Chapter Twenty-Three The Burning Grove #2
Finally, she looked up. “I was trying to keep you safe. I still am, Diviner.”
Her dark eyes peered over my shoulder, and I turned. Down the tree line, wedged between Samuel and a party of foresters, Benji was watching us through the dark slit of his visor.
“I thought he would be furious with me when I injured you,” Tory whispered. “You almost died, and yet he was eerily heartened. I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that the only thing you ever truly needed protecting against, Diviner, was him.”
Caustic, I whispered, “The king only ever wants things that are useful. When they are not, by impulse or calculation, he discards them. He did it to his own friends, then again to Dedrick, to Hamelin. Watch your back, Tory.” I tightened my grip on my hammer.
“It would be a shame to see him do away with the one decent knight in his company.”
“Decent?” Her thin lips curled. “Does that mean you forgive me?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. You fucking skewered me. But if you still have it in you to keep me safe”—I held out my free hand—“by all means, join me in the hunt.”
Tory looked down, her brows as tight and skeptical as ever.
“It’s not a holy object,” I told her. “Just a hand to shake.” A second chance.
Slowly, like it was an animal that might bite, Tory took my hand. Shook it. A purple flag waved, and Tory and I moved to the line of participants, wedging ourselves between foresters and the king.
“You really think you can take down a birke, boy-king?” I whispered to Benji.
He didn’t reply.
I looked back one more time to Rory and Maude and the gargoyle—
The purple banner waved again, and the hunters dispersed, Benji, then Samuel Eichel, slipping away with the rest into the dark stomach of the Chiming Wood.
I put the wool balls in my ears, clenched my hammer, and followed, Tory at my heels.
Branches swiping at my face and arms, brambles tangling and snapping along my legs, Tory and I ran through the Wood after Samuel Eichel. He was fast—faster than I’d expected, and while the other hunters crouched low and moved slowly, Samuel hurried, rushing through the Wood.
Left, then right, he weaved, moving up and down ravines and jumping over trees felled by earthquakes, his steps crunching over a sea of yellow leaves.
Winded, growing more irritated by the moment, I had half a mind to shout at him, then knock that stupid chime from his hand, but then the Wood thickened, birches growing closer and closer together, and I lost sight of him.
“Shit.”
“What?” Tory asked.
“Samuel’s gone.”
“What do you want with Samuel?”
“His chime.” I looked back at her. “I’m going to destroy it.”
Her mouth fell open, uncharacteristic shock smoothing out the furrow between her brows.
“You don’t have to come along,” I told her. “Then again.” I touched my abdomen. Made an exaggerated sound. “One might suggest that you owe me, Bassett.”
She didn’t, or couldn’t, argue with that.
The morning light dimmed, snuffed out by the canopy of leaves and branches above my head.
The trees were taller, some so close together I had to turn sideways to get between them.
Other animals hadn’t been so lucky—there were bones, antlers, of animals who had died between these trees.
I’d been here before. This grove was sacred to folk of the Wood.
The exact same place we’d stolen the chime last time.
The story doesn’t change, echoed the abbess’s voice in my mind.
The air grew denser, the sharp scent of nettles filled my nose.
Smoke was billowing ahead.
We cast around the sacred grove, searching for Samuel.
Hadn’t there been a wooden dais, and stacks of idleweed around it?
Hadn’t the sprites been drawn to it last time?
I had no doubt if I found the burning idleweed, I would find Samuel Eichel.
But then a breeze flipped through the trees, pushing smoke in my face. I coughed, eyes burning.
There was no seeing ten feet in front of me. I put my hand out to catch my bearings upon a birch tree—
And touched flesh.
“Pith.”
Tory jumped. “What?”
“Shut your eyes.” The tree—no, the birke—I’d touched was shivering, its pallid skin rippling. One by one the dark knots speckled over its flesh opened. The sprite looked at me, then Tory, with dozens of black eyes.
I hid my hammer behind my back and tried not to scream. “You won’t like these,” I said, pointing at my own stone eyes.
When the birke blinked, its eyelids made squelching sounds.
Tory was holding so tightly to her spear her gauntlets groaned. “Diviner?”
“Shut up and stay still.” I cleared my throat. Looked up at the sprite. The creature was taller than all the surrounding trees. “I mean no disrespect,” I hedged, voice wobbling, “but would it be all right if I climbed you?”
The only answer I got was dozens of wet blinks.
