Chapter Twenty-Five The End of Time, the Start of Time
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE END OF TIME, THE START OF TIME
When the vision ended, I was already running, fighting the blur of tears. I climbed Petula Hall’s stairs. Sprinted down corridors. Found the hallway with three doors and wrenched open the first. “Rory?”
He wasn’t there. His room held every bit of clutter known to man, but not the man himself. I went to Maude’s room to find the gargoyle.
He wasn’t there, either.
More tears fell. They’d waited weeks behind my eyes, and there was no strength in the world stout enough to keep them from coming.
“Are you lost, Bartholomew?” said a familiar craggy voice.
I turned. The gargoyle was paces away, sitting upon a bench near an open window, looking out on the dawning sky.
I ran like I’d once run to him on that cliffside by the sea.
This time, I think he understood, because he did not ask why I was crying.
He just opened his arms, and I fell into them, wrapping my own around him and pressing the broken pieces of him together with all the strength I could summon.
“No.” I sobbed into the cracks of his chest. “I’m not lost.”
We sat upon the bench, looking out over the Chiming Wood, and I told him of my vision.
How he’d been right, the tor was a sprite—an ancient sprite who had been there all the while.
The limestone rock was her body, the spring water her blood, the cathedral her prison—and the earthquake her call. Her hope.
“The world needs to know,” I said. “But where to start? Pith, everyone still thinks sprites destroyed the cathedral.”
“Perhaps, someday, someone very brave will change that story.”
Outside the window, it was almost dawn. The fires had burned out, and while many of the birch trees had been consumed, a few remained, their thin top branches dancing in the wind.
“I don’t want you to leave me,” I whispered to the gargoyle.
“I don’t want sprites to die that the kingdom might have something to believe in.
I don’t want the hamlets to break or burn.
But lately I’ve looked upon the world and seen only myself, bereft of goodness and faith.
” I shut my eyes like a woeful child. “Traum used to be a great hand, held out to me, full of promise and beauty. But now the world is full of cracks.”
He petted my hair. “Flowers grow in the strangest of places, Bartholomew. Even cracks.”
I wept into his bandages, the fissures in his back, his arms, his shoulders, deeper than ever before. “How much longer do we have together?” I whispered.
“What an impossible question.” He put his hand to his chest. “But I think, somewhere in the cathedral of my body, a stone heart lingers. I imagine when the cracks reach it, my story will finally come to a close.”
It felt like the end of time thinking about his death. There would never be a sword so mighty—no coin or inkwell or any magical instruments so valuable—never be a soul so pure, as that which belonged to my precious limestone gargoyle. “What is your whole name?” I asked him. “Your family name.”
“Is Bartholomew not my family name?”
I shook my head.
“Oh. Then I suppose I do not have one.”
“Would you like to have mine?”
His stone eyes widened, like I’d offered him something as unattainable as the sky. “Bartholomew Delling,” he whispered, trying it out. Then, louder, his voice catching in the breeze. “Bartholomew Delling.” His chest swelled. “It is, I think, a perfect name for a peculiar boy like me.”
The wellspring behind my eyes never dried; more tears fell.
The gargoyle sighed, and the sky grew pinker. “Dying is not a hopeless endeavor. The trees will grow back,” he murmured, looking out over the Chiming Wood. “The current will ease. Mountains will crumble and new ones will rise. The end of time is also the start of time.”
When I snuggled closer, he jumped, turning to me in surprise. “Oh my—you’re still here, Bartholomew? He’s waiting for you. Hurry and go.” He gave me an excited shove. “You’re running out of time.”
I blinked at him. “You just told me the end of time is also the start—”
“Don’t hurt yourself thinking on it, just go!” He smiled, nodding at the corridor beyond. “Before the water gets cold.”
Steam plumed from beneath the washroom door. I put my ear against the wood and heard a rustling, the sharp clang of chainmail hitting the floor. My pulsed quickened, thrumming in my wrists, my chest, the base of my tongue.
I didn’t announce myself. I’d slipped past the door, and maybe he wouldn’t hear me, and if I lost my courage and couldn’t tell him I was sorry for being hopeless, he’d never know I’d been there.
But then I stepped into the washroom. Peered through steam.
And lost the will to leave.
Rory’s armor, chainmail and shirt, lay on the floor.
I was confronted with his bare back. My gaze roved downward, stopping at the dimples that cusped his spine just below his waist. He might have been a statue, a sculptor’s muse put to stone, carved with such meticulous care he almost didn’t look human.
