Chapter Twenty-Two Light, in Stone
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LIGHT, IN STONE
Gasping for air, I woke in a clammy sweat.
I was in a room I did not know, and the sky outside my window was not as I’d last seen it—the sun was out, and the sky was a hazy shade of orange. The night had passed, and half a day. I was still in the dress I’d worn the evening prior, and it was damp with sweat.
When my memory found me, it came in pieces. The smell of meats and herbs in Eichel House. Smoking idleweed with Rory. Kissing him in the alcove, blood on my tongue. In the great hall there’d been actors and a minstrel. Tory had bid me come that I might speak to Edora Eichel, then—
I jolted up.
There had been another dark alcove. Tory had pulled me into it.
Poured ox-eye down my throat. I’d gotten a good kick in, knocked her down hard, but the draft had been strong.
White splotches of light had eclipsed my vision.
I remembered little after that, except pieces of a dream where I lay on my back upon the tor, looking up at the Omens.
Head pounding, I dragged myself off the bed, pulled at my chamber door.
And found it locked.
I hit the wood. “Let me out!”
I shouted until my voice was raw. Then—footsteps, coming down the corridor. “Sybil?”
It was Maude. Relief clawed at my lungs. “I’m here!”
“Step back from the door.”
The grating knell of iron hitting iron sounded. The latch trembled, then jumped, then broke, and the door was kicked open.
Maude was on the other side, chest heaving, axe raised. Ten woodsmen stood behind her in leathers, and beside them, Samuel Eichel, whose mouth was hanging open. “That’s a two-hundred-year-old mahogany door, Bauer!”
“And a cheap lock.” Maude came into the room and grasped my shoulder. “You all right?”
I nodded. “What happened?”
“I came back last night. No one knew where you were, not even Edora.” She nodded at the foresters and her throat worked. “We haven’t been able to find Rory.”
The last I saw of him, he’d been standing with Benji.
Dread fell like a stone into my stomach.
Maude turned to Samuel. “I’ll ask you one last time. Where is the knave?”
Samuel was clutching the Faithful Forester’s chime, eyeing the woodsmen and their axes. “I’m not sure—”
“Where?” I screamed.
Of all the king’s knights, Samuel Eichel had proved the most superstitious, willing to see a sign in everything he beheld. “It would bode very poorly for you,” I said in a low voice, “if you did not tell us.”
He swallowed. “He’s in the servants’ quarters. First floor, just off the larder.”
We ran.
Another feast was being prepared in the kitchens, but the smell of ham and spiced potatoes did nothing to me—there was another smell on the air. We turned a corner, and it grew stronger: rotten flowers. By the time we reached the door next to the larder my tongue was heavy with saliva.
“Here,” I said. “I can smell the spring water.”
Maude’s axe fell, and another door was ruined. I kicked it open and let out a broken sound.
Rory was on the floor, unmoving. Beneath his head, pooled over stones, was a puddle of blood.
Maude swore, both of us crouching over him. My hands shook, but then—his neck. There was a pulse. And his chest was rising, falling. He was breathing. I looked up at Maude. Said, choked, “He’s alive.”
She grasped Rory from beneath the arms. Hauled him upright.
Blood dripped down his face like tears. Rory stirred, waking with a gasp. “Sybil?”
“I’m here.” His armor looked intact. But the rest of him… “How badly are you hurt?”
“Hardly at all.”
He was favoring his left arm. Wincing, to sit up. Rory’s bottom lip was split, his right eye already blackening. The blood on the floor had come from a cut in his cheek, nigh identical to the one Benji had dealt him the night Aisling fell. I could tell just by looking at it that it needed sutures.
I smoothed his hair out of his eyes. Ran my fingers in tender strokes up his neck. “Pith, Rory.”
He exhaled. “He knows. Drugged me with ox-eye. Had a vision. Lost my”—he coughed, winced—“mind.”
We yanked Rory to his feet. I helped Maude bear his weight, draping his left arm over my shoulder. His head slumped forward, blood from his cheek staining the silk at my breasts. “Time to go, knave,” I whispered.
The sound of rattling armor echoed in the corridor. When I looked up, the king was there.
Benji’s golden hair was tousled, his cheeks red, his eyes jumping from me to Maude, then lingering on Rory’s bruised and bloody face. His breath quickened, as if he were whetted by the notion that he could overcome his former heroes as assuredly as I’d conquered Traum’s gods.
“You’re finally awake,” he said. “For all the ways I imagined how you might get back at me, Rory, I never pictured that. You, lying on the ground, spewing holy garble and rousing the superstitious nobs like a Diviner—No offense, Six. But what I can’t understand is why.”
His fervor vanished. “Why should you say the same things Six said at our wedding? A strange game for a party of heretics to play. What. A. Performance.”
