The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(113)

Her stone eyes snapped open, and the Heartsore Weaver took a step toward me.

“The spring water stopped coming, as I expected it would. I did not seek it. I hoped without it I would die. For nine years, I starved. On the tenth year, the limestone from my eyes began to spread, twisting and distorting my face. It traveled to my arms. Then my legs and torso. I fractured, my body changing until I was neither human nor animal nor sprite, but a weaving of all three.” She gestured at her goat-like body. “I became this. Hewn of stone. It was… excruciating.”

The Heartsore Weaver kept coming, her hooves tapping against rocks, her stone wings quivering. “She sent me coins from Aisling’s coffers to remind me that I was still holy in the eyes of the kingdom. I threw them in the pits of my cave, but ever, they mock me. Make a false god of me.”

Nearer and nearer she drew, her steps an ominous clack, clack—like nails in a coffin. “I don’t know when she decided starvation was a better tool than her hammer and chisel, or when her craft became cruelty. I wonder if the other Omens even questioned it. They don’t carry the horrible, beautiful burden of memory, of humanness, the way I must. When the first dead Diviner was brought to them, did they even pause before drinking her blood, hungry for spring water—or did they think only of their holiness? That, as gods, a Diviner’s body, her sacrifice, her tragedy, was owed to them?”

My heart beat against my breastplate, and the Omen came closer. Closer. “She certainly thinks that way,” the Heartsore Weaver rasped. “She believes herself a mother and a god, nurturing Traum with stories of the Omens and faith. But is it godly to punish your subjects for questioning you? Is it motherly to demand resolute devotion?”

She was almost upon me, so near I could see the cracks in her teeth.

“Moth, she calls herself. An insect made holy for mastering death—but she is not holy. She’s the sixth Omen. Abbess of the tor. But you know her true name. There is not a man, woman, child, or sprite who does not. It wails on the wind. Looms, like her eponym cathedral, casting shadows, darkening this land.”

And then she was right in front of me, her stone eyes locking onto mine. “Aisling.”

I was firm upon my feet, but it felt like a dream. Like falling. “The end of her lies, her sanctified story, draws nigh, Omen. Answer me—where is your loom stone?”

“I will tell you. But first, you must begin what you came here to do. Gift me what Aisling never did.” She reached for my hand. Lifted my chisel. “End my battle with time. I have never been able to do it myself.”

I stared into her stone eyes and waited for a snare. An attack of duplicity or force, like the other Omens had tended. None came. The Heartsore Weaver bore no weapon but her unrelenting silence as she waited upon my chisel—and my answer.

I’d lost my voice. All I could manage was a whisper. “You want me to kill you?”

“Yes.”

She let out a long breath, stepped over rocks, and came once more to the wall of weavings. Upon a stone table, next to One, beneath the pale cocoons, she laid her body down.

I stood over her. “Where would you have it?” My chisel brushed over her wrists, her throat, then settled over her heart.

“There is fine,” she said.

I fixed my chisel in my fist. Lifted my hammer. “Your loom stone, Weaver. Tell me where it is.”

“Strike me first.” She shut her eyes and let out a choked laugh. “I am ashamed, after all these years spent dreaming of death, that I still fear it.”

My throat tightened. “Be still.”

I struck.

The sound bellowed like thunder through the cavern.

“Again,” the Heartsore Weaver said, fissures coursing down her chest.

Again, I struck her.

The cocoons along the wall trembled.

If she felt pain, she bore it. I struck the Omen once, twice more, dust filling the air, her goat-like body breaking apart beneath my unrelenting hand. She had no blood within her, composed entirely of limestone, like my wall upon the tor—like Aisling Cathedral itself. When her limbs were at my feet and her chest fissured beyond saving, the Heartsore Weaver let out a gasping moan. “That is all. Let me speak.”

I stayed my hammer. Sweat dripped down the back of my neck into my armor, the joints in my shoulder, my arm, aching. The pale cocoons kept trembling. They jerked and swayed, until one let out a little white moth.

The rest came after. Dozens of moths, struggling within, then breaching their cloistered cocoons and crawling over gossamer, over One and what remained of the Heartsore Weaver. Out and into the world.

The Heartsore Weaver watched them through cracked stone eyes, and smiled. “Thank you.” Her voice was quiet. “My loom stone rests where it was made. Upon the tor. I returned it to Aisling when my body twisted beyond all recognition. When I became but one of her many stone creatures. An inhuman gargoyle.” She coughed, and dust flew. “Just like that first Diviner I’d made a robe for.”

Footsteps echoed behind me. “Sybil?” It was Rory’s voice, calling me. “Sybil!”

But I was frozen, staring down at the Heartsore Weaver, my voice a wretched scrape. “But the gargoyles on the tor… they’re sprites…”

“No. They are not.”

Again the Weaver coughed, more injurious this time. Her body was falling apart. “To be a gargoyle…” she rasped, “is a very strange thing. The ones upon the tor do not tell the stories of who they are—indeed they hardly speak—I think, because they do not remember what it is to be human. Or maybe they are too afraid to disobey their master. But not that first one. He was a most peculiar boy. What was his name? The first gargoyle she made?” Her breaths were labored. “I saw him not two days ago upon my cliff… came to see him last night, but you frightened me away. What was his name…”