The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(81)

Disappeared into the storm.

The ruination upon the Ardent Oarsman’s brow froze. Stone eyes wide, mouth a jagged, bloody hole, he gazed at my unshrouded eyes so intently it seemed to cast him into a dream. A fleeting, utter stillness.

It was enough.

I sprang forward. I had no oar, no inkwell, no coin, but I was across the platform in a flash. The Oarsman let out a rasping shriek—swung his oar. I ducked. Kept going. My vision was blurry, blotted out by rain and blood and the bruises that were already swelling around my eyes, but I kept going.

When we collided, the Ardent Oarsman and I, the clamor was of two undeterred forces—a seismic crash. He fell back onto his platform, and I landed on top of him. He prodded me with the blunt end of his oar, but I was already pressing my chisel over his chest.

He thrashed, frothing as he hit me again and again. But I raised my hammer. Harnessed all the strength I possessed—

And struck it directly into the Omen’s heart.

His cry filled the air, a violent calamity that echoed through the Peaks. The Oarsman looked down at his body—at my chisel, protruding from his chest. Blood oozed, seeping from his clothes onto wood, dripping through the platform’s slats into crystalline water.

I lay over his body. “I have defeated you at your craft, Ardent Oarsman. Matched your strength and overcome it.” Blood, like the rain, streamed down my face. “Where is the Diviner that was brought to you?”

His grip on his oar tightened, but he did not lift it. “Your eyes…” He peered down at himself. At all his blood, staining the basin’s water. “I did not know this could happen. I did not think I would ever die…”

Rage, revulsion, and the unspooling terror that he hadn’t been lying—that he’d sunk his teeth into past Diviners—it did something wretched to me. “Tell me the truth.” My gauntlets crashed into the Omen’s jagged body, hitting, breaking, again and again until my hands were screaming. “Where is the Diviner?”

“I already told you. She came barely a week ago, naked and still. I took her into my castle. Placed her upon my throne…” The Omen’s breaths grew shallow. “And drank her.”

When he looked at me one last time, his stone eyes held nothing. “Dead. Your Diviners are all dead.” A terrible gasp fled his mouth. “And so are you.”

He slammed his oar into the platform.

There was a terrible creak, wood splintering into a thousand pieces beneath me. I lost my balance, held to my hammer and chisel. Rolled, then fell.

Into water.





The Chiming Wood



Chime.

Harken to the chime in the Wood. There, the wind tells us how to feel what we cannot see. Only the wind can say what is to come.





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


SYBIL DELLING




Diviners moved around me, twirling under a watchful moon. They danced upon the world’s grassy tongue, spinning until they were airborne. Pale wings blossomed from their gossamer gowns like petals.

They flew away. I tried to follow, but my feet were pulling me down. The Diviners giggled like sprites in a glen, floating farther away until they were white specks, like stars, upon a violet-blue sky.

I walked alone to Aisling Cathedral. Inside, the abbess waited, a shroud in her hands.

“Well?” she said. “How do you feel?”

“I don’t know.” I looked down at myself. I was naked. “Strange.”

“You are. Sybil Delling is dead. What remains is strange. Special.” The abbess beckoned me forward. She tied the shroud around my eyes, then took my shoulders. Hugged me. “And new.”

She shoved me into the spring.

Water drew over me like the lid of a coffin. The abbess dipped her hand into the spring, grasped my throat and pressed. I cried out, bubbles filling the water. I clawed, thrashed—and was kept down. Pressed and pressed and pressed.

“Benji! Bring her here!”

I heard voices. Not low and steady like the abbess’s, but loud. Rough. Desperate. “Get her out of the fucking armor.”

“It’s bent—I can’t—”

“Pith, she’s blue.”

Someone was crying. Long, aching sobs. “Bartholomew?”

“Give me your axe, Maude.”

“The sprites are coming—”

“Give it to me!”

Pain, greater than I’d ever known, touched my face, my hands, my ribs. I felt something shift—and then an oppressive weight found my chest.

“Come on,” a man’s voice shouted. My mouth was pulled open by an unseen force, hot, torrid breaths filling me. “Breathe, Diviner.”

There were more sobs. “Bartholomew always wakes. Why doesn’t she wake?”

A woman’s voice sounded. “Rory.”

“No.” There was more pressure—a pounding sensation over my chest so violent the world quaked. “Wake up, sweetheart. Wake. Up.”

And the pain, the pain I knew so well from drowning, from dreaming—

Was now the pain of awakening.





I opened my eyes under a new shroud.

Gossamer, fastened too loosely, lay over my eyes. When I peered through it, it was into a darkened room with high ceilings and a tall lancet window that held the night sky.