Chapter Twenty-Two Light, in Stone #3
A sneer slid over his face. “I have come to tell you I have outgrown you. No matter your schemes with the nobility, Maude, I will outdo you, outthink you, just as I have before.” His throat caught.
“But I must know.” His gaze jumped to Rory.
“Last night. The entire Wood is in an uproar about your little Divination, knave.”
“I told you, Benji.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “It’s not a Divination. There’s something in the ox-eye. That draft your grandfather made—the one that comes from the gowans that grow along the tor. It’s special.”
“Ox-eye.” Benji looked from face to face as if he expected one of us to laugh.
“Here.” Rory moved to a shelf. Retrieved an old leather-bound notebook. Flung it and hit the king on the head. “The page is marked.”
Benji stared down at his grandfather’s notebook. “Where’d you get this?”
“I stole it,” said the gargoyle cheerily.
Aged yellow pages turned, Benji’s finger stopping where a thin strip of leather had been placed. He read to himself, muttering. “This proves nothing.”
“Pith, you idiot,” I snapped. “Read.”
“Yes,” the gargoyle said, nodding. “Call him an idiot. He likes that.”
Steam practically pluming from his ears, Benji read aloud.
“‘Once, I found a water sprite with a blade in her stomach. She’d crawled onto the embankment and died under the generous shade of a great oak. I buried her where she lay and came back a full year later to a meadow of gowans. But the great oak! It was dying. I dug beneath the gowans and found no bones—all that was left of the sprite was a stone. It had crushed several of the oak’s roots, depriving the tree of water.
Limestone, it was. Heavy and hard and without flaw—just like that which sits on the tor. ’”
He snapped the book shut. “What care I for stones or gowan flowers? The only worth a sprite ever had in the Stonewater Kingdom is in death.”
“In a strange, terrible way you are right.”
We all turned to the gargoyle. He was standing with his hands behind his back, shifting weight between his feet. “Indeed, folk of Traum have always killed sprites. Even hundreds of years ago, before I was born. And I wonder, as I so often do, how did it begin?”
Maude’s voice distant. “The Bauer women drew their axes against Der ewige Mond. Sprites have been hunted ever since.”
He pondered that. “The tor has always been a place of wonderment. The spring and the limestone it leaches from is the source of our magic, our history, the pinnacle of our beliefs, built upon stones and gowans. How terribly, perfectly put that, in death, the sprite wields its greatest power.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. Felt the cracks in his body against the flesh of my palm. “What are you saying, Bartholomew?
“Oh. Can you not hear me?” He began to shout. “The tor is a dead sprite!”
He might as well have bludgeoned us each over the head. We stared at him, our stupor thicker than smoke.
The gargoyle pointed at the notebook and continued. “The old pervert king laid it out for us. I suppose we should give him the credit he is due—I do not think anyone before him ever paid so great attention to sprites.”
Rory made a face and mouthed, Pervert?
“He must have guessed, from its limestone, its gowans, that the tor was a great, vanquished sprite. Had his life not been cut short, he might have realized his ox-eye concoction was not a failure at all, and that those hewn of limestone like Bartholomew would be granted visions from it.”
Benji’s voice was thin. “You believe that the limestone on the tor, the spring that leaches from it, the stone objects… they all come from a sprite?”
“It is one of life’s strange contradictions, isn’t it?” the gargoyle mused. “That the lowest creature in the world should firstly be the highest.”
Benji’s gaze darted back and forth—I could practically hear the cogs of his mind turning. “The earthquake. Its first rumble began that night when the sprites were digging at the tor. They’re doing something to the spring. Dirty fucking sprites.”
He turned from us and began to walk away.
“Where are you going?” I shouted after him.
“If the tor is truly a sprite, then I will see it remains buried beneath the prison of Aisling’s remains.
Any wretched creatures that come to dig it up will be slaughtered.
You four have done your best to cast a pall over my spectacle, but the tournament continues.
I am, as ever, a king who gives his people something to believe in, even if it is but a common enemy. ”
Rory stalked him through the room. “What the hell do you imagine you’ll do? Kill every last sprite until Traum is a wasteland of gowan? Brutality isn’t coin, Benji. You can’t buy everyone.”
“Yes, I can.” The king’s turned, his grin all teeth. “I bought your woman with your blood, didn’t I?”
Rory exploded.
Rushing forward with such ungodly speed I hardly saw him, he slammed his body against Benji’s, the crash echoing through the library. Benji cried out, and Tory and Samuel burst through the door, all of us witnessing the staggering moment the knave finally stopped holding himself back.
Rory threw Benji on the floor, then climbed over him, fists, elbows, knees, swinging with brutal force.
Benji took a hit to the jaw and grunted, then delivered a blow to Rory’s wounded cheek, opening the sutures.
The sound of a scream came from behind Rory’s clenched teeth.
“Motherfucker.” He raised his fist, unbridled and terrifying—
And hit Benji so hard in the jaw the king’s teeth broke.
Benji howled, Samuel and Tory and Maude and me tangling in a knot above him. And Rory—he was shouting so loudly in the king’s face I couldn’t make out the words, only the fury, the pain, trapped within them.
In the end it took my and Maude’s strength to wrench him off the king. When Benji stumbled back, his mouth was dripping blood.
Tory lowered her arm to help him, but the king scorned her, hissing as he staggered from the room, his gaze finding mine when he reached the library door. “You want to best me and my knights in a tournament, Six? Now’s your chance. I won’t stop you this time—the hunt begins at dawn.”
He coughed blood, then spat it upon the carpet. “We’ll be hunting a sprite.”