Timidly, I reached out. Touched its flesh. When nothing happened, I put another hand on the birke, this time upon one of its bough-like limbs. It remained still. I did it again and again, until I found myself off the earthen ground and ten, twenty, thirty feet in the air.
The birke did nothing, save watch me with its dark, terrifying eyes.
Tory was a little speck on the ground. “Diviner?”
I pushed through yellow leaves, hauled myself onto one more branch, tasted fresh air. I was above the smoke now, the vantage clear enough to see yellow flames flickering in the distance, just north of me.
Pyres of idleweed, burning.
“I can see where Samuel’s gone.”
I climbed down, praying I was not putting my foot in some essential part of the birke’s body that might cause it to withdraw its graciousness.
But the sprite did not move, and even when I dropped to the ground before it, panting and sweating and more terrified than I’d been in a long while, it did nothing to harm me.
It just watched my stone eyes, and I its dark ones, both of us strange creatures in an even stranger land.
“There are hunters about,” I whispered. “Mind yourself.”
I took Tory by the arm. Laughed just a little when she let out a yelp, then led her north. “You can open your eyes now.”
The paths between the trees narrowed, bones that had been strung into crude chimes clacking as we passed. Fingers tight around my hammer, I kept my knees bent and my steps light, combing the smoke until the orange flames of the pyres grew stronger, the smell of idleweed bolder.
There. Between two burning pyres—a dais. It was broken, split down the middle.
In front of it lay the great birke Maude had killed. From its body, gowan flowers grew, tiny specks of white against oppressive smoke and its violent pyre.
Samuel Eichel stood atop the dais, holding his chime, waiting.
“If he rings that thing,” I warned Tory, “your mind will scatter. Put your hands over your ears.”
She already had her hands over her nose, trying to keep the idleweed smoke at bay. “You won’t hurt him, will you?”
“All I want is that chime.”
She nodded. “I’ll come up from behind.”
Tory crept away between trees, and I went forward.
Eyes shut, nostrils wide, Samuel remained on the dais, breathing in the idleweed while I did my best not to. He seemed strangely at ease for a man on a hunt, his gaze pointed inward and not outward as a predator’s ought to be.
I could see Tory now, paces behind him. If Samuel tried to flee, he’d run right into her. Closer and closer I drew, to the dais. And I should have seen it coming. Should have read the signs. But I was so concentrated on the Faithful Forester’s chime—
That I never saw the arrow.
It hit Tory just beneath the jaw, chainmail screaming as the arrowhead broke through her coif and into the flesh of her neck.
Light flickered, and the Artful Brigand’s coin flew, shooting past my head and stirring my hair. Benji appeared out of nothingness. Caught it. Reached for my ear—and yanked out one of the balls of wool.
“Now, Samuel,” he shouted.
The sound of a chime echoed discordantly through the Wood. My thoughts fell away like a crumbling floor, the knell knocking loose every terrible thought, every painful memory, I’d ever had.
I was a child, drowning in Aisling’s spring, bruises on my chest from where the abbess held me down.
Then I was a woman in the Diviner’s cottage.
One’s shape was still embedded in the mattress, but she was gone.
Then—Castle Luricht. I lay on the Artful Brigand’s floor, certain the only thing I had left to live for was death.
The ringing of the chime ended.
Slowly, my mind picked itself back up.
I lay on my back on the broken pieces of the dais, coughing. Samuel stood above me. I could see wool in his ears. Benji was there, too. My hammer was in his hand, and the net on his belt was gone.
No. Not gone. It was wrapped around my arms, my legs, locking me in a misshapen heap upon the dais. I jerked against my constraints. Spat out obscene language and called Benji every horrible name I could think of.
The net held.
Benji took off his helmet. Removed wool from his ears.
“Pith, Six. Don’t struggle so.” He crouched.
“I didn’t want it to be like this. I really did dream that you and I, the boy from Coulson Faire and his holy Diviner, would be different kinds of sovereigns.
That Aisling’s power would fall to us. But no matter what I do, I seem destined to be like every other king in Traum.
Temporary. Clearly I have gone about everything in the wrong way. ”
He shook his head. “Folk already think sprites destroyed the cathedral. When I tell the nobles those vile creatures are responsible for the earthquake, too, they will rally to my side, no matter what occurred in this tournament.” He lowered his voice.
“And when they learn that a birke consumed their precious queen, the last Diviner… well. If they cannot gain faith in our spectacle, they will find it in my bloodied sword.”