Текст книги "The Knight and the Moth"

Автор книги: Rachel Gillig

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE THE CHIME

The ring of the chime was beautiful. Steady, melodic.

But it split into me like a chisel. Suddenly I was fissuring, my mind cracking open. The glen of tightly woven birch trees became a blurred visage, and my thoughts became unmoored. I was everywhere and everything at once. Foundling, Diviner. Sybil, Six. I danced around a pyre in Coulson Faire, climbed a mountainous path in Fervent Peaks, rushed through bustling streets of the Seacht.

Then—familiar noises, echoing in the walls of my mind. Footsteps on the stairs in the Diviner’s cottage. A young Three and Five, laughing. A comb, tugging through Four’s dark hair. One, breathing long and low in her sleep. The batlike gargoyle, humming to me as I worked the wall.

The chime stopped ringing, and I was jolted back to the sacred glen, my mind righting. But then—gods, it rang again. Only this time the notes were not melodic. They were ugly, discordant—a horrible knell. Once again, my mind felt struck open, only now it hurt, disorienting agony radiating from my temples.

I heard the slosh of spring water. The abbess’s voice. “Strange, special… and new.”

When I looked down at my body, my shiny new armor was covered in pale, fluttering moths.

The chime stopped, and everything went quiet. My armor held no moths, just the reflection of licking flames. When I looked around for the gargoyle or Rory or Maude, the knighthood was not standing in a line as they had been. They were scattered among the trees, swaying on their feet. Some had their hands to their ears, others had their eyes shut—but all looked to be in a stupor.

It was the chime. The Faithful Forester’s chime.

The magical stone objects. Their abilities. Transportive, and destructive. The coin, the inkwell, the oar—those were all physical. But this, the chime, the sound of it, wasn’t a flickering of my corporeal self. It was as if my thoughts had been transported. When the chime had rung harmoniously, my thoughts had gone with it, taking me to the joyous corners of my mind. But when it had rung discordantly—

There was pain. Fear.

Strange, special… and new.

I coughed, smoke stinging my eyes.

Meanwhile, upon the dais, the ceremony continued. Helena Eichel, bleary-eyed, had set down the stone chime, and was holding a smoldering branch of idleweed out like a torch. All the nobles were. They turned in predatory circles around Benji, wielding the branches, stirring the air, smoke ghosting behind them.

The glen became blanketed by smoke. It put a lid over me, sedating my senses, burned my eyes. I faltered back a step.

My spine collided with armor.

“Have you smoked yellow idleweed before?” a voice said in my ear.

It took me a moment to recognize Hamelin with his face painted. “No.”

A noble with thin lips and gnarled knuckles bent low over Benji. His spine went rigid, but he did not resist. The noble inhaled idleweed smoke into her nose from her burning branch, seized Benji’s face—

And clamped her mouth over his.

I let out a curt breath. When the noble let Benji go, imbuing him with smoke, the clarity in the king’s blue eyes was already fading.

“They only ever burn it like this when a new king comes for a ceremony,” Hamelin murmured. “I’ve heard breathing it is like a fever dream. Your mind is thrown asunder. Prepare yourself for a treat.”

It’s not just the idleweed, I thought. It’s the chime.

All five nobles bent over Benji, filling him with smoke from their mouths. When they’d finished, the king was still on his knees, but he seemed unaware of it. He was swaying, as if he weighed too little—yet far too much. His eyes rolled back, and he began to hum in wretched harmony with the chimes.

The nobles watched him, satisfaction stealing over their painted mouths. They turned.

And set their smoldering branches loose on the knighthood.

The idleweed was passed from knight to knight, the process repeated. Not all partook. Those who did breathed in the smoke. Pulled in a second breath, then pressed his or her mouth over another’s—filling them with smoke like a tongue fills a mouth in an impassioned kiss.

