caravan lumbered forward, the light in the wood fading. A shadow moved in my periphery. I turned to face it.
There was nothing there.
Night fell and the wind rushed, the sky clear, its hue the shade of bruises—black and purple and blue.
Torches were lit, and we traveled among trees, moving down the road at a hurried pace.
No one spoke, the only sound among us the clatter of footsteps and the groan of wagon wheels and the wind, sounding through the trees in its usual chiming knell. But even that fell silent.
“Bad portents on the wind,” I heard Samuel tell Benji and Tory. “Very bad portents—”
“Here’s a portent,” Benji snapped. “Shut the hell up or you’ll find yourself at the back of the caravan with the horseshit.”
Samuel blanched and was quiet the rest of the way.
An hour later the trees began to grow farther apart, a glen opening up, the road no longer dirt but gravel, lined with flaming torches. A tall house came into view, the moon, like a great eye, sitting upon its turreted shoulder.
Eichel House.
We rode into the drive. At the entrance, purple banners hung from the spandrel, four figures in yellow cloaks waiting.
The eldest, a stooped woman, held the Faithful Forester’s chime.
She was Samuel’s grandmother, Edora Eichel.
I didn’t know how old she was—she’d seemed a thousand years old when I’d first come to the Wood as a boy.
Besides Maude, she was the most respected noble of the hamlet.
I had it on good authority that whenever Benedict Castor the First mentioned heavy-pocketed nobs who go to Aisling for a Divination, he’d been referring specifically to Edora Eichel.
Samuel dismounted. “Grandmother.” He turned to the house and held his breath, like the damn thing might crumble any second. “Did you feel the earthquake?”
“Yes.” Edora held out a wrinkled hand, handed her grandson the chime, then gestured to the wood. “There have been rumbles, and the trees sway, the song among them different than before.”
Benji dismounted and stepped forward. But Edora looked past him. “Tell me—where is the Diviner?”
The gargoyle raised his hand, and Sybil stood in the wagon. “I am here.”
Edora nodded solemnly. “There have been rumors—talk of a Divination on your wedding day, when you predicted this. That the stacked stones of faith and accordance would crumble and the kingdom would end as it began, fractured and bloody. Tell us: Are the winds of change blowing? Does the Faithful Forester warn of toil, of hardship? What do your stone eyes see?”
Everyone turned to Sybil. She stood higher than the rest of us, hand on her stomach and a crown on her head, peering down through gossamer, so pretty I was sick with longing.
Her fingers lifted, ghosting toward her veil.
Edora, the nobles, even knights like Samuel and Tory leaned forward in anticipation.
Sybil’s hand went still. She did not raise her veil.
She stepped out of the cart instead. “I do not know from whence these earthquakes come,” she said plainly, “or why they come now. What I do know is what I’ve seen.
Folk are displaced, sprites butchered. A pair of the king’s knights have died for spectacle.
A distant memory, it seems, since I was a witness, pupil, visitor to Traum’s wonders.
All my stone eyes see now”—her mouth went hard—“is a deeply flawed world.”
She might as well have slapped the old woman across the face. Edora Eichel gasped, and so did the other nobles. Even the wind seemed to quiet, hushed by the last Diviner’s flagrant faithlessness.
And still… they looked upon her, searching her veil. Were I to lift my visor, perhaps they would comb my stone eyes as well, hungry for signs and assurances.
Benji, on the other hand, looked up at Sybil like he was about to scream.
I dismounted and brought Fig close to the cart where Maude and the gargoyle sat, all three of us wearing our idiotic heralding sashes. “I can’t tell if she’s taking the piss out of Benji,” Maude murmured, “or if she means what she’s saying.”
“Bartholomew has never been a very gifted liar,” said the gargoyle. “There is a dimness in her eyes that was not there before.”
I felt the same calamitous fear that had kicked my lungs in the Fervent Peaks when Sybil and I had sparred in the rain. If the stone objects go, and I go with them, then perhaps the lie might end.
“She still feels a part of Aisling’s system, like she’s another magical stone object.” I turned to Maude, hardly able to say it. “And you know what she intends to do with the stone objects.”
Understanding washed over Maude’s face. When her gaze lifted, it wore the same expression it had the night I’d woken on the tor: steadfast determination.
“Would that folk stopped treating her like one.” I exhaled hotly. “The fools cannot stop themselves from looking for signs that aren’t there.”
