The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(31)

One tapped the iron bars. “Clearly the abbess doesn’t want us sharing the tale of vanishing Diviners with the tor’s visitors.”

“Why hasn’t she come to speak to us?” I said. “How could she let this happen?” The abbess had told me fear was not an outward-pointing compass. And maybe that was true. My own fear was deep within me, piled so high it had begun to rot, emanating its own putrid heat. My knuckles went white over the bars. “How could she treat us this way?”

One had no answer. She turned away from the window and climbed the stairs. I followed and sat down next to her upon a mattress, trying not to look at the empty beds around us.

“I’ve been praying.” One looked so, so tired. “You’d think, after all we’ve done in their name, that the Omens would help us in some way.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but One did not wait for my answer. She was on her feet again, moving slowly to the cracked looking glass. She stared at her reflection. Then, with a ghostly hand, reached behind her head into her cropped, tangled hair.

And began to untie her shroud.

My body seized. “What are you doing?”

“I’ve waited forever to take this thing off.” Her voice was harder than before, as if she was putting the last of her vigor into it. “I’m starting to think if I wait for permission, it will never happen.”

Her courage was a gale—a bold wind. And while it stirred me, it could not dismantle ten years of doing as I was told. I’d broken more rules in the last week than I had in a decade, but this was not one I could bear. I kept my hands in tight fists at my side and did not touch my shroud. When One’s fell, silent as it hit the floor, I turned my gaze to the wall.

Her gasp filled the room. Soft, quiet horror. “What’s happened to us?”

My voice shook. “What? What do you see?”

One did not answer. When she returned to the mattress, she was wearing her shroud once more. She didn’t say what she’d seen in the looking glass, and I was too afraid to ask again.

The day slipped into night, and for every hour we tried to stay awake, One’s shoulders sank farther. “I can’t remember my childhood.” She rested her head on my shoulder. “Everything before Aisling is so… dark.”

She sank deeper into the mattress. “Don’t forget me if I disappear, Six.”

“If you disappear,” I said fiercely, “I will come find you. And then we will find the others together, no matter the signs, no matter the portents. I promise.”

One held out her arms and I nestled into them. We lay on our mattress, staring up at the ceiling. “Talk to me.” One’s breath grew heavy. “Tell me a story.”

“We’ll see all the hamlets. Study their customs, their crafts, even their sprites. I’ve heard rumors of sprites as big as trees—as big as mountains.” My eyelids grew burdensome. I forced them open and pinched myself until my arm was covered in bruises. “It’s a wild world out there, One. Strange and magnificent, and we’re going to see it. Everything will be so… entirely… beautiful…”

When I opened my eyes, it was morning.

I knew by the quiet, by the cold—by the balance of the mattress beneath me—that One was gone. The cottage was empty now, hollowed out. Outside, the wind wailed a sorrowful tune.

My tears did not come. They were trapped somewhere within me, festering beneath a heavy surface I could not shift.

When the serpentine gargoyle came to deliver more bread, I rushed to the cottage door. The gargoyle dropped the bread, caught me by the waist, and hauled me back up the stairs.

I kicked, bruising my shins on stone. The gargoyle threw me down onto my bedroom floor so hard I saw stars. Shadows danced in my periphery and the cottage grew hazy, then winked out entirely.

I woke to a twilight sky.

There was a small pool of blood, cold, beneath my head where my temple had met the floor. When I pulled myself to a rickety stance and saw myself in the cracked looking glass, my cheek—my silver hair—was painted red on the left side.

My visage fragmented in the broken mirror. For a moment it looked like there were still five other women in the room with me.

But it was merely a trick of the glass.

I held my breath. Lifted my hand to my shroud, ready to do what One had done. To finally see myself.

And froze.

No. The truth of what One had seen beneath her shroud had not saved her—nothing had. I slammed my fist into the mirror instead, shattering the already fractured pieces. Glass rained upon the floor. I dropped onto my mattress. Buried my face in the pillow that still smelled of One.

Night came, the moon tossing silver light through my barred window. I watched it travel across the floor with heavy-lidded eyes, too tired to plan, too tired to cry, too tired even to sleep—

The moonlight in the window disappeared, swallowed by a shadow. A moving shadow.

I sat up slowly.

The shadow belonged to an object. I couldn’t make it out, only that it was small. A stone, perhaps. Then—gods, I was losing my mind—because the object began to fall, and a moment later, as if the iron bars blocking my window were nothing but a suggestion—

A man stepped into the room and caught it.

His back was to me. His shoulders stiffened when his boots crunched over shards of the broken mirror. He stood over the blood on the floor, hissed out an exhale.