Chapter Twenty-Two Light, in Stone #2
“It took Bartholomew ten years to turn into a gargoyle.”
“You’d spend a decade in agony?” Understanding deepened the lines in her face. “Or you do not expect to live that long?”
I said nothing.
Maude leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees. “Can I tell you a story, Sybil?”
“It won’t change my mind.”
“That’s not always what stories are for.
” She did not ask why I had not yet removed my veil.
She simply looked upon it like she could already see my face, and said, “When Benedict Castor the First was named a heretic and thrown down in the gravel of the cathedral courtyard, he’d told me to denounce him.
He wanted me to go on, searching for the Omens, to protect Rory and Benji, and I could not do that if I was in the gravel next to him.
So I threw the first stone. And for nearly a year after, I slept no more than a few hours a night.
“I’d stay up, pacing this house, sharpening my axe—anything to keep from dreaming. Because when I did manage to sleep, I’d see his face. And even when I was awake, it took me a long, long time to look Benji in the eye.”
“You had nightmares,” I murmured.
“Not at all. I’d dream of the good things.
Of when I was a child and Benedict was my mentor, playing swords with me or stacking books beneath my nose.
I can still smell those pages. But he was dead, and I’d helped kill him.
I couldn’t bear to look back on memories that would hurt me. And when I’d look at Benji—”
Maude almost smiled. “Those blue Castor eyes always did get to me. For all his faults and uncertainties, there was never a time I did not see a brighter future when I’d look into Benji’s eyes.
But because I could not look back, I couldn’t look forward—I stopped looking Benji in the eyes altogether. ”
She sighed. “Love is a knightly tenet, same as war, and while I’d spent my life building muscle and wielding my axe, no one told me to love is always in some way to mourn—you can never truly love anything unless you allow yourself to see it clearly. Even when the looking breaks your heart.”
Maude blinked rapidly, running a finger beneath her nose. “Eventually I slept. Dreamed of my old friend. Woke, and looked once more into Benji’s blue eyes. Even when he broke my heart, I looked, just as I looked into Rory’s eyes when the light faded from them.”
She reached out. Took my hand. “If you are determined to go, I will not look away. For whatever time we have left together, I will look you in the eyes, Sybil Delling, and you will know that I love you.”
Slowly, I reached for the crown atop my head, fingers curling around the moldings. It wasn’t a heavy thing, but it had held gossamer in place, protecting me as well as any helm.
When it fell, taking my veil with it, Maude Bauer looked into my eyes, tears in her own. “But that does not mean I will not do everything in my power to get you to stay.”
We said very little after that. Fresh clothes were brought to the washroom, and Maude helped me strip away my yellow dress. When I stood naked before her, she took a cloth and dipped it in the bowl of hot water. “May I?”
I nodded, and Maude wiped sweat and Rory’s blood from my hands, my neck. She took the fresh clothes—braies and a padded shirt and wool trousers—and helped me dress. Then she brought a comb from a low shelf, glancing at my tangled, stringy hair like it would defeat her.
And got to work.
Maude did not brush my hair like the abbess did, soothing it away from my eyes. No. She combed it from the bottom up, getting out the knots while inflicting the least amount of pain, just like the Diviners used to. Like caring for me was a craft, and it was a pleasure to do it well.
After, she brought me to the room I’d slept in last time I was here.
The gargoyle was there, wrapped in blankets, sitting on a bench in front of a tall lancet window. When I entered, he smiled. “Hello, Bartholomew.”
There were more cracks in his body. New fissures, up his neck.
I went to sit with him, and Maude shut the door.
We gazed out the window at the night sky. “Something is wrong, Bartholomew?” The gargoyle looked me over. “The light in your eyes is dimmer now more than ever.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” I said quietly.
“I love secrets.”
“I don’t think you’ll like this one.” I hauled in a breath. “The night Aisling fell, I lay very still in the highest room in Castle Luricht, thinking you and Maude and Rory were gone, just like my Diviners—that the world had come to an end. I vowed to myself I would kill the king. And after—”
I looked out the window. “There is a beautiful place. A clifftop, covered in thrift flowers. You know the one. I thought I might return there when the tournament was done, when I’d destroyed the stone objects and Benji was dead.
I would climb to that cliff at sunrise. Shout loud and long until my voice echoed behind me.
I’d wear my armor. Look out over the dawn and—well. ”
I swallowed, voice breaking. “I was always good at drowning, wasn’t I?”
