The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(83)

I turned to the last page of the notebook, where a single line was written.

But ever, I wonder. What horrible thing do they hide behind their shrouds?

“Six?”

I whirled.

Benji stood behind me, holding a cup of wine and a candle.

My voice was an ugly rasp. “Where am I?”

“The Chiming Wood. This is Petula Hall—Maude’s house.” His eyes were wide. “We arrived yesterday. You’ve been unconscious. Are you—do you feel any better?”

His eyes fell to his desk. To the notebook, sprawled open upon it.

I stabbed my finger over the final page. “What is this?”

He didn’t seem to understand. “My grandfather’s notebook.”

“He’s written about Diviners.” The bite marks in my neck seared with every word. “You told me he hadn’t.”

The king fiddled with his wineglass. “Yes, well, what he wrote wasn’t exactly relevant to taking up the—”

I came before him like a dark shadow. “This was never about taking up the mantle for me, boy-king. It was about finding my friends.”

He nodded so quickly he looked like he was shaking. “I thought you might not come with us if you knew what my grandfather had written—that no Diviner had ever been heard from after her service at Aisling. I thought—” He looked to his wine for courage, upending it into his mouth. “I thought it would pain you.”

I put a hand to my bandaged neck. “So the king decides when I should bear pain and when I shouldn’t, so long as it serves him best?” I said it with the tastelessness it was due. “Not so different from the abbess, are you? From an Omen.”

Benji flinched. “It sounds horrible when you put it like that.”

“True things often do.”

Shoulders slumping, mouth struck down, the king looked helpless. “I’m sorry, Six. It is very difficult for me, with all of Traum’s opposing stories, to know what to say, or what is right. I usually ask Maude or Rory to tell me what to do, because most of the time I simply don’t know. I should have just been honest.” His chin began to tremble. “There is a very good chance we will not find your Diviners.”

Dead. Your Diviners are all dead.

“Because of Aisling’s spring water. Because the Omens crave it, and we have spent our service drowning in it. So when our ten years are up, the abbess—” But I couldn’t say the rest. “Where is my gargoyle?”

“He’s with Maude in the village. Pith, I’m sorry, Six. It’s—oh. You are…” Benji’s gaze lowered to my tunic. “You’re bleeding.”

“I’m fine.”

“We thought you were dead, you know. We got the oar off the platform before it sank. Kicked the Ardent Oarsman’s corpse for good measure. We pulled you out of the water and Rory beat your chest, but we thought—” Benji’s voice was small. Frayed. “You should rest. I’ll send for some fresh clothes.”

He left me the way he’d found me. Alone with the unbearable truth.

I didn’t go back to my room. I didn’t know where I was going—but I went.

Bare feet slapping against stone, I took to the stairs. When I reached the entry, the punctures in my neck swelled as I hauled open the great wood door.

The stormy skies I’d known in the Fervent Peaks were gone. The Chiming Wood’s night was still, with blue heavens and a glowing moon that hung over a dense forest of birch trees.

I limped away from Petula Hall down the drive until I stood at the edge of a vast wall of trees. Slipped into the arms of the Wood.

And screamed.





My feet couldn’t take me where I needed to go, because my feet were bleeding. Just as well. I had nowhere to go. I tripped over rocks, roots, brambles.

Fell.

I lay utterly still upon dirt, bleeding moon’s blood, praying for a way to sink my teeth into earth and stone and flesh and rip Traum open until the entire world was a gaping wound. To wipe Aisling Cathedral from existence. Obliterate the Omens from lore, from memory, from the annals of time.

I lay there and lay there, and my prayers weren’t answered. Nothing answered, save the wind.

It wasn’t a mournful note like it was upon the tor. The wind in the Wood was a chime, dissonant, discombobulating, flinging itself near and far. It reverberated through the trees, the leaves, the thorny vines that lay over the road.

The Wood suddenly felt tighter, the air closer, as if the spaces between the birch trees had narrowed. I looked up. Studied them. Their pale bark wasn’t translucent or papery, but mottled. Heavy. Like old flesh. And the knots in the trunks—gashes of darkness in all that pale, sloughing bark—

The knots were eyes. Hundreds of black, lidless eyes, watching me.

I jerked back, my hands, my feet scraping over thorns, scoring the road red.

There was a noise. The groan of wooden wheels.

Yellow light split the darkness. I blinked against it, and saw that there was a cart on the road, drawn by a gray horse, coming toward me. Driving the cart was a man with a gray beard, stooped over the reins. Next to him, lantern light catching along the angles of his face, his black hair, the rings in his ear—

Rory.

When I looked back to the birch trees, they were eyeless once more. Just wood and bark and branches and leaves.