I thought of Four, blowing idleweed into our mouths the night we visited Coulson Faire. How she’d told us of what life would be like away from the tor, transporting us into the future. How, in a soft cloud of smoke, I’d promised her a world where we would always be together.

How, without meaning to, I’d lied.

Next to me, Hamelin held a branch of idleweed. Breathed it into his nostrils, then turned to me. “Take a deep breath. You’ll like it.”

I shook my head.

Hamelin’s hand fell upon my shoulder. “Come, Diviner. Be mythical, be fearsome,” he said, echoing the words he’d said to me weeks ago, between kisses. He sucked more smoke into his nostrils, leaned his face toward mine. Whispered, “He’s a dark horse, keeping you close.”

He tried to blow the smoke into my mouth, his lips practically on mine.

I shoved him back. Hard.

He stumbled, as if the idleweed—and being twice denied by a Diviner—had made him unsteady. Hamelin looked up with lifeless eyes. Took a step toward me again.

And was brought to a wrenching halt.

Rory had his fellow knight by the face. He gripped Hamelin’s cheeks—pressed brutally. Hamelin coughed out smoke—and Rory sneered at him, slapping the idleweed branch from his hand. “Don’t fucking touch her again.”

Hamelin’s gaze darted from Rory to me, then to Benji in the distance, as if beseeching the king to put a leash on his knight. But Benji was on his knees upon the dais, swaying with shut eyes, leaving Hamelin no option but to lower his own.

When Rory let go of him, he blurred away, disappearing into the glen—into smoke.

I reached for Rory. “It’s the Faithful Forester’s chime,” I said. “When it rang, did your mind—did you—”

Rory caught my arm and pulled me against him. “Yes.” He winced against the smoke. “The idleweed isn’t helping. Or maybe it is. No one suspects a magic chime is twisting their thoughts when there’s this much smoke in the air.”

He reached to his belt. Withdrew a small knife, then cut the hem of his tunic into two strips. He held one to his face, covering his nose and mouth, then handed me the other. “This will help with the idleweed. That chime, however—”

Maude was suddenly there, and so was the gargoyle, their voices reverberating around me. She nodded at the dais. “We need to snag that chime from Helena Eichel while the others are too distracted by the smoke to—”

The chime rang again, harmonious.

The world blurred.

My thoughts were as helpless as gowan flower against a gale. I was suddenly a girl, back in Aisling Cathedral, spring water on my lips. The abbess was there, holding me, stroking hair from my eyes and tying a shroud around them. “There, there,” she murmured. “Everything will be better for you now, little foundling. To sleep is to finally awaken. After all—swords and armor are nothing to stone.”

The chime stopped, and my vision righted.

Helena Eichel stood next to Benji upon the dais, running her fingers over the Faithful Forester’s chime, eyes rolling back in her head. “It came from this glen, this chime,” she called into the haze. “A gift from the Omens, just like the gold we’ve found over the years. Yes, yes, a gift from the Forester, for whenever I strike the chime, I feel transported through time and space. I feel bliss and agony, just as the faithful must.”

The other nobles in yellow cloaks stepped off the dais, moving slow and serpentine between birch trees. “Do you feel it?” they called. “Do you feel the divine?”

All around, knights swayed, moving through tightly positioned trees. Whether they believed their thoughts had fallen prey to idleweed or something more sacred, it frightened me to see the kingdom’s most commanding soldiers, like its king, so easily manipulated.

Perhaps it was why the Omens were so sure of their own transcendence. The Faithful Forester’s chime—the stone objects, their magic, their power—was astounding.

Maude shook herself, her eyes red but pointed firmly on the dais. “I’ll distract Helena Eichel.” She caught Rory’s arm. “You, my thief, will snag that chime. Six, you and the gargoyle make sure Benji is all right.”

I lowered my hand, and the gargoyle took it, and we all headed for the dais. But just as we grew close, Helena Eichel lifted the Faithful Forester’s chime once more.

And struck it.