The gargoyle’s bottom lip trembled. It took him a long while to speak. “You are right. I do not like that secret.”
“I felt a sick kind of righteousness, knowing that the Stonewater Kingdom would be doomed to remake itself without its stone objects. That perhaps without its coin, its inkwell, its oar, its chime, its loom stone—without Aisling Cathedral—and without me, Traum might face its own kind of death and wake anew. Even now that you and Rory and Maude are here… I cannot stop thinking it.” I shook my head. “I can’t let it go.”
He did not like that, either. His brow fell low. “Do not make yourself into an object, Bartholomew, and do not judge in perhapses. They are as a dream—they cannot dictate your life unless you put your faith in them.”
How softly and thoroughly he shamed me. I nodded, forlorn, and the gargoyle wrapped one of his blankets over my shoulder. “Oh, Bartholomew,” he said. “You must search the world for hope like you once searched it for your Diviners.”
“I never found them.”
“But you kept looking.” He took my hand. “Do not let the light go out of your eyes.”
A tear fell down my cheek. “There’s no light in stone, Bartholomew.”
“That is true.” He peered out the window and nodded at the moon above. “And yet.”
We stayed by the window for a long time, looking up at the night sky.
Two hours later, a banging knock sounded on the castle door. I took the gargoyle’s hand, lent him my shoulder for support, and we hobbled through corridors and down stairs, following the hum of voices that came from somewhere in the house.
I turned a corner and ran headlong into Victor.
“Library,” he blurted, then kept on about his business.
The gargoyle sighed. “I love a man of few words. Leaves the rest for me.”
We trailed down a corridor into the western side of the hall and found the library door open.
Stationed across from each other like opponents, Benji and Maude sat at a table, their hands visible, showing they bore no weapons—nothing to hide.
Behind them, however, were weapons aplenty.
Samuel and Tory stood behind their king, hands locked around the hilts of their swords.
Rory was behind Maude, wearing a green tunic and black leathers.
The gash on his cheek had been sutured, red against his olive skin.
He stood in a lazy slouch, the marks of boredom upon him, but I knew better.
His hands were fidgeting. They caught Benji’s eye, and when the king looked upon him, Rory grinned. Raised his middle finger.
The king flushed and turned to Maude. “What has become of my knights that were here? Rothspar and the others I sent weeks ago?”
“The ones you sent to pillage my house?” Maude’s eyes drifted to the window, and the swaying birch trees beyond. “They’re gone. Tragically eaten by birke.”
The king’s jaw jumped.
I cleared my throat.
All eyes turned to the gargoyle and me, lingering in shadow by the door.
For a moment, time was nothing; I was standing exactly where I’d been the last time I’d stepped into this room wearing armor.
Then, the king had lowered his sword to my shoulders, swearing me to his knighthood, heartened to hear me take vows.
Now, I walked to him without armor or crown or veil, treading over the fractured pieces of those same vows.
The gargoyle came beside me, and we stood next to the others, my back pressing against Rory’s chest. He touched the sleeve of my shirt, fingers tracing the contoured muscles of my arm.
Benji watched us, the lines of his face sharpening. He raised a hand, signaling Samuel and Tory. Maude reached for her axe.
But the king merely waved his knights away. “Wait outside,” he told them. “Shut the door behind you.”
It seemed their lot to exchange looks every time their king issued a dubious command. Samuel and Tory made twin faces of skepticism.
“It will be all right,” Benji assured them. “I only need a moment.”
The knights did as they were bidden, armor rattling as they quit the library and shut the door behind them.
Benji withdrew from the table, pacing. “It’s true what they say—waiting for the blow hurts more than the blow itself.
I have lost hours, days, weeks of rest, wondering if I should have killed you, too, Maude.
I thought surely you would come for me as Six did that first night—an indomitable assassin in the dark.
I trained tirelessly, expecting you’d come for me and close the loop: my mentor, my maker, and finally my killer. ”
He rubbed the Artful Brigand’s coin possessively and looked at the four of us, Rory, Maude, the gargoyle, and me.
“But now I see you all clearly. Maude, stiff with age and bones not mended; Rory, so easy to kill, so easy to bleed; a gargoyle, crumbling.” His eyes met mine.
“And a queen meant to be as fearsome as a god, reduced to a hopeless, broken thing. None of you are indomitable. That was simply how I kept you in my mind.”