The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(88)

“The greater the spectacle, the greater the illusion.” Maude rapped a knuckle on my breastplate. “But sometimes, I think the spectacle means something. I felt like I was a hundred feet tall the first time I put on armor—like I could do anything. When I was older, I ordered Rory and Benji their first sets. Watched them grow into them. And that meant something, too.”

My voice was small. “I still can’t pay for it, Maude.”

“Oh, the pride on you.” Her green eyes shone. “Would you still wear it if I told you it was a gift?”

I looked down at myself. Maude had told me on the road to the Fervent Peaks that she didn’t know anything about being maternal. And it heartened me that someone as honorable and purposeful as Maude Bauer could still get some things wrong. She was the most nurturing woman I’d ever known. “Yes.”

“Good.” She disappeared back down the corridor. When she returned, she held a wooden palette with wet charcoal upon it. “Now let’s get ourselves painted.”

She smeared the charcoal around her eyes the way I’d seen her wear it a hundred times. Only this time she did not stop at her eyes—drawing dark hollows over her cheeks, a dark triangle over her nose—lines over her lips.

I watched, transfixed, like a painter’s understudy. “Why do folk of the Wood wear it? Charcoal, I mean.”

“Tradition—an old safety precaution. Because of the birke.”

“What’s the birke?”

“A name we have here. Birke—birch tree.”

I could tell she wasn’t keen to talk about it. “And…?”

Maude sighed, making a face at her own reflection. “They’re called birke because they look like the trees—only they aren’t. They’re sprites who prowl the Wood. Once, they fed on idleweed, but folk here keep it stored up for ceremonial or medicinal practices. Now, the birke feed on flesh. And what flesh they like best—” She tapped her brow. “Eyes. That’s why we paint charcoal on our faces. The illusion of hollowed skulls. I know. It’s garish—painting your eyes so they don’t get eaten. But name me a tradition that isn’t garish.”

I thought of the trees I’d seen my first night in the Chiming Wood, and was suddenly cold all over. “When I dreamed of the Faithful Forester’s stone chime, it was always in a circle of reaching birch trees, only those trees moved. And their knots…” I shuddered. “Their knots were made of terrible blinking eyes. Are those…”

“Indeed. Birke.”

An hour later, when the sun had bid the clouds goodbye and surrendered to the moon, the knights arrived at Petula Hall.

They waited outside, just as they’d waited outside of the Diviner cottage to escort us to Coulson Faire. Only now they weren’t wearing full armor, just breastplates and the garb of the Wood. Leathers, cloaks.

Their faces were painted like skulls.

We were just finishing up painting the gargoyle’s face. Maude had said it wasn’t necessary—that birke had no interest in eyes made of stone—but the gargoyle had been offended to be so excluded, and so we painted him.

When we were done, Maude applied a final dab of charcoal to my mouth and turned me toward the hallway looking glass.

The effect of the charcoal was not so startling with my eyes hidden behind my shroud. But my brow, my cheeks, my jaw bore all the contours of a head without flesh. A skull, emptied out by shadow.

“I look like I’m dead,” I murmured. And because everything did, that made me think of the Diviners.

Maude smiled at my reflection. “You’re perfect.”

We stepped outside into the courtyard. Benji was at the front of the line, talking to Hamelin and two other knights I recognized. Dedrick Lange, who hailed from the Seacht, and Tory Bassett from the Cliffs of Bellidine.

Rory stood slightly apart from the others, arms crossed over his chest, taking in the sight of me in my new breastplate. I thought, having so often seen him with charcoal around his eyes, that the effect of the paint would not be so striking.

I was wrong. Rory, black hair awry, rings in his ear, face painted like a skull—he looked as far from a knight as I dreamed a man could. He, like me, looked like death itself.

“Well, Six.” Benji’s arm was there. “You’re about to see me prostrate before man and god alike. Again.”

I sighed. Took his arm. “If I could draw the short straw and do it in your place, I probably would.”





The smell hit me before we reached the sacred glen. Sharp. Pungent.

Idleweed.

It wafted through the trees—a mist that smelled so severe it put tears in my eyes and made the gargoyle cough.

At the mouth of the glen, five hooded figures waited. Their cloaks were yellow, like birch leaves, their faces painted in the same skeletal design as the rest of ours. Like the esteemed families who waited at the Fervent Peaks, the nobles of the Chiming Wood fixed their gazes upon Benji.

“I am Helena Eichel,” one of the hooded figures said, nodding at Maude. “My family, like the Bauers, have lived in the Chiming Wood for hundreds of years.” She was old—stooped, with a deep, croaking voice. “You, new king, are another Benedict Castor.” She paused a long while. Her painted eyes were hidden beneath the hood of her cloak. Still, I knew the moment they turned to me. “But I can see you are nothing like your unbelieving grandfather. It is an honor beyond all reckoning that you have brought a daughter of Aisling to our Wood.”