The gargoyle pondered that. “They never will.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “Not helpful.”
He lifted a fractured hand to a nearby birch, plucking away yellow leaves.
“To be seen clearly is not a gift all of us are given. Some might look upon Bartholomew and see a stone object, and others look upon her”—he batted his eyelashes at me—“and see the whole world over. Some might glimpse her eyes and find a void, begging to be filled with cathedrals and systems and rules, and some might see a strange kind of freedom. Truth, and lies, can always be found when we search the unknown. But even a child learns by watching.”
He sighed, forlorn. “The story will never change unless, first, we observe it.”
Folk were still asking Sybil questions. About portents.
About Omens. About belief. Her answers were brief, curt, until the king, disturbed by a conversation he could not control, cleared his throat.
“The unfortunate incidents that plagued the last events will find no foothold here, Edora. The Chiming Wood has ever been a hamlet of fine portents.”
He shot Sybil a glance, then held his hand out to the nobles, the knights, ushering them into Eichel House as if it belonged to him.
Still—it was Sybil whom Edora Eichel brought first over her threshold. “Come, Diviner. I’ve prepared my home in your honor.” She looked back. Waved at Maude. “You and the other champions have honored places, too, Bauer.” Finally, she acknowledged Benji. “You too, King Castor.”
Ten minutes later, the gargoyle was crying. “But I want to dance.”
Maude leaned over the wagon, speaking to him in a soothing voice. “I know. But those coins you won in the Peaks need a safe place, and you heard Sybil—you require rest. I’ll take you to Petula Hall. There are lots of blankets there.”
He stuck out his bottom lip and pouted. Maude took the reins. Gave me a pointed look. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Don’t do anything stupid and get yourself killed.”
“Already dead.” I smacked the horse’s bottom, and they rode off into the darkened Wood.
Inside, the air was heavy with smoke. A suckling boar turned on a spit in the crackling fireplace.
A grand table had been placed along the wall, covered in candles and dried fruits and herbs.
Eichel House might not have been as old as Petula Hall, but its insides looked the same—rich and brown, nearly everything made of cherrywood or mahogany.
Only here, instead of books and trinkets laid out on the house’s many shelves, there were bones. Pelts. Trophies of animals slain.
I walked along the periphery of the great hall, combing the room for Sybil.
She wasn’t with the king. He was over by the dead pig on the fire, onto his second or third goblet of wine, talking with Samuel, who was partially listening, partially showing the Faithful Forester’s chime to anyone who drew near.
A forester stepped in front of me. I was almost positive I’d picked his pocket at one time or another. “Where is your champion weapon, Myndacious?” he asked. “Did you use an axe from the Wood to win the melee? A sword?”
“A hammer,” Benji called, too loud.
He crossed the room. When he reached me, head barely clearing my chin, he grinned. Without so much as asking, Benji lifted my visor, showing folk of the Wood my eyes. “Stone,” he said against the tide of gasps. “Spectacular, isn’t he?”
The crowd pushed, vying to get closer, peering at me as I’d once looked upon Aisling Cathedral—in wonderment and fear.
They asked me questions. Touched and tugged at me.
“What will you do when the tourney ends?” the same noble asked.
“I’ll return to Castle Luricht.” An ugly part of me liked it, telling Benji what he’d always wanted to hear, knowing he’d never get it. “That I might be useful to King Castor in all his endeavors.”
The king’s cheeks flushed. Folk of the Wood, who had never bothered to acknowledge me when I was Maude’s squire or Benji’s knight, came up in droves, asking about the melee, about my eyes and my winnings, running their gazes and hands over the heralding sash I wore over my breastplate.
Bartholomew might have been right—it was good for folk to look at me, to break preconceived notions or form new ones—but by gods, if these idiots didn’t take ten honest steps back I was going to retrieve that hammer and break something. “Excuse me.”
I found an alcove behind a velvet curtain, a casement window beyond it. Another forester was there, fumbling to light a twig of petrified idleweed with a candle. I yanked off my helmet, ripped the idleweed from his hand, and lit it.
“Hey,” he complained, then looked into my stone eyes, blanched, and walked away.
I took a deep inhale, held it in my lungs, let it out, remembering what Bartholomew had said about not needing to breathe, and how that would likely be me one day. What a damn shame.