Chapter Twenty-One Playacting #4
My vision went dark. I blinked. Saw the king’s bleary shape.
Benji dropped his goblet, then drew his sword with a sudden zeal.
“You’ll have all seen by now,” he said, his voice echoing through the room.
“The knave’s peculiar eyes, hewn of stone, just like my queen’s.
How strange, special, new you must think him, despite his ill looks and manners. Perhaps you even wonder if he is holy.”
The king jerked his sword, leveling it against the side of my neck. He pressed and I felt the sharp pain of skin splitting. “But I assure you,” Benji said. “He’s just a man.” Blood trickled down my neck. “As fallible as the rest of us.”
The king barked at his knights. “Make a circle.”
The knights exchanged glances, grasped their weapons, and boxed Benji and me into the center of the room. I could hear murmurs. But for every second that passed, the ox-eye’s grip on me tightened. I was farther and farther away, a pallid nothingness stretching out around me.
“Fight me, knave,” came Benji’s voice, hot and excited.
I slouched forward, faintly pressing against the tip of the king’s sword. When I said nothing, Benji threw his sword down, reached into his pocket, and withdrew the Artful Brigand’s coin. He tossed it, vanished, then reappeared behind me, knocking his gauntlets into the back of my head.
I hissed.
Then Benji did it again and again, using the coin to vanish and reappear, always hitting me from the side or behind, never head-on.
“You almost had me fooled,” he said quietly.
“Pith, Rory, I never knew what a good actor you could be, bowing like that, reverent, not a single sign of your usual grating disdain. You held so damn still when I kissed her.”
I tried to anticipate him—tried to move—but it was like wading through mud. I was hindered at every turn, my vision growing dimmer, the pounding in my head and the rolling of my stomach worsening.
“I’ve been lying to myself,” Benji said, “thinking you’d truly forgotten the prick you were and had come to me new, full of value and zeal.
But then Hamelin was holding my Diviner down in the water, and I was fumbling for the coin to save her, and you called out.
I don’t even think you heard yourself, but I did.
You said the strangest thing. Something the knave would never know to say. ”
Benji slapped me over the face. Came forward. Whispered in my ringing ear. “Sybil.”
He clapped me over the ear and skirted away.
“Six could barely walk in the Seacht until she took your blood for a Divination. You’ve given it to her since, haven’t you?
The blood on her shroud just now—and on your lip.
” His voice cracked and he hit me again, this time on the jaw.
“Clandestine meetings under moonlight, were they?”
I spat blood on the floor. “She’s not your Diviner, asshole. She’s never been yours.”
Benji appeared in front of me and, with surprising strength, shoved me. I fell, my head hitting the ground with a bang. I coughed. Blinked—
And saw five figures. A merchant with gold rings on his fingers, a scribe in a gray robe, an oarsman in leathers, a forester with long black hair, and a weaver in a dyed woolen knit.
All of them had stone eyes.
In front of them, leering over me, was a woman. She wore silken gloves and a veil, obscuring her face from view. The abbess.
In her hands were a hammer and chisel. “The water is magic,” she said, “and so is the stone it leaches from. Let us see what we can make of it. Or what it makes of us.” She pressed the chisel into my body, lifted the hammer—
And slammed it down.
I let out a terrible sound.
Again, the abbess placed the chisel. Again, she struck it. Chunks of limestone fell, clouding my vision, pain cutting through my body. And I—I was rooted. So heavy I couldn’t move, helpless but to lie there and let her lay waste to me. From my body, she carved five objects.
Coin.
Inkwell.
Oar.
Chime.
Loom stone.
But then I blinked, and it wasn’t the abbess leaning over me but Benji, and the pain from the chisel was him hitting me over and over again with the wooden stick I’d refused to pick up.
My eyes rolled back, my vision going dark.
I lurched up, throwing the king off my body, my jaw opening, a horrible rasp scraping free.
“You look upon me, but you do not know me.” There they were again, the craftsmen with the stone eyes: merchant, scribe, oarsman, forester, weaver.
Each of them held a stone object. I called up to them, knowing they could not hear me.
“I am older than the world, younger than time, permanent as the sky, and temporal as a dream. It is I who measures Traum’s portents.
I who Divines what is to come, for naught but the past can foretell the future. ”
“What are you doing?” Benji hit me again over the face. “Rory—Rory. Stop.”
I couldn’t. I wasn’t Rory, but someone else entirely.
“What happened before will happen again,” I said to the craftsmen, watching as they clutched their stone objects.
“Tools will turn to weapons, and the stacked stones of faith and accordance shall crumble.
The Stonewater Kingdom shall end as it began: Fractured. Bloody…
“But never godless.”
A mournful cry clawed over my tongue.
Everything went dark.