The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(117)

I struck her with a closed fist. Hard, just beneath the jaw. Her head snapped back, but her grip remained tight over my throat.

The gargoyles rushed forward, stone hands catching along my head, my shoulders, my knees—pressing with brutal strength over my armor. I writhed. Screamed.

But I couldn’t get away from them. Couldn’t get out of the spring. Couldn’t move but to barely hold my mouth above the water’s fetid surface.

“What about the Faithful Forester? She’s been dead decades.” Spring water slipped between my lips, choking me. “Are you such a monster that you would kill one of your own Diviners for an Omen nigh thirty years gone?”

For the first time, emotion touched the abbess’s unflinching coolness. Her stone brow twisted, her eyes narrowing.

“You did not know she was dead? Killed by one of King Castor’s knights?” I coughed. Laughed. “You stand here upon your chancel, upon your tor, and look down at everyone, looming like a god. But you know nothing of what really goes on in the hamlets. Nothing of the real Traum.” I choked on water. “It will be your undoing.”

She squeezed my throat. “Diviners and kings come and go—and so will Omens. Traum is but five hamlets and me. If my gods are killed, I will make new ones. A Diviner’s blood is never wasted, so long as someone is fed.” Her lips peeled back in a smile. “I’m sure their carcasses were a fine feast for sprites.”

I thrashed in the water. “You could have let us go after our service, like you promised. If the Omens needed spring water, you could have given them spring water. But blood…” My voice ripped up my throat. “How could you be so monstrous?”

“To the faithless, a god is a monster. And I am certainly a god.” She touched her stone skin. “I was born in this very spring, a hundred years before Bartholomew came to the tor. I was a babe—a stillborn. I have never tasted humanity, nor food, only sweet, rotten water. My infant flesh fell away, leaving only stone.” She smiled. “And there is nothing to stone.”

She looked down on me, pitiless. “But you… flesh and hair and blood… you’re young. Guileless. You do not understand the weight a god must bear, or that, sometimes, we must do the wrong thing for the right reason. You do not know what it takes to rule this tor, and you do not know the responsibility of controlling that which you have created. Starving things make for loyal pets, so long as you feed them just enough. It’s how I control my Diviners, starving them for love, and it’s how I control the Omens. They craved spring water, and so I gave it to them, diluted in blood, that they’d always heed me, hungering for more.”

I’d never heard her laugh before. The sound bubbled out of her like boiling water. “They could have stopped drinking—the Heartsore Weaver did. They would still be eternal, like my gargoyles. But when you tell someone they are a god long enough, they stop believing they should have to give anything up. All they do is take.”

Again, she pushed me into the water. Held me down, longer this time, yanking me out just before I lost consciousness.

“Was I not like a mother to you?” she whispered over my soaked face. I couldn’t hear the noise in the courtyard anymore. My gasping lungs, my pulse, were too loud. “Did I not care for you, clothe you? Make you wondrous? I would have kept you, Six. You would have made such an obedient gargoyle.”

She ripped my hammer and chisel from my belt. “You have been a witness to the wonders of the Omens. A pupil to their portents. Ever but a visitor to their greatness.” When she looked down at me, I could tell she thought it was for the last time. “Now sleep.”

She kept one hand on my throat, and raised the chisel with the other. The gargoyles gripped me harder, holding me still.

I fought. My hands breached the water, gauntlets scraping over the abbess’s stone face. She let out a hiss but held fast to my throat. The gargoyles tightened their grips, and when I looked up at the chisel’s tip, I was looking up at the cathedral’s moonlit windows, too. They in light, I in darkness.

“All your love and resentment and martyrdom,” the abbess said, “were for nothing.”

An inhuman roar shook the cathedral.

The chisel stilled, and the abbess’s hand disappeared from my throat. She drew back, and so did the gargoyles that held me.

I fell, slipping into dark, fetid water.

I grasped for the edge of the spring, arms churning, air fleeing my mouth in bubbles. I thought, This time, I finally succumb. This time, the drowning will be complete.

Then a man’s hand was there, breaching the water, searching, desperate. It clasped the nape of my neck, bringing me out of darkness. I hauled in air, and when spring water fell away from my eyes, all I saw was Rory.

“I’ve got you, Sybil.”

He pulled me out of the spring. Beyond, the cathedral had become a battlefield. Maude and Benji were together—Maude with her axe, Benji holding tight to her, flinging the Harried Scribe’s inkwell, disappearing and appearing somewhere else every time a gargoyle drew too close. Maude’s face was white, her bandages bloody. Next to her, Benji’s left cheek was swollen, his bottom lip split, but his blue eyes remained alight.

The abbess stood in the heart of the bedlam. She’d dropped the hammer and chisel, and I saw then that her perfectly hewn visage was marred. There were teeth marks in her neck. A giant cut of stone, ripped out of her.