My vision spun. The chimes. The chimes. So dissonant they sounded like the notes within notes, rasping against one another. Against the walls of my head, where, in darkness, the abbess’s voice waited. “All your love and resentment and martyrdom were for nothing.”

I slapped my hands against my ears.

“My mind is playing tricks on me,” said the gargoyle at my side. “What is magic, what is memory, and why are both so haunting?”

“It’s the chime.” My breathing was too fast. I pressed the cloth Rory had given me harder against my mouth. “It’s bringing me back to Aisling.”

“Me as well. I see craftsmen upon the tor, each holding a distinct stone object. Coin. Inkwell. Oar. Chime. Loom stone. I see Aisling, and I see dark, fetid water. I see blood.”

The gargoyle began to tremble. “I see young girls wearing shrouds, and I watch them age. The ones that do not vanish fracture and bend and cry out. But, like mine, their voices catch in the wind, distorting, then disappearing, over the landscape.”

I looked down at him. “That sounds like my dream, gargoyle. The one I had of the moth.”

His stone eyes held me. “I imagine it does.”

A sound perforated the wood. This time, it wasn’t a chime.

It was a scream.

I stumbled. “Did you hear that?”

There. Coming from behind us, somewhere in the dark haze of the glen. More screams—followed by shouts. I put a bracing hand out to the nearest birch tree.

And felt it prickle.

I turned. The tree’s bark was laden with gooseflesh. Only it wasn’t bark. It was skin. And the knots in its trunk—gashes in all that pale, sloughing flesh—

Were eyes.

I dropped the cloth I was holding and jerked back, yanking the gargoyle with me.

“Bartholomew, what are you—”

“Shhh!”

The tree, no—the birke—watched us, horrifying and grotesque and utterly silent. And I thought, maybe, just this once, it was not such a terrible thing to be from Aisling. Because this sprite, this monster, took no interest in the gargoyle’s stone eyes, and no matter how it searched for mine, it could not glimpse them behind my shroud.

I heard the ring of swords, more shouts sounding. “Sprite attack!”

The birke beside me shifted, and I saw how large it was. Behemoth—rivaling the tallest tree in the glen. It lifted its roots from the earth, moving toward the heart of the glen until it was looming over the dais—Benji and Helena Eichel still upon it.

There were more sprites, I realized. The glen was full of birke—every other birch tree seeming to move, the sacred glen morphing into something unholy. An ambush. A hunting ground.

Visors lowered, protecting their eyes against the vicious swipes of the birke’s gnarled branches, the knights struck out against dozens of swiping birke. Maude was at the lead. “Don’t let them see your eyes!” she cried, swinging her axe to the sickening sound of flesh splitting, blood splattering. Then—more screams.

They came from Helena Eichel. She was on the dais, holding tight to the Faithful Forester’s chime and staring up at the behemoth birke. Next to her, Benji, by fear or idleweed, was so incapacitated he couldn’t even raise his head. He trembled, and Helena screamed.

And the great birke drew closer. It blinked its dozens of eyes and reached forward with branch-like limbs. Then, the pale surface of its flesh was opening—a hole peeling wide in the center of the birke. No teeth, not tongue, just a dark, lipless mouth and more eyes within.

The gargoyle and I pushed forward on frantic feet, my hammer and chisel drawn. “Benji!” I shouted. “Benji, move.”

He looked up, right into the birke’s dark mouth, and froze. The birke made a horrible rasping call, and the king shut his eyes, quivered—

And vanished.

The birke’s branch-like fingers curled around Helena Eichel instead, and the Faithful Forester’s chime fell, catching on one of the creature’s branches. The birke raised Helena, screaming, from the dais. Brought her to its wide, gaping mouth.

And ate her whole.

Benji reappeared twenty feet away, clasped tightly in Rory’s arms. Hamelin and Dedrick Lange broke from the knights fighting more birke, and Rory handed them the king. They hurried from the glen, retreating into smoke, and Rory vanished, too, reappearing seconds later back on the dais.

