Chapter Twenty-Four I Will Shoulder Any Weight You Give Me #2
It happened again. There would be a drowning, a Divination, a great show of power.
After, the gargoyle would hand the girls—some were women now—out of the water and hold them, staying with them until they woke, his gentleness the grandest gesture that cold, unfeeling place had ever seen. “Would that things were different.”
It kept on that way. So many girls, then women, drowning, dreaming, the abbess harnessing my magic, my body, to procure portents and signs.
I cared not for the falseness of her stories—how could she tell the truth of who or what I was if she did not know me?
I lay still, as I always did, forlorn every time a Diviner drowned, heartened every time the batlike gargoyle pulled her from the water.
Another girl came. She had cropped silver hair that hung limply over her face. She was not yet in a silk robe. Not yet wearing a shroud.
I knew, just to look at her, that she was dying.
“I’m Sybil.” Tears fell down the girl’s cheeks, her voice echoing in the cathedral as if a hundred girls were crying. “Sybil Delling.”
“Would you like me to take care of you, Sybil Delling?” the abbess asked.
“Yes.”
The abbess pushed the girl into my body with the hand of death. The girl cried out, sucked my waters into her lungs, and went still.
After, when the abbess had pulled her out and soothed her hair and called her names that so often abounded in the cathedral—strange, special, new—the girl reached up with both arms, wishing to be held.
The abbess stepped away. “Nobody’s going to carry you here, child. You’ve got to hold yourself up; you’ve got to be a big strong girl.”
The abbess left her lying on the chancel. Coughing and sputtering for air.
“Settle yourself, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle told her. “Your dream is at an end.”
The girl shook her head, the anguish in her voice so heavy it might have drowned her twice. “I don’t think I can do this.”
“That would be all right, Bartholomew.” The gargoyle hummed his usual tune, and the girl trembled.
He wrapped his arm around her. “Would that things were different. But if it is too much to bear, take heart: I am made of stone. And if you do not feel you are strong enough”—I could hear the little smile in his voice—“I will shoulder any weight you give me.”
After that, the girl did not cough so loudly during her Divinations, and she did not flail in the water. She let the abbess press her down, as if desperate to prove there was no weight her own shoulders could not bear, as if she was already made of stone.
But then I heard her, speaking to the other girls with shrouds over their eyes. She was not stone-hard with them, but gentle as the gargoyle had been.
She told the Diviners stories. There were many, but some she favored most.
“We’ll go to the Cliffs of Bellidine and look out over the Sighing Sea. We’ll shout, loud and so long, and our echoes will sound behind us. We’ll lie under the stars on beds of pink thrift flowers and stain our teeth with wine. We’ll sleep, but never dream.
“We’ll see the hamlets. Study their customs, their crafts—even their sprites. I’ve heard rumor of sprites as big as trees—as big as mountains.”
I liked that part.
“It’s a wild world out there, strange and magnificent, and we’re going to see it.
Everything will be so entirely beautiful.
We won’t always be here, trapped on the tor, drowning again and again.
Things will change,” she’d whisper to whichever Diviner she spoke to.
“They’ll get better. They just have to.”
They’ll get better, I murmured to myself. Strange that a creature as ancient as I might taste the words of a person so young and be fed. They just have to.
And suddenly Bartholomew and the Diviner were gone, taking their tales of hope with them. The cathedral was empty. I was alone, staring up at the stone ceiling, tragic and forlorn again.
But then—she returned. She could not see me, did not know me, but she came back, wearing neither silk nor gossamer, but armor. She bore a hammer and chisel, and with them she broke down my cruel wardens, hitting the abbess and the cathedral again and again until they were dust.
I shouted, a long, beckoning call I had not uttered since before my own death. A sound long forgotten. The tor shook.
The cathedral began to fall.
The Diviner ran, taking Bartholomew and her companions with her, and the ceiling fell in on me, stone crashing into my body. I was in the dark again—buried beneath rubble, unable to see even the moon through the cathedral’s stained-glass windows.
I lay still, alone and forlorn.
But lo—the rubble shifted. Through the cracks in the stone above, a light shone. The moon, peering through the cathedral’s rubble, such a tiny glimmer of light, and yet it filled me with a dizzying kind of longing.
Someone had heard my call.
They came in droves. In flocks. With slow, arduous precision, the cathedral’s rubble was hauled.
The lid of Aisling’s tomb finally lifted, and I was surrounded by dozens, hundreds of sprites.
Thin and panting and murmuring in that mournful language no human of Traum had ever understood, they looked upon me.
After all this time, they knew me.
I saw the sky again after centuries in the dark—oh, to see the moon. To see her light! A beautiful shade of silver, the color of my savior’s hair.
I did not hum to the world—the sound was not a minor tune.
When I cried out this time, the sound of my freedom was a deep, rolling call, full of fury and sorrow and gladness and hope so absolute it rattled the world.
Trees trembled, rivers shivered, and mountains bowed.
A great quake shook Traum with an iron fist, rolling on and on until its tremors came back to me like an echo.
I stared up at the night sky and the moon it held, my oldest companion, and wept.
There was light to touch, yet.
Things to dream of, yet.