The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(82)

I wore a long linen tunic and lay in a bed with a pillow and sheets far finer than the ones I’d been afforded at the Diviner’s cottage. I tried to move—to take in the anatomy of the room. But every muscle hurt, and half my bones were arrested in pain. There was a throbbing agony near my temple, and another along my left hip.

But nothing was so painful as my stiff, bandaged neck.

“Hello?” My voice grated up my throat. “Gargoyle?”

No answer.

I sat up. There was red on my linen tunic, too, below my pubis. I’d bled my moon’s blood. I’d been lying there some time, then.

The world was hazy, my mind undulating. I remembered darkness—hands tying fabric around my bleeding neck, then traveling through gales of wind, held in the gargoyle’s stone arms. I was adrift, my body washed and bandaged and put in new clothes. Then, fitful sleep.

It was all so murky. The last clear thing I recalled…

I sat up.

The Ardent Oarsman. His magic oar, calling up waves. Water, crashing into me. Teeth, biting. Blood, pain.

She came barely a week ago, naked and still. I took her into my castle. Placed her upon my throne…

My body seized.

Dead. Your Diviners are all dead.

I leaned over and coughed up bile. Then I was out of my bed, feet slapping against the cold floor.

No fire was lit, the room a dark blotch behind my new shroud. I reached for the iron handle of my door, turned it, and was confronted by a long, twisting corridor with a wine-red carpet that ran down its center like a tongue.

It looked like Aisling. Its ceilings were tall, vaulted, crafted with carefully cut stone. But the cathedral was unadorned but for its ancient pews, its stained-glass windows, and this—wherever this was—

Was opulent in its ornaments.

There were looking glasses taller than me and twice as wide. Tapestries, paintings—landscapes and portraits that, even in the hazy dimness, were vivacious in color. Shelves upon shelves held tomes and glass casings filled with petrified insects, animal pelts—live plants with serpentine stems and black petals I didn’t know the name of.

Artistry, craftmanship, everywhere.

A low creak sounded somewhere ahead, and I limped toward it. When I reached the end of the corridor, I was greeted by three doors.

I don’t know what made me knock on the third door, or why, when no one answered, I opened it.

Hinges groaning, I was confronted by a wide room, lit by moonlight and the dying embers in a hearth. I stepped inside, throwing shadows hither and yon. The room was as the corridor—cluttered with artifacts. I saw a table, strewn with stacks of paper, some aged, some new. “Hello?”

No one answered.

I came to the desk, looking for a seal—some indicator of where I might be. The Harried Scribe’s stone inkwell was there. My stomach twisted. So was the Ardent Oarsman’s oar. I ignored both, my fingers scraping over parchment, stirring dust. There were leaflets, letters, and—

My breath stilled.

Benji’s grandfather’s notebook.

A more obedient version of me would have left it alone. It wasn’t mine to look at. But that version of me belonged to Aisling Cathedral, and I had fled that place, intruding upon the strange, perilous land of Traum.

What was one more trespass?

I opened it, the smells of aged leather and parchment filling my nose. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Something to challenge the horrible things the Ardent Oarsman had spewed before his death. Proof of Diviners past. Reassurance, in all of King Castor’s scholarly learnings, that daughters of Aisling had never been treated as anything but holy.

I saw his art instead. Beautiful drawings, some in dark ink, others in faded color. He’d drawn sprites, a few I recognized, many I didn’t. Some looked like monsters—twisted bodies, hollowed-out eyes, jagged teeth and claws—while others were strange amalgamations of birds and reptiles and mammals.

He’d drawn gargoyles, too, the detail striking, particularly their wide stone eyes.

Beneath them, in slanted script, was writ: The gargoyle sprite has no discernable home, save the tor, for their bodies are composed of the same limestone as the spring in which the Diviners dream.

I shoved the page aside, accosted by maps—dozens of them, with scribbles in the margins. King Castor had charted all the hamlets, and I could make out the rows of merchant tents at Coulson Faire, the cobbled streets and reaching buildings of the Seacht—the jagged contours of the Fervent Peaks. There was faded yellow paint where he’d painted the birch trees of the Chiming Wood, and pink where he’d rendered the dawn, rising over the sea along the Cliffs of Bellidine. Then, near the end of the notebook—

A cathedral atop a hill. A long stone wall.

And six shrouded figures.

I leaned in—traced a finger over the ink. The art was faded, but I knew exactly who the six figures were. They weren’t Omens.

They were Diviners.

Above each of them, drawn in careful detail, was a moth.

King Castor’s slanted script returned. I have traveled Traum, this land we have settled into the Stonewater Kingdom; known her hamlets like the fingers of my hand. Yet I have never met a Diviner after her service at Aisling Cathedral has passed. There are no records of them in the Seacht libraries, no mention of their names or even their numbers. Indeed—how does the abbess choose them? Where do they go after ten years? I seek them, but they remain hidden. They are saints and martyrs, as venerated, as significant—as unknown—as the Omens themselves.