It took a moment for him to spot me in the mayhem, his eyes so dark and desperate my heart stopped.

I ran to him.

Rory caught me around the waist, gripping me so tightly I lost my breath.

I turned to the birke. “We’ve got to get that chime.”

Rory weighed his coin in his palm. “Too high to throw.” He turned it over, rough side up—but he didn’t throw it, saying in a strained voice, “I don’t want to kill it.”

“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.

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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—”

Benji pulled away. “Fucking hell, Rory, leave me alone. No one believes this white knight charade.”

Rory flinched.

I flew to my feet, but it was the gargoyle who spoke. “That is unkind and unworthy, Bartholomew.” He’d been quietly crying in the corner of the room, and now appeared the spirit of righteous anger. “If you value your friend when he fights your battles for you—when he is rogue and ruthless—you must value him when he is gentle, too. Otherwise you do not value him at all.”

Benji leaned his back against the bed. Put his hands over his face. “I’m sorry, Rory.”

Rory was looking at Maude’s unmoving form, his dark eyes glassy. “It’s fine.”

Hours later, in the quiet of the hall, I was thinking of Maude. Of the Diviners. Of sleep that brooked no awakening.

Next to me, the gargoyle was looking out the window at the Chiming Wood. “The whole world is a wood, Bartholomew, and everyone in it is fashioned of birch bark. Frail as paper.”

He began to cry, and I did, too. “Oh, gargoyle.”

I used to think his sadness, his heavy emotion, such a futile thing. An irreconcilable flaw. But as I kept to Maude’s room, watching Benji drink and Rory go silent and feeling my own tongue struggle to put to words the defeat I felt, I began to think I’d been telling myself the wrong story about my peculiar batlike gargoyle.

Sadness, like birch bark, had all the appearance of frailty. And yet…

The tree prevailed.

A day later, I was running down the stairs, bare feet slapping against stone. When I found the gargoyle, polishing armor in the great hall, I was breathless. “She’s awake.”

Maude was sitting up in bed, drinking water, pale and shaky and covered in bandages, but awake. I stepped into the room, and she looked at me with those kind green eyes, and I learned that, for all my heartbreak over death—over false stories and lying gods and lifeless Diviners—my heart could break for happiness, too. “Hey, Maude.”

“Heard you two snagged that chime,” she said, winking at the gargoyle. “That’s four Omens down—two more to go.” Her voice grew solemn. “I know things have not been anything like you thought they’d be when you left Aisling, Diviner. But I hope you know how special you are to us. We wouldn’t have gotten this far without you.”

“Oh.” I scrubbed a hand over my cheek. “Thank you. I’m very glad you’re not, um, you know—”

“Dead as a doorhanger?” the gargoyle offered.

Maude turned to Benji, who stood near the window. “We should do something to commemorate her. She’s been fearless.”

Benji’s skin was brighter. His eyes less glassy. Maude’s awakening had brought him back to himself. “Whatever sounds good to you, Maude.”

“I was thinking a knighthood. We’ll have a proper ceremony. Today.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Don’t knights swear to the Omens in their vows?”

“We can skip that part.” Maude beamed. “You don’t have to do it, of course. But just in case you’ve grown tired of Aisling’s creed and everything that’s come with it, you might like to say ours for a while.”

My armor may dent, my sword may break, but I will never diminish.

I knew what she was doing. Offering me a permanent place, now that the Diviners were gone. Telling me that I need not remain adrift—that I had a home with them if I wanted one.

Tears prickled behind my eyes. “I’m not noble born.”

“Exceptions can be made,” Rory and Maude said at the same time, sharing a smile, then sending it my way.

Benji’s gaze shifted between Rory and me. He was quiet. Then—“Six has proven helpful as a Diviner. I wouldn’t want to change her title. The influence she wields, the way the nobles look at me when I’m with her—”

“Don’t be a prat,” Rory said. “This isn’t about you.”