But then there were the marks the king had left on him. Bruises, some red, others dark purple, splotchy and angry up and down his back, merciless and sizeable.
Halfway to undoing his pants, Rory went still. His head turned, and when he saw me standing behind him, he drew in a sharp breath. His gaze flittered down my body, then lifted to my eyes, searching.
I closed the door behind me. Came and stood before him.
Steam from the tub had wet Rory’s hair, and it clung to his dampened face, charcoal and ash from the fires running down his cheeks.
Just like his back, there were marks upon his front.
A split brow, the sutured cheekbone, the swollen bottom lip.
He was a mess. Filthy and bloody, smelling of smoke and sweat.
I wanted him so badly I couldn’t breathe.
Rory reached for my face, drawing his thumb down my cheek. I gestured at the tub. “Can I join you?”
His gaze softened, the corners of his lips lifting in an almost smile. I couldn’t tell if he thought me silly or exquisite. “Of course.”
My fingers lowered, ghosting over the bruises upon his chest, his ribs, his stomach, ending along the trail of hair that disappeared into the hem of his trousers. “Your pants.”
Rory let out a rough sound and caught my wrist. His hand slipped down my cheek to my throat, where he gave the neck of my breastplate a tug. “Your armor.”
We worked the straps together, freeing me of my iron encasement.
When boots and breastplate and leathers fell away, leaving me in a thin linen shirt and padded trousers, my body so much lighter than before, the relief was immediate.
I took deep, greedy breaths. Let the washroom’s damp air fill my lungs.
Rory listened to me breathe, his own breaths quickening.
I took his hand. Brought it down my neck, over my breasts, to the cuff of the shirt. “Take it off,” I murmured.
His voice was low, overheated; the coals at the bottom of a hearth. “I might rip it.”
“So rip it.”
No almost smile would do—Rory pressed his teeth over his bottom lip and grinned.
He took my collar in both hands. Yanked me closer, the tips of our noses grazing.
Then, in one calamitous yank, he tore my shirt in half.
When he lowered himself to his knees to take off my trousers, his hands flexed, like he’d considered tearing those as well.
But then his touch slowed, and he drew one leg, then the other, down with a reverent kind of delicacy.
He helped me step out of them, and then it was my turn. I offered my hand. Rory took it. Raised himself to a stand, and I hooked my finger on the hem of his trousers. “Rip them, too, if you like,” he murmured.
He didn’t think I would. And maybe it was because I held his gaze as I did it, but when I took both hands and tore, ripping the seam of his trousers from waist to knee, Rory’s grin widened, his cheeks darkening to a brilliant crimson.
There was nothing between us now, just steam from the bath and a taut, familiar awareness. This time, there was no doubt. When he looked at me, eyelids soft, chest heaving, I was certain that, in Rodrick Myndacious’s strange, pallid eyes, I was exquisite.
I leaned in, grazing my lips over his, my cheeks passing soot and tears onto his face. When we pulled back, we were both filthy. “You’re a mess, knave,” I whispered, wiping at his cheek.
He glanced at the bath. “Then clean me, Diviner.”
The tub was wide enough for the two of us, its depth not so different than the hot spring at the base of the Fervent Peaks or the spring atop the tor.
Rory handed me in, and I folded my legs beneath me, tense at first in the water, then gradually loosening. Rory settled in with far less constraint, practically throwing himself in and resting his back against the edge, water spraying as he draped his arms on the rim of the tub.
Eyes shut, he moaned, the sound hitting me directly between the legs.
He shoved hair out of his face and opened his eyes. Whatever he saw on my face made the pulse in his neck jump. “Come here.”
I held out my arm. Rory caught it, and I glided through water, pulled by his insistent hand until I was atop him.
Like an instrumentalist long acquainted with a ballad’s key, my body knew what to do.
Hands bracing the tub on either side of Rory’s head, my thighs opened and I straddled him, pressing down and rolling my hips, earning another delicious moan.
Rory, strung in the same key, hardened against the crux of my legs.
He brought soap and a cloth from the side of the tub.
Dipped both into the water. Brought the cloth to the nape of my neck and began washing my skin, freeing it of dirt and ash.
Just as he’d once spread wax over my clothes, measuring me for armor, his work was entirely efficient—a craft to do well.
And for every place he washed, he asked first. Face, arms, legs—
“Hair?”
I nodded.