The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(16)

And dreamed.

Coin. Inkwell. Oar. Chime. Loom stone. Good portent, ill portent.

I woke, the abbess’s shroud looming over my face. “Again, my girl,” she said, holding a woman’s bloodied hand to my mouth. It coated my tongue, and I was pressed into water once more.

When I finally made my wet, weary way back to the Diviner cottage, it was almost suppertime. Visitors had been expelled from the grounds—the echoes of their voices were gone, and the wind along the tor spoke in its usual mournful refrain.

I stopped twice to vomit.

A pale figure waited near the cottage gate, sitting in grass and leaning against the fence. “Pleasant afternoon?” One asked.

I slumped to a seat next to her. I wouldn’t say it to anyone else. But One never made fun of me for being the abbess’s favorite, for trying so hard to be the best Diviner I could. It was just… easier, saying shameful things out loud to her, so I whispered, “I can’t wait until we’re free of that spring.”

One put her hand over mine. “Are you still up for sneaking off the tor?”

“No.” I looked at my feet. “It was a stupid idea.”

“Tell me a story, then.”

It made me a little sick to talk. Still—“We’ll go to the Cliffs of Bellidine and look out over the Sighing Sea, all six of us. We’ll shout so loud and long that our echoes will sound behind us. We’ll lie under the stars on beds of pink thrift flowers and stain our teeth with wine. We’ll sleep, but never dream.”

One inhaled slowly, like she was breathing it in. “That’s a good story.” She turned to me. “I’m sorry you had to Divine for the king. You draw the short straw so often, don’t you, Six?”

Her grip on my hand slackened, and I looked up. “One?”

There were wrinkles on her brow, the telltale sign of a furrow. One tilted her head to the side, her shrouded gaze fixed on something in the bushes near the gate. “What’s that?”

On first glance, it seemed no more than a stack of twigs. But the closer I looked, the better I could see that the stack was perfectly balanced. Six twigs that smelled sharp as nettle, wrapped in a leather strip.

Idleweed. Tied around it was a note.


Be ready by nightfall.


—R





(The idleweed is to spare my fucking boots. Don’t smoke it all.)





Coulson Faire



Coin.

The only portent, the only prosperity—the only god of men—is coin.





CHAPTER FIVE


SPRITES IN THE GLEN




We smoked all the idleweed.

Four danced around the room, her white dress and a trail of smoke billowing behind her. “Where did you get this, Six?”

I held a sprig of idleweed in the crease of my lips and brought a candle to it. Fire, smoke, inhale. This time, I didn’t cough. “You’ll meet him soon enough,” I muttered, passing candles to Two, then Three, while One did the same to Five. A minute later, our entire chamber was clouded in smoke and lit by a lavender sunset, the effect deliciously hazy.

“Whoa.” One’s voice was awestruck. “There goes my nausea. Will it make me tired?”

I’d stayed up well enough the night before, seething over Rodrick Myndacious. “Shouldn’t.”

Three grinned at Five, who opened her mouth with a wolfish smile and swallowed the smoke Three blew into it. Two lay back on her mattress, limbs loose, and stared up at the ceiling. Of all of us, she was the least unlikely to say, “Let’s do this when our service is up. Lie in bed. Smoke. Drink. Eat. Do absolutely nothing.”

“Absolutely nothing,” Three agreed, raising her twig of idleweed in a salute.

Four moved to the center of the room. “And when we need money we’ll work and when we get bored we’ll play with knights or whomever we please, but we’ll never give them anything. We’ll only love one another.” She looked around at us, and I wished then I could see her eyes, because I knew they were wide and feverish and full of assurance. “Because out there, even when the shroud is off”—she pointed out the window to Traum’s sweeping hills—“we will be daughters of Aisling. Diviners, harbingers of gods—not real women. People will want us without ever wishing to know us.” She came round the room. Kissed each Diviner plain on the mouth. “But we’ll always be so much more than that to one another.”

When she came to me, I lowered the idleweed from my mouth and felt Four’s lips in its place. “Promise me it’ll be like that,” she said.

I had no right to promise. I knew, just like the other women in the room, that Divining—reading the Omens’ signs—gave me no sway over their enactment. There was no telling what tapestry the future would weave for us. Still, I said with my whole being, “I promise it will.”

“Me too,” the Diviners replied, our voices catching in the smoke.

A knock sounded upon the cottage door.

Four banished her intensity with a final puff of idleweed, then pinched her cheeks in the cracked looking glass and pushed up her breasts. “Well, shrews. Shall we don our cloaks?”

They were for winter months, our cloaks. Wool and undyed, they’d been traded by a weaver from the Cliffs of Bellidine for a Divination. And while they were heavy and hot for late summer, when we drew the hoods up, we were Diviners no more, our dresses covered, our faces and shrouds perfectly obscured by shadow.