The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(115)
“And how to drown.”
The gargoyle sighed. “But then—you stopped obeying me, Bartholomew. You stopped being my perfect Diviner. You did not wish to dream or to talk of the Omens any longer, for you had helped make them, and therefore could not fully believe in their divinity. You no longer wished to tell a story that was a lie, even when I assured you it was necessary. That the hamlets of Traum had become the Stonewater Kingdom, and a kingdom always needs something to believe in. Constantly, I had to childmind you. When that ceased to work… I remade you.”
The gargoyle’s voice hardened. He shut his eyes, imitating the abbess. “Lie in the spring, Bartholomew. What signs do you see, Bartholomew? Don’t mix up your words, Bartholomew. Don’t cry or be sick, Bartholomew. Ignore all the pain, Bartholomew. Never complain, Bartholomew. Stop humming, Bartholomew. Swallow the blood, Bartholomew. Would that you were a daughter, Bartholomew. Soon I’ll replace you, Bartholomew. I’ll forget and erase you, Bartholomew. Bartholomew. Bartholomew. Bartholomew—”
His shoulders shook, and he let out a long, mournful sound. When he opened his eyes, looking me in mine, I knew he was speaking in his own voice now and not the abbess’s.
“She kept me locked away in the cottage with no windows. Denied me spring water, thinking I might starve. I do not know how long it took for my body to fracture and change… a long while, I think. I must have gone senseless for the pain. I starved, but I did not die, turning to stone instead. I became a gargoyle. Fearsome—a guardian at Aisling’s gate. Suddenly, she was pleased with me again. Suddenly, I was useful once more. After all… swords and armor are nothing to stone.”
“Oh, gargoyle.” I ran to him, armor rattling, and threw my arms around his body.
He made sad little sounds against my shoulder. “She told me to find her more dead foundlings. Girls, this time, since I had proved such a disappointment. I searched the gutters of the Seacht, Coulson Faire, the Chiming Wood, and brought them to the tor, where she’d fill their mouths with spring water and coax them awake. She tied gossamer over their stone eyes and told them they were strange. Special. New. They dreamed in her cathedral, as if born of its water, and the story of the Omens prevailed. Then, every ten years, the dreamers would vanish, and new foundlings had to be brought. But the ones she liked best, the ones she lent her hammer and chisel to—the most obedient—she always kept locked away to make into gargoyles.”
Rory’s face was wan.
“I suppose I saw it then,” the gargoyle said. “How she guarded the tor like a dragon. How she was made as large as a cathedral herself, commanding the Omens, the spring, and the foundlings she raised to dream within it. How, like a god, she said she loved us but hurt us.”
Tears fell down my cheeks, stirred, then made cold by the fluttering wings of moths.
“My name was wiped from her stories, and so were the names of all the Diviners that came after me. But I tried to hold on. I think I must have spent centuries trying to tell the world who I was in my own peculiar way.”
I pressed my hands into his stone body. “My dream. Of the moth. That wasn’t a sign from gods. You were the one to drown me… it was you, Bartholomew.” My tears fell. “You, trying to tell me your story.”
He pulled back to look at me. “I’m sorry for all of it,” he said, wiping my cheeks. “But she gave me a second chance at life, though it was hardly living. My devotion to Aisling was hard to undo. I am sorry I found you, sick in the Seacht; I am sorry that I brought you back to the cathedral like the dozens of dead or dying girls I’d brought before.” His chin quivered. “I’m sorry that, upon the chancel, you died. I’m sorry she remade you with spring water, and that you bore such loyalty to her for it.”
He wrapped his arms around me. “To live again after death is strange magic, and an even stranger fate. Would that things were different, Bartholomew. Would that we had never been reborn. But if we hadn’t… well. I have wondered, and pondered, and now I am sure. For better, for worse—
“The rest of the story could not exist without us.”
Aisling Cathedral, Returned
Swords and armor are nothing to stone.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE END OF THE STORY
We returned to where Traum’s most sanctified story, its most crafted lie, began.
The tor.
It had taken all day to get there. I was on horseback, holding tightly to Rory, and for once Fig cantered with urgency, as if she felt our turmoil. Benji rode behind us—without the rest of his knights. What we meant to do was not for them to see. Above, still too injured to ride, Maude flew in the arms of the gargoyle. Our pace was unrelenting, our brows slick with sweat as we hastened through Traum’s hills upon the holloway road, hungry to lay all our rage upon the cathedral’s door. To collect the last stone object—to kill the final Omen.
To end the story.
We reached the tor at nightfall. Aisling Cathedral was coated in moonlight. I stared up at its looming edifice, its wall. It was not so long ago the Diviners and I had perched, watching the king come, on that very spot.
The path felt steeper than it ever had.
We reached the cathedral gate and found it shut. Locked. Benji held the Harried Scribe’s inkwell and the Ardent Oarsman’s oar, and Maude bore an axe with her uninjured arm. The gargoyle held tight to the Faithful Forester’s stone chime, and Rory the Artful Brigand’s coin, which he raised, rough side up—and threw.