The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(84)

I slipped into their gaping shadows.

From between thorns, I watched the cart roll past. Then—

“Whoa.”

The horse whickered a complaint, and the cart groaned to a halt.

“Go ahead, Victor.” Rory’s boots hit the ground. “I’ll be there shortly.”

The cart resumed its journey, but those boots stayed firmly in my line of sight, rocking back and forth onto their heels. “Whoever you are who’s bled onto the road,” Rory called, “I hope you’re enjoying your night.”

When I stepped from my hiding place, Rory’s eyes widened, roaming over my clothes—and the blood upon them. “What the fuck, Diviner.”

I touched my new shroud. “Did you put this over my eyes?”

He blinked confoundedly, like he’d been thrown into a horse race with no horse. “Did I—yes, I put that there. I’d thought you’d—” He shook himself. “The Wood is dangerous after dark. What the hell are you doing, bleeding out here in the middle of the night?” He hissed out a sigh. “And would you look at that. You’re not wearing shoes.”

“I’ve spoken to Benji. He told me what his grandfather knew. That there are no records of Diviners after they leave the tor. That’s why”—I spoke too fast, rushing through the atrociousness of it all—“the Ardent Oarsman bit me, because he’s put his teeth in Diviners before. Lapped up their blood. They’re—” I forced myself to say it. “They’re dead.”

Warmth fled his face, silence taking us in its fist. Rory did nothing to dispel it, then—“The Artful Brigand always wanted the spring water. But the rest—” He was too anxious, too furious to even fidget, standing perfectly still. “I didn’t know.”

I was struggling to breathe. Underwater. Drowning all over again. “The abbess never told us how the spring works. How the dreams come. But it’s fearsome magic. When I Divined for you, when the gargoyle drowned me, I didn’t dream of the five Omens… I dreamed of the sixth. The moth. The Diviners vanished after that.” I put my hand to my chest. “Maybe I’ve known this entire time that something horrible had happened. That I’d never see them again.”

Rory shook his head. “If the spring upon the tor truly grants its dreamers signs, then it is cruel magic. Why show you something and give you no power to change it? There was nothing you could have done, Diviner.” Rory cusped the nape of his neck. “But you can do something now. Put the other Omens down. Destroy Aisling.” When I looked up, I saw fear in his eyes. “Just don’t give up.”

“I can’t keep going.”

“Yes, you can.”

I felt the truth in all my bruised and broken skin. “I always had strength—and ever just enough. Being a Diviner, being one of six… I loved it and hated it and bore both so well. And now that it’s all gone…” A great agony pressed behind my eyes. “Everything is too heavy.”

My vision blurred. Sorrow, I realized. That was the agony behind my eyes. Sorrow, who came like a shepherdess, leading a flock of tears. “I wish I was still a girl, made special for dreaming upon the tor.”

For the first time since before I could remember, I cried.

It hurt more than drowning.

Rory’s hand moved from my neck and hovered just at my face, not touching the tears that fell from beneath my shroud but guarding them against the breeze, as if they deserved their own tender pilgrimage down my cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for the Diviners. I’m sorry the people who best understood what you’ve endured were taken from you, and that so much of living without them feels like dying. But if you hadn’t left that tor—”

He said it with a deep familiarity. Like he’d thought to say it a million times, and the thinking of it had worn down all the sharp edges of saying it aloud. “I’d have come for you. I’d have killed or stolen or done any ignoble thing to see you free of that place. You are more special than you realize. I don’t even know your name”—he drew in a breath—“and I would do anything for you.”

I cried in front of him and hated myself for it. But the tears were hurried, as though they’d waited lifetimes to come. I cried and cried and then… I don’t know why I did what I did next. Maybe because my darling One—Two and Three and Four and Five—were gone, and I had never learned their names. Maybe because the Divination ceremony at Aisling meant something to me yet, or maybe I was merely forgetting my faith in dreams, in the Omens, in faith itself. And maybe, in all the forgetting…

I wanted to remember who had come before.

I put my thumb in my mouth and bit down.

A line drew between Rory’s brows. Blood, hot and viscous, pooled around my canine teeth. I let out a pained exhale. Held my hand out to him.

He knew. He always seemed to open a door to himself the moment I needed somewhere to go. Rory brought my bloodied thumb to his lips and said what I’d said to him—to thousands of others—from Aisling’s spring. “What name, with blood, would you give me?”

I put my thumb to his lips. “My name is Sybil Delling.”

His face broke open, as if I’d taken my chisel to his derision and shattered it. Rory ran the grooves of my thumb over his crooked bottom teeth, over his tongue, taking my blood into his mouth like it was something holy.