The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(112)

“I have time.”

She grinned then, shadows cutting across her inhuman face. “More than you realize.”

The Heartsore Weaver took a step back from my chisel’s tip. “You know by now there is magic in the world. The stone upon the tor, its water—the spring you drank from, drowned in—is the mother of that magic. From it, five objects were hewn. A coin, an inkwell, an oar, a chime.” She sighed. “And a loom stone.”

I waited.

“What you do not know, perhaps, is we whom you call Omens had no sway over that magic when the objects were made. I did not chose my loom stone’s power, and neither did she who carved it for me, yet, strangely, it suited me. Magic is like a god in that way. All-knowing, and most effective when not fully understood.”

I hated talk of gods. “What does your loom stone do?” I said, clipped.

“I could slip my finger into the hole in the center of it. If the stone’s face was pointed outward, I would be transported—made invisible. I could jump through the walls of this cave. Travel twenty feet in the air. All I had to do was know in my mind where I wanted to go. So long as the distance was not more than my line of sight, I could get there. Brilliant magic it was. But when I turned the loom stone over, its face pointed inward—”

How burdened she suddenly looked. Her head lowered, as if weighed down. Even her eyes seemed too heavy to lift. “I was transported not in body, but in mind. Perhaps it’s because I’m a weaver, and a tapestry is like a memory brought to life. I always know what I was feeling in that moment, what I was thinking, when I look back on something I’ve woven. The loom stone was no different. I’d slip it on my finger, and it gave me back the most important thing I’d lost.”

Her eyes lifted. Found my face. “My memory. If I wished to, I could recall who I was before I was the Heartsore Weaver.” Her head turned as she surveyed me. “Tell me, Diviner. Do you recall anything before you tasted Aisling’s waters?”

I could tell she already knew the answer. “No.”

She nodded. “Losing something is painful. Sometimes, finding what we’ve lost is just as agonizing.”

I looked down at One, lifeless beneath the tapestry. Whispered, like I was telling her a story before bed, “You can never really go home.”

“No. You cannot.”

The Heartsore Weaver looked out into the darkness of her cavern. “But I did not want to look back at who I was. I was too enthralled with being an Omen. For many years, I did not use the loom stone in that way. I kept to my hamlet, as we Omens said we would. For decades I sowed the seeds of gods and signs within the Cliffs of Bellidine. Used my loom stone to appear and vanish. To kill sprites. I gave Traum something to rally behind. To believe in.”

She began to pace. “Then, on a year without mark, she came. The Omens and I—we all needed the tor’s spring water to live. Not much, and not often, but we needed it. Sometimes the water came in a flask at the hands of her little foundling, but this time she brought it herself. We drank it together, like old friends. Then she asked me to make her a silk robe.”

The Heartsore Weaver reached out. Pet the gossamer weaving upon the wall, its delicate fabric snagging against one of her stone claws. “‘A Diviner is not so different from a silkworm,’ she said. ‘That is what I will call my foundling—a Diviner. He came into the world vulnerable. Fell into dreamless sleep. I wrapped him in my arms, put water to his lips, and he awoke a moth.’” Her stone eyes flashed. “‘Strange. Special. New. I want him to look the part.’”

My throat tightened. “You’re talking about the abbess. The abbess, and the foundling child from her story.”

“I knew her before she was abbess of anything.” The Heartsore Weaver’s gaze dropped to my hammer and chisel. “When she was but a stonemason who wore a shroud over her face. A craftsman, like me. I made her the robe. When I traveled to the tor to deliver it, the first stones of a cathedral had been laid. Many years later, she came to see me again, asking for five more robes. This time, there was no foundling child at her heels, but a stone gargoyle.”

The Heartsore Weaver rolled her shoulders, the sound inhuman—like rocks, scraping together. “More time passed. One by one, I made her the robes she’d asked for. But by the time I was on the sixth and final robe, I’d grown weary. Lonely. So I slipped the loom stone back on my finger, facing inward, hoping to be comforted by memories of my past.”

She stopped pacing. Shut her eyes. “Only they were a torment. I remembered my real name. My mother and brother. My wife and her parents. My naughty yellow cat. I remembered what it was like to love and be loved, to be careful and also carefree, to be good and bad—to be human. But I’d spent too much time sustaining the charade of the Omens. When I finally went home to see my loved ones, most had died of old age. Those who remained looked upon my stone eyes in terror. They’d thought me missing. Mourned me—let go of me. Soon they, too, died and I was alone with naught but my memories.”

The Weaver seemed lost in her story, her digits moving in strange patterns. Had she fingers and not claws, I might have thought her plaiting an invisible tapestry. “I withheld the final robe. When she came for it, I told her I no longer wished to be an Omen. That I didn’t have it in me to live forever, playacting as a god. I thought she would pity me. She didn’t. She called me disloyal. Took the robe I’d made and left me alone with my caverns, my silkworm sprites, and my steadfast foe—time.”