He reached for his belt. Withdrew the Artful Brigand’s coin. “I’m sorry, Maude. I can’t have you take them from me. If the Bauers have taught me anything, and surely they have, it’s that we are only as powerful as the creatures we conquer.”
Maude held tightly to Rory. “Throw that coin at me and folk of the Wood will not sit idly by. Nor the prominent families of Traum.” Her voice was as sharp as the edge of her blade. “We both know how precarious this tournament has left your standing with the nobles, don’t we, Benedict?”
He paled. “That’s your aim, then. You’d depose and deny me as you once did my grandfather.” His fist tightened around the Artful Brigand’s coin. “Would you cast the first stone, Maude?”
Edora Eichel, along with Samuel and Tory and five other knights—and Maude’s party of woodsman besides—shoved their way into the corridor. “Goodness,” Edora said. “Is that blood? A terrible portent. What’s happened, King Castor?”
Benji’s eyes rolled back in his head. But he cared too viciously for his magnanimous repute, too embedded in the spectacle to let it go now.
“Fear not,” he told Edora, putting on a toothy grin.
“The knave bit off more than he could chew, challenging me to spar last night. Maude has been gracious and offered to bring him to her surgeon.”
“And I’ll be accompanying them,” I said, gripping Rory so tightly he wheezed.
“Indeed. Please—take my carriage to Petula Hall, Maude.” He slipped the Artful Brigand’s coin into his pocket. “I shall join you there soon.”
Folk lowered their gazed to Maude, to me, as we passed, and we hastened through Eichel House, drops of Rory’s blood left behind on woolen carpets as remembrance. Outside, dusk was fading, night pressing over the Chiming Wood.
“Don’t take his fucking carriage,” Rory said, keeping his weight on Maude’s and my shoulders, our footsteps in the dirt that of a chimera—not three travelers, but one with six legs. “I’d rather walk until my legs fall off than take a kindness from that little prick.”
I held him tightly. “Who’s the martyr now?”
The wind called, and the birch trees swayed. “This way,” Maude said, leading us off the road. “It’s quicker.”
Shadows moved in my periphery. I kept my gaze forward. “Birke,” I whispered.
Rory nodded, wincing.
A twig snapped. When I looked to my left, a birke was there, its pale flesh sagging, dozens of black eyes watching me.
I shivered, small and frightened against the dark, vast Wood.
But then—light. I could see the moon and a clearing ahead, where there stood a house, tall and wide.
Our steps dragged over gravel, up the stairs, and then we were there, hammering on the door that might have been the only place in Traum that felt remotely close to home.
Victor wrenched the door open. “What’s happened?”
“He took a beating—that cut on his cheek needs mending,” Maude said. “The king won’t be far behind. I doubt he’s keen to have Sybil out of his grasp for long.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Rory devolved into profane mumblings, blood spilling from his lips, his cheek. “Kitchen,” Maude told Victor. “Sew him up. Pith—don’t be a baby. Go, Rory. I’ll get you when the king arrives.”
“Go,” I muttered, knuckles grazing his. “Please.”
His concession was hard earned. He hadn’t yet dragged his eyes off me when Maude took my arm and pulled me up the stairs. “Come on, Diviner. Let’s take a look at you, too.”
She brought me to the third floor, where her and Rory’s and Benji’s rooms stood in a row, then turned a corner. We entered a wide washroom. A hearth boasted a fire; there were sheepskin rugs strewn on the floor in front of a great wooden tub.
Maude took a kettle from the hearth and poured boiling water into a bowl, then pulled a chair from the wall. I thought she’d command me to sit.
She lowered herself into the chair instead. “Hurts to stand after a while,” she said, wincing as she sat. “Never did quite recover after the birke fell on me. Walking, riding—everything seems to sit in my body more than it used to. Everything feels heavier.”
I pressed my lips together.
“Now.” Maude laced her fingers and peered up at me with insistent green eyes. “If I asked you about your injuries, would you tell me?”
The muscles in my abdomen bunched. “You know I was punctured by a spear.”
She nodded.
“There’s nothing else.”
“You haven’t had spring water in a long while.” When I said nothing, she pressed. “Does it cause you pain?”
“Yes.”
“How much does Rory’s blood help?”
“Plenty.”
“How long does the relief last?”
Not long enough. Even now, a day since I’d tasted it, a biting stiffness sat in my abdomen, pushing up into my chest. “I’m not an Omen. I have no intention of taking more blood from him than I was ever offered for a Divination.”
“We could always go back to the tor. Dig up the spring. From what I understand, for their own strange reasons, the sprites are doing that themselves.”
I fixed her with a hard look. “Like I said. I’m not an Omen.”
Her brows rose. “You’re resigned to it, then. To the pain.”