The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(26)

A loom stone.

A sixth figure stood at the mouth of the cathedral, hooded like the others. It bore no stone object—its hands were empty, arms held wide, as if it were beckoning me into the cathedral. As if the cathedral itself was the figure’s personal stone object.

The vision behind the moth’s wings rippled. Disappeared. I was confronted now with Aisling’s innards. Its nave and pews and windows.

Its dark, fetid spring.

The moth beat its wings, and I began to see faces in the water.

I saw the shrouded abbess and her gargoyles. Men in armor and crowns that must be kings of old. Hordes of Traum’s folk, lined up outside the tor for a Divination.

I saw Diviners. Young girls, draped in gossamer. Then the moth beat its wings once more, and the Diviners’ faces, their arms and legs and torsos, grew distorted. Fractured, bent in terrible grotesque shapes. They cried out in agony, but their voices were like the wind—long and mournful and without reprieve.

I put a hand to my mouth. “Please, stop.”

Then they were gone, and so was the visage of the spring. I was alone in darkness once more. The moth flapped its wings over my eyes, fanning my face.

And then a pain like I had never felt ripped into me. It was like drowning, but so much worse. An inescapable kind of pain. Omnipresent. Complete.

“Swords and armor,” came a voice, “are nothing to stone.”

I lurched up, gasping.

I was laid out on a pew, the light in the rose window high above me still young. Rory was gone. Only the gargoyle was there, watching me. “Very curious, Bartholomew,” he mused. “Very curious indeed.”

“What happened? Did—” I put a hand to my shroud, wet but secured over my eyes. “What did you hear?”

“Nary a thing.”

“I didn’t say anything in the dream?”

He blinked. “Perhaps the Omens no longer favor you.”

“Where’s Myndacious?”

“The king and his knights came to collect him. And I must say, I am relieved.” He shuddered. “There is something about knights, their unbreachable zest for virtue, that I find truly sickening—”

I didn’t hear the rest. I was stumbling out of the cathedral, sick on the way. My feet churned over carpet, over gravel, then grass. I reached the apple orchard, then the wall.

The Diviners were there, perched high, white beacons against a blue sky. They turned, sensing my approach, and One and Four handed me up.

I didn’t ask why they weren’t abed. I knew they’d come to watch.

The king’s knights were halfway down the hill. I searched the glinting armor, looking, looking.

There. Near the front, riding between King Castor and Maude. Dark hair. Broad lines of his back.

Rory.

He turned, frown deeply set, and looked back at Aisling Cathedral. His gaze found the wall, and the Diviners upon it. When it landed on me, it froze, frown deepening. I might have called him back. Asked him what he could possibly know of the sixth Omen—the moth—and why it had visited my dream. But he was turning away, spurring his horse, riding until the road turned and the greenery of the holloway swallowed him whole.

“What a charming pair of days they’ve lent us,” Four said, black hair in the wind.

“Almost worth the sleepless nights,” Three muttered through a yawn. “Almost.”

“What of your knight?” One put her hand on my shoulder. “Was his dream interesting?”

The moth. The vision of the statues in the courtyard come to life. Of the Diviners, twisted and wailing. “I—” The dream lodged in my throat. “I don’t know. I couldn’t read the signs.”

One’s brows rose. I tried to laugh it off. “A waste of time.”

I prayed it was. That the dream of the moth meant nothing—that life would go back to normal as it always did after a Divination. I would take up my hammer, my chisel, mind the wall, and dream with the others until our service was at an end. We would bid Aisling farewell and I would forget about Rodrick Myndacious, his irreverence, his idleweed, his sneer. It would all come to nothing but a bad story.

Nothing but a terrible dream.

Only life did not go back to normal. I knew the second I woke the next morning that something wasn’t right. The Diviners’ cottage felt colder, quieter. And Four, vibrant, determined Four—

Was gone.





CHAPTER EIGHT


GONE




The batlike gargoyle stooped down low, transfixed by a gowan flower. He plucked it. Held it up to Aisling Cathedral’s looming edifice. “Which is more intricate?” he mused. “The designs of men, trying to reach gods, or that of gods, trying to reach men?”

My hammer collided with a chunk of granite. “What is either to the intricacies of women, who reach both?”

Clunk, my hammer fell again. In my periphery, Divining robes danced on the clothesline. I’d walked the entire circle of the Aisling’s compound, keeping to the wall, making like I was looking for crumbled stones, but my eyes had been low, searching the grass for any hint of where Four might have walked. I’d trodden through grass and spiderwebs, past all of the tor’s stone structures—even the cottage with no windows—wind shrieking around me.

I’d found nothing, ending right where I’d begun at the clothesline.