“Of course it’s not.” Benji’s cheeks reddened, his voice hardening. “I’m the king, and it’s never about me. I’m not respected like a craftsman or a knight or a Diviner. My first public act is to go into the hamlets and be utterly humiliated by the nobility in the names of the Omens. I know that I’m young, and that my grandfather was a heretic, but the treatment of sovereigns goes far beyond that. It’s as if my position has only ever existed to be a foil to Aisling. I am made a prostrate fool to prove how much weaker a king is to a god.”

The silence in the room was heavy.

Rory went to stand in front of Benji. When he slouched as he often did, Rory and the king stood exactly equal, eye to eye. “Perhaps that’s the system’s fatal flaw. If Aisling and the Omens have only ever painted a king as inconsequential, what does it say about them if a king is the one who brings them all down?”

Benji’s face twisted as he held back tears.

“Your grandfather would be proud of you, Benji.” Maude, despite her bandages, tried to sit up straighter. “We’re proud, too.”

I nodded in agreement, and the gargoyle leaned close to whisper in my ear. “If the boy wants to make me cry, he’ll need a sadder story than that.”

I shushed him, and the king’s gaze turned. Benji looked at me. Really looked at me. I couldn’t see the world behind his eyes, but I was certain it was vast, and that he was desperate to map it. “If you wish it, Six, of course I’ll knight you. Your loyalty is a treasure I would never deny.”

He stepped around Rory, placing himself between us. “But please understand. Our work is not yet done. Every Omen that dies, every stone object I claim, I grow closer to reclaiming the kingdom from its dreams and portents and false stories. But if I succeed in taking up the mantle, if the Omens are vanquished—if Aisling falls—I must give people something to believe in in their stead. All that power has to go somewhere.”

He took my hand, then turned to Maude, then Rory. “Do you all promise to be there with me, that I might bear it?”

“Of course, Benji,” Maude said. “We’re with you.”

Rory nodded, his gaze flickering to me.

“My business has ever been with the Omens,” I murmured. “Next, it will be with the Heartsore Weaver. And after—” My voice hardened. “With the moth. When I face the abbess again, it will be in armor, not gossamer.” I reached out. Took Benji’s hand. “With King Benedict Castor the Third at my side.”

He smiled. Boyish, brave. “Then let’s get you knighted.”

The gargoyle and I stood outside Petula Hall’s library door at sunset. Maude had chosen it for the knighting, because that was where the best western light shone, and she said she liked the feel of it on her cheek. The rest of the knights were not there, and I was glad for it. I didn’t want a display. It was only me, the gargoyle, Maude, Benji, Rory, and the blacksmith, Victor, who’d brought me my finished suit of armor that morning.

It was so… beautiful. I didn’t even remember the names of all the pieces, but the gargoyle, who had not shirked his duty as squire, had chattered in my ear about them as he dressed me. When the chainmail, then armor, was fastened, I felt like a great stone edifice. Sturdy and impenetrable, but with a beating, swelling heart within.

“You know, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle said, just before we joined the others in the library. “It would be all right if you did not want to become a knight.”

I turned. “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know why I say the things I do.” I’d given him my hammer and chisel to hold. He weighed them in his palms, his brows lowering in contemplation. “Only, you did not ask to become a Diviner, yet you swore all your worth to Aisling. It would be a sad story, were you to do that again.” His stone eyes rose to my face. “But if you wanted to—I would not blame you. It is easier, swearing ourselves to someone else’s cause than to sit with who we are without one.”

With that he stepped forward, humming to himself, and pushed open the library doors.

Benji and Maude and Rory stood by the west windows of the library, lit by a sunset sky. Maude was not wearing armor on account of her bandages, but Rory and Benji had donned full suits, the metal bright, reflecting the day’s final light.

