Текст книги "The Knight and the Moth"

Автор книги: Rachel Gillig

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I remembered One, searching her reflection in that same mirror two nights ago—her horrified gasp. What has been done to us?

I turned my head away and said nothing.

Rory muttered beneath his breath. “Fine. Don’t take it off, then. But know it will be dangerous.”

“Isn’t that what my knightly escort is for? Besides, I have these for protection.” I wagged my hammer and chisel in his face. “And the gargoyle.”

We both looked over our shoulders. The gargoyle had taken Fig by her lead, his face close to her muzzle as he lectured her. “Never trust anything written in rhyme, Bartholomew. It is trickery—a pretty falsehood. That is something I intend to tell everyone when I pen my own book of tales. Firstly, of course, I must learn to read and write.”

Rory angled his brows at me. “An army of wits, you two.”

“Shut up. He doesn’t have much sense or memory or even a name—just a strange compulsion to serve Aisling. He’s a bit… peculiar.”

“You’re a pair, then.”

If I told him, No, I’m not a pair—I’m one of six and there are five cracks in my heart for it, he would laugh at me. He’d remind me that the only reason I am distinct now is because there are no other Diviners around to make me indistinct.

I did not need a reminder of that.

When the silence hung too long, Rory pivoted. “Speaking of Aisling, there’s something I’ve been wondering. It involves you, me, my blood on your tongue—and the little matter of your dream.”

My stomach tightened. “What about it?”

“You didn’t say anything in the spring. The gargoyle pulled you out after you—” He exhaled sharply. “You know. Drowned. He laid you on your back upon the chancel and said you were dreaming, but you didn’t breathe a word. Why is that?”

The last lie I’d told was to the gargoyle, and I’d had to feign a vomiting spell to be convincing. Better to aim toward the blurry truth. “I don’t know why I didn’t say anything.”

Rory’s stare warmed the side of my face, dark eyes mapping my every corner, as if he could almost hear me think, I saw the sixth Omen, the moth—and horrible things have been happening ever since. I might have even said it out loud…

Were it not for that strange coin in his pocket.

When the silence became unpalatable, Rory said, “You’ve been Divining a while, I take it.”

“Nearly ten years.”

“How old are you?”

“Bartholomew is quite old,” the gargoyle answered behind us, drawing an idle finger though Fig’s mane. “Though in a sense, she is prodigiously young—”

“No one knows,” I interrupted. “I have no memory before Aisling. But my teeth are healthy and my skin is not so lined yet.” I looked to Rory. “How old do I look to you?”

“If I answer badly, are you going to pulverize my head with that hammer?” He studied me down his nose. “You look…” Was that red in his cheeks? “You look like a young woman. Not far from my age. But your condescension is perfected. Like that of someone old.”

I made a face. “What’s your age?”

“Twenty-six. But my youth felt so endless that perhaps I’m the exact same age as you.” He lifted one shoulder, like a full shrug was not worth the effort. “Young, and also rather old.”

We stayed quiet for the rest of the crossing. Rory did not ask me about my dream or to take my shroud off again. I listened to the sound of the Tenor and the beat of our steps upon the bridge—hooves and boots, stone and feet—thinking on the stories I’d told the Diviners of the things we’d do when we left Aisling, and how bare it felt, living one without them.

The Seacht was a roaring instrument. By the time we’d crossed the Tenor River it was full morning, and the city’s labyrinthic streets were bustling with people. Wedged between Fig and the gargoyle, I flexed my toes over cobblestones and threw my head back as I took in the city.

It was nothing like Coulson Faire—tents plopped haphazardly in rows upon an open field. The Seacht, its architecture, was a meticulous wonder. Every building, by wood or stone or brick, was built to an exact stature that allowed its neighbors light. There were culverts so no freestanding water remained in the streets. Water wheels fed into factories. I could smell leather. From open windows, I saw men and women in gray robes, shuffling about large tubs or stretching a wet yellow material over large stones, then pinning it to dry.

“Parchment.” My eyes were wide. “They’re making parchment.”

“Oh, Bartholomew.” The gargoyle took my hand. “For writing stories.”

“Histories, more like,” Rory said. “Medical discoveries, star charts, architecture and invention—you name it, it’s been scribbled on a leaflet somewhere in this city. They love that, the scribes. Learning, and scribbling.”

I watched a row of women through an open window as they sewed, then pressed, stacks of parchment together. “You sound disapproving, Myndacious.”

“Not at all. Knowledge is a wellspring, and I happily drink from it.” He scowled up at a banner of an inkwell. “I simply can’t fathom why, for all their learning, folk of the Seacht still lend credence to those old, superstitious ways.”

