The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(92)

“Why not?”

“They’re starving. All the sprites are. The knighthood makes sure of it. Even Maude.” Turmoil lined his brow. “Hunger is a slow, maddening torture. If the sprites are monsters, it’s because we’ve made them so.”

Behind us, the battle raged on. Birke swung at the knights, opened their mouths and snapped at them, but the knights were far quicker with their blades. They cut the sprites down, and the birke shrieked, a wretched sound that put a thousand prickles on my neck. Several fell—the rest retreated.

The knights kept attacking.

Meanwhile, the Faithful Forester’s chime was still stuck high upon the behemoth birke’s branches. It turned, drawn by the clash of swords, and lumbered toward the knights.

The gargoyle sighed. “Very well. If you find the violence ignoble”—his voice was dry, but his finger trilled excitedly—“go ahead. Ask me to be your pigeon.”

Rory and I turned. “You want to fly?”

“By the seat of my skirts.” He grasped my waist, smiled, then on mighty feet, the gargoyle sprang from the ground. His wings spread, beat the air, stirring smoke. I held to his neck, and he to my waist, and then we were soaring.

“‘Seat of my pants,’” I called over the wind.

He flew us to the top of the birke, where the air was not so smoky. I took in gulping breaths—held my arm out. For each pass around the great beast, I tried to snag the Faithful Forester’s chime off the fleshy branch it was lodged against. The birke aimed a few idle swats at us, but its attention was spent on the knights, leaving the gargoyle and I to keep circling.

But no matter how I reached, I couldn’t grasp the chime.

On the next pass, I let go of the gargoyle’s neck. “Toss me.”

Oh, he was delighted, smiling so wide his fangs peeked over his lips. “Toss you?”

“I can’t reach the chime. You’re going to have to—”

I was already airborne. I collided with the birke a few hands below the chime, grasping the creature’s mottled flesh, the effect so grotesque my stomach rolled.

The gargoyle clapped, and Rory swore from below. When my stomach was not in my throat, I clung tighter to the birke, swung my legs around it, and began to climb.

Flesh and stone were nothing alike. Still I managed, pretending I was back at Aisling, climbing its wall. I could hear the wet sounds of the creature’s many moving eyes. Feel the vile prickle of skin beneath my hands.

Below, the crash of swords and the horrible sounds of sloughing flesh echoed, but I did not look down. All I held in my gaze was stone, the Faithful Forester’s chime closer, closer. But just as my finger closed around it, a low, horrible groan sounded. The birke trembled.

Rory began to shout.

When I looked down, a spring of blood was flowing from the birke. A fatal wound. The knighthood stepped back, but Maude remained, striking again and again with her axe, like she had something to prove, someone to save.

The birke swayed. Rory kept shouting for her to stop. To retreat. “Maude!”

She didn’t heed him. Maude kept on swinging, and the birke kept on taking her blows and I—I lost my grip.

My fingers wrapped around the Faithful Forester’s chime—and I fell, plummeting though air and smoke. Stone arms caught me, the gargoyle chuckling with glee. “All in a squire’s duties.” Then we were soaring, wind scraping against my cheeks as we shot out of the trees and into the night.

When I looked back at the sacred glen, the idleweed was burning low, illuminating the conquered sprites, who lay like fallen timber upon the earth. The last of them, the great behemoth birke, fell—the monster slain. But if the creature was a monster, it was because it was made that way. And maybe the birke knew that. Maybe knights and boy-kings and Diviners weren’t the only creatures in the Traum who wanted to kill their tyrants, because when the great birke succumbed to the axe, dropping like a felled tree in the forest—

It took Maude with it.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR


TAKE OFF MY ARMOR




We put the Faithful Forester’s chime in Benji’s room with the other stone objects and shuttered Petula Hall. Not even the knighthood, dispatched to the village two miles away, was allowed in. And not just because their fellow knight Maude Bauer was bruised and broken and unconscious.

It was to spare them the sight of their king.

Benji was… I didn’t know what to call it. His grief that Maude, whom I expected he held as both mother and sister, was so injured, put a misery in him no ale or wine or idleweed could ease.

“No,” he said, spilling his wine when Rory tried to drag him from her bedside for a proper sleep. “I want to stay.”

It was two days after the ceremony in the sacred glen. Maude lay on a finely woven quilt atop her bed, covered in bandages. The birke had fallen on her, shattering the bones on the left side of her abdomen and putting a swollen knot along her temple. Her ribs, her shoulder, her arm and fingers—all broken. The village physician came and went, setting her bones, but she’d said it was the bump to Maude’s head that concerned her most. That Maude might never wake.

That did not stop us from sitting at her bedside, waiting for her to do so.

“Come on, Castor.” Rory reached for Benji’s arm. “I’ll take you to your room. Sleep off some of that wine—”