The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(27)

“She wouldn’t run off,” I said for the hundredth time. “Not without saying something.”

“Perhaps she did,” the gargoyle pondered. “‘Something’ is a fairly common word, after all.”

I was going to damage my vision, rolling my eyes this often. He’d been with me all morning, the gargoyle. The abbess meant it as a security measure, assigning a gargoyle to shadow each Diviner after Four had gone missing. She’d even sent the feline gargoyle away from the cathedral in search of Four. Beyond that, the abbess was strangely inactive. Divining continued as usual.

And that did not sit well with me.

My hammer fell again, and the stone cracked. “Would you tell me if you knew where she’d gone? Four?”

“How would I know? And why would I tell?” The gargoyle wrinkled his nose. Opened his stone mouth and threw the gowan flower into it. “What are we speaking of, again?”

My hammer grazed my thumb. “You’re no help.”

That, or the gowan flower’s taste, put him in a sour mood he carried with him through the day. I worked the wall, dreamed in Aisling, and was liberated from the gargoyle’s stone gaze only when he deposited me at the Diviner cottage at sundown.

I rushed up the stairs and found the other Diviners gathered in our bedroom.

Fighting.

“She’s followed the knights, that little minx,” Two said, hands on her hips. “She might have at least finished her service and not left her turns in the spring to us. But that’s Four, isn’t it?”

“She wouldn’t have left without telling us,” Five shouted. “She wouldn’t do that.”

“She might, if she thought one of us might squeal to the abbess about it,” One countered, jutting her chin out at Two.

Two’s lips went thin. “That’s not fair. Four’s like a sister.”

“She is a sister,” Three said, her even voice uncharacteristically choppy. “And it wouldn’t matter if we told the abbess—she clearly does not care. One measly gargoyle as a search party? We should go out and look for her ourselves. She can’t have gotten far.”

I thought Two or Five would object. But the Diviners stood silent and solemn, unspoken resolve hovering around us.

“Tomorrow night,” I said. “If she’s not back by tomorrow night, we’ll slip out—search the holloway roads and Coulson Faire, then be back by morning.”

“We might even go to Castle Luricht and ask for help,” Three offered.

“Then it’s settled.” One put her hands out, and we Diviners took them, forming a circle that felt too small without Four. “Tomorrow. We’ll leave at dark.”

We didn’t reach Coulson Faire or Castle Luricht. After a day of dreaming for the merchants and lords and layfolk who came to Aisling, we Diviners, wrung out but resolute, ate our dinner in the commons. Made like we were going to bed when the sun set in the sky. Waited in our cottage for the fall of darkness. Stole to our door.

And found it locked.

The next morning, the air was colder still. I sat up and combed the room. Held in a scream.

Two was gone.





I was dreaming.

A farmer had paid the abbess twenty-four silver coins to have her future Divined. I hardly saw her face. When I put on my robe, stepped into the spring, tasted blood, and drowned, I fell through my dream. Read the signs from the coin, the inkwell, the oar, the chime, the loom stone.

But all I thought of were Four and Two and my own terrible dream of the moth.

Of Diviners, screaming.

Hours later, I knocked on the abbess’s cottage door. There was no answer.

I searched the tor for her. I searched and searched, until my quest brought me back to Aisling Cathedral.

She was upon the chancel—a pale smear in darkness. Hunched over on her hands and knees, the abbess leaned over the spring, the smell I knew so well all around. Sweet, fetid rot.

I heard the sound of lapping water. “Abbess?”

She stilled, then slowly rose. Turned.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, abbess. But there is a matter I’d like to discuss.”

“You never disturb me, Six.” She stepped off the chancel onto the nave, coming toward me with one of her silent, open-armed beckons. She ushered me out of the cathedral. “Come.”

We walked to her cottage in silence. Inside, the small parlor smelled of roses, incense burning near the open window, its long trail of smoke the only adornment in the small room save two wooden chairs near the fire.

I had been in this room only once before. I’d been a girl, and the abbess had handed me a hammer and a chisel with all the tenderness of a mother giving her child a gift. “I always bestow these upon my best Diviner,” she’d said, pressing a hand to my cheek. “See what you make of them—or what they make of you.”

The abbess’s voice was just as warm now as it had been then. “Sit with me, Six.”

Our chairs groaned as we sat. The abbess took my hand, her silken glove so much finer than my toughened palm. I loved the way it felt. “You are here about the runaways.”

“That’s just it, abbess. I don’t believe they ran away.”

The light from the fire cast long shadows over her. She shifted the neckline of her white dress, as if moving a necklace. “What, then? Taken?”