“You mean the ways you are meant to defend as a knight? My ways?” My wonderment was doused in irritation. “You think that because someone embraces innovation they must scorn the ancient and ethereal?”

Rory retrieved the scribe’s stolen stylus from his pocket and set it on a windowsill. “Clearly you don’t.”

“You said it yourself. Two things can be true at the same time—people can believe in more than one thing at once.”

“Like what is young, and also that which is rather old,” the gargoyle offered.

The streets were wriggling snakes, and so were the river channels that wove beneath bridges, each pointing toward the heart of the Seacht—a bustling marketplace square. We passed more banners depicting inkwells, shops and tanneries, and tall, windowed archives. When we reached the lip of the marketplace, Rory pointed his finger over my shoulder, directing my gaze at a humble brick facade. “I imagine your Diviners came from one of those,” he murmured.

I heard the sweet, unmistakable sound of children’s laughter. The brick building’s door was open, and from it, I glimpsed hair, swinging arms, churning feet, rosy cheeks. Children, gleefully chasing one another. One of them, who seemed no older than eight, caught the open door, shut it—and I noted an inscription painted upon the wood.

Pupil House III

A School for Foundlings

Oh. This was where Diviners were chosen from. Where One or Two or Three or Four or Five or I might have begun, before Aisling. I took a step toward the house—

Someone stomped on my bare foot. I yelped, knocking into a short, burly man with several inkwells in his arms. “Oi! Watch where you’re going.”

I checked my shroud was still in place and muttered an apology. The man’s eyes widened as he took me in. His mouth turned. “Get away from me, bitch.”

The gargoyle made a shrill noise of affront and shoved the man. He tumbled onto his bottom, dropping his inkwells, which shattered on the cobbled street. Ink pooling beneath him, the man struggled to his feet, shouting profanity so decorative I didn’t know what half of it meant, only that he thought me an Omen witch and a whore—

Rory leaned down. Cracked him over the jaw with an open palm. “Watch your fucking mouth.”

The man slipped on his own ink and fell a second time. When he scrutinized Rory—the charcoal around his eyes, the rings in his ear—he clearly didn’t know whether to spit out another slur or flee.

But the Seacht was indeed a city of intellects. The man raised himself out of the ink and ran.

“You can be happy now, I suppose,” I said through tight lips. “Clearly not everyone in the Seacht falls prey to the old ways.”

Rory pushed his hair out of his eyes. “That didn’t make me happy at all.”

“Oh, look—a Diviner!”

Pith. A crowd was already forming. “Did someone show you their ink?” a woman asked me, dragging a man who looked about one hundred years old with her. “Pray, Diviner, will you read mine?”

“Oh. I’m sorry, that’s not how it w—”

More onlookers pushed forward, and suddenly there were two, three, four more inkwells in my face. “Read my ink! Please, Diviner, what signs do you see? Good or bad?”

I was jostled, my bare feet trampled, and then a warm arm was around my shoulders and I was being moved through the crowd, through the marketplace, far quicker than before.

“And to think,” Rory said in my ear, “it might have all been avoided had you been wearing shoes.”

The Seacht’s streets narrowed as we turned east. The crowd was thinner here, dispersed. I noted the exact moment when, just ahead, two figures slunk from an alley.

They walked close to each other, the hoods of their cloaks pulled up like mine.

Rory watched them, a crooked smile slithering over his mouth. “Well, well.” He retracted his arm from my shoulders and pressed ahead. Soon he was directly behind the hooded figures, walking on silent step, reaching a hand into one of their cloaks like a common pickpocket.

I balked. “What are you doing, Myndacious?”

One of the figures turned. I saw a sharp face fitted with green eyes with charcoal drawn around them.

Maude.

She caught Rory by the wrist, denying him her pocket. “Nice try, little thief.”

Rory looked at me like he’d picked me out from between his teeth. “Spoilsport.”

The second figure, who turned on his heel, was none other than the king of Traum himself. When King Castor saw Rory, he smiled so widely I could count his teeth. “We found him, Rory. He was hiding in plain sight. We followed him and—”

The king stopped short, his eyes finally catching up to his mouth. “Oh—a Diviner.” His cheeks went ruddy. “My Diviner.”

“Six,” I reminded him. It would have been proper to lower my head. But the boy was in common garb—leathers and an undyed cloak. He looked so ordinary I forgot he mattered enough to bow to.

“I am here, too, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle said, clearing his throat. “You may greet me as well.”

Maude went still. “Pith,” she muttered. “I didn’t know gargoyles spoke.”

“Who’s Bartholomew?” the king asked.

“Unimportant.” Rory’s posture had changed. He wasn’t slouched or lazy or perked for enjoyment. His back was stiff, his shoulders inflexible. “You found him. And you were going after him—without me?”

“Who?” I snapped.

They turned, six eyes combing me. They were like the three leaves of a clover, conspiratorial and exclusive in their trio. There was an arduous pause, then Rory looked at Maude. Said something to her with the wiggle of his eyebrows.

Maude shook her head. “No.”

I crossed my arms. “No what?”

Rory scratched his jaw and ignored me. “It’s a two birds, one stone situation.”

“It’s risky and thoughtless,” Maude bit back.

“My specialties.”

I was going to break something with my hammer if these idiots didn’t stop acting like I wasn’t there. “Ahem.”

King Castor looked from me to Rory to Maude—then back to me. Slowly, he shrugged. “I say we bring her. She could be useful.”

The gargoyle puffed his chest out with pride. “Bartholomew is a daughter of Aisling, a harbinger of gods—the most dedicated dreamer I know.” He patted my shoulder. “But no, I’m sorry to say she is not especially useful. I, on the other hand—”

I put my hand over his mouth. “Whatever you are doing, I will come along. But immediately after, I require your ear, King Castor.” I tried to be like the abbess when she was cross—like Aisling Cathedral itself. Cold, beautiful, and disapproving. “And I will have it.”

The king grinned. “Ear, eye, hand—they’re yours.”

“Easy, Your Majesty.” Rory threw an arm over the king’s shoulder, steering him away from me. “It’s hardly a marriage proposal. Now”—he gestured to the street ahead—“let’s go see an old friend.”

Maude was not pleased. I could tell by the way she censured Rory with relentless glares as she led us down dizzying streets that she did not want me along for whatever ill adventure lay ahead.

Too bad. I wasn’t letting the boy-king out of my sight until he promised he would help me find my Diviners.

We stopped abruptly in an ivy-laden alley that was almost too narrow for Fig. Maude looked over her shoulder. Satisfied we were alone, she began peeling back the ivy, revealing a small wooden door in the alley wall. “Right.” She turned to me. “We need to go over a few things before we bring you in.”

“In…” I looked up at the ivy wall. It didn’t look like a barracks or anywhere the knighthood might be stationed. “Where, exactly?”

“We’re meeting with someone,” Maude said flatly. “A vestige of the Seacht.”

I crossed my arms. “You’re being cryptic. It’s obnoxious.”

“Hey.” Rory tapped my wrist. “Uncross those and listen. There’s a chance this man knows something of your lost Diviners. Seeing him may be a bit of a shock, but it’s important that you see him, understood?”

“Understood, Bartholomew.” The gargoyle straightened. “I will strive to be a pillar of decorum—”

“You will stay with Fig.” When the gargoyle’s bottom lip began to quiver, Rory hastily added, “She gets lonely.”

The gargoyle looked up at Fig, who was contentedly eating ivy off the wall, and sniffled. “Very well. If my presence will ease her suffering, I shall weather my own.”

“Fantastic.” Rory’s dark eyes returned to me. “Our business may get… animated. Stay close.”

My brows shot up. “Animated how?”

“Will there be kissing?” the gargoyle asked.

“What—no.” Rory made a face. “We’re going to…” He turned to Maude for help, but she offered none, grinning as he struggled to articulate.

“We are taking up the mantle and challenging this man to his craft,” King Castor said, then blinked rapidly, as if surprised by his own exactitude. He looked to Maude, who patted him on the back, then focused on me. “Do you know what that means, Six?”

I didn’t. It sounded vaguely familiar—a memory stuck in a dark corner of my mind. But my pride was a formidable beast. I’d sooner go back to Aisling than give these idiots another cause to think me witless and unworldly. “Of course.”

I could see in the way they looked at one another that they thought me a prodigiously bad liar.

Maude wrenched open the alleyway door, revealing a dark corridor. “Then let’s go.”

King Castor followed, quick in his step, like he did not want to stray too far from Maude.

I handed the gargoyle my hammer and chisel for safekeeping. “You still haven’t told me this man’s name,” I said to Rory, stepping over a fractured wood threshold into the corridor.

“He’ll be more than happy to introduce himself.”

Rory shut the door behind him, expelling the echo of the Seacht and the gargoyle’s voice as he began to lecture Fig about varying sorts of ivy. The only thing I could hear now was the muffled patter of our steps on wool rugs. I peered at the surrounding walls, their height so vast I had to crane my neck. Upon then, obscured by dimness, were rows of elaborate paintings I could not make out. They looked like portraits with blurry faces—bent, unclothed bodies.

No lanterns were lit. The corridor stretched on, its end obscured by murky shadow. I walked behind the king, a step ahead of Rory, suddenly afraid I was being heedlessly led into the unknown.

Ahead, Maude’s and King Castor’s backs were rigid. Behind, I could