They watched me as I came into the library, offering the moment the stillness it was due. Rory’s gaze warmed my face, and I met it, wishing with a sudden intensity that he knew I was looking back at him.

That my shroud was not there, between us.

When I stood before them, next to the gargoyle, light fell upon our faces in a way it never had in the spring upon Aisling’s chancel. The king drew an arming sword from his belt. Cleared his throat. “I am Benedict Castor the Third.” His voice was quiet at first, but then I smiled at him, and he spoke louder, projecting over the library like we were in a vast hall filled with witnesses. “It is my honor, for deeds done in bravery, in shrewdness, and in generosity of heart, to bestow the title of knight upon—”

“Sybil,” I said. “My name is Sybil Delling.”

Benji’s gaze widened, and Maude’s smile lit the room. Rory watched me with soft eyes, and the gargoyle began to clap, then sob. “Bravo, Bartholomew. Bravo.”

The king took a moment to speak. “Very well. Sybil Delling—do you accept the accolade of knighthood?”

“Yes.”

“Bend a knee.”

I did.

“A knight’s craft is love. Faith. War. Now, because the knights are not here, I will not swear you to the same vows of faith we three took. There will be no talk of the Omens. No self-effacement. Rather, I will put upon you the weight of responsibility due to the valorous of the Stonewater Kingdom, and you will tell me if you agree to its burden.” He did not seem like such a boy anymore, his spine straighter, his words surer. “Does that suit you?”

“It does.”

Next to him, Maude was grinning ear to ear. I wondered how many ceremonies she’d been to. How many times, since girlhood, she’d watched a knighting. Yet I knew, by the happy lines in her face, it meant something to her, being here for mine.

“Do you vow to protect the weak and defenseless and all those who beckon for your aid?” Benji asked.

“I do.”

“Do you vow to be a witness, pupil, and visitor to the kingdom’s peoples and keep peace within the hamlets?”

“I do.”

“Do you swear to reject pecuniary reward and all mercenary endeavors, acting only upon charity and what best suits the kingdom?”

“Yes.”

“Do you swear loyalty to the crown? To be my serving knight—and also my Diviner?”

I paused. My shroud was so much lighter than my armor. But I felt its weight upon me. “What is a Diviner, really, when nothing is divine?”

“You needn’t wear the title if it no longer fits you,” Rory murmured. “You needn’t do anything you do not wish to.”

The king’s gaze shot to him. “Yes, she does. That’s the whole point. To swear to me is to swear to my wishes, my aspirations—my kingship. If she vows to be my knight, she vows devotion. To do as I ask, just as you and Maude have.” His eyes darted to me, then back to Rory. “Yes?”

“Yes,” Rory snapped. “We swore loyalty—but not mindlessness. She’s not here to give up more of her liberty, Benedict. The abbess did not own her Diviners, the Omens do not own Traum, and you do not own the Stonewater Kingdom, nor your knights, just for some words said in a ceremony.”

“That’s not—” Benji flushed. “You’ve never seen the importance, the virtue, of noble vows.”

A deathly calm came over Rory. “Because I’m neither noble nor virtuous?”

Maude rubbed her brow as if she were watching two siblings squabble over a toy. “Wrong time, wrong place.”

“This armor fits me better than my Divining robe ever did,” I said abruptly. “It’s an honor to wear it.” I reached up. Grazed the rim of my shroud. “But I’ve sworn to Aisling, and I’ve sworn to the Omens, and I’ve sworn to my friends, who are now forever gone.” I drew in a long breath. “I think I would like to stop promising myself away, or else there will be nothing left of me to give, King Castor.”

“A fine answer, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle commended.

Benji’s cheeks were still red. He turned away from Rory. “Fine.” The king lowered the arming sword to my left shoulder, then my right. “Sybil Delling. Your armor may dent, your sword may break, but may you never diminish.” He looked upon my shroud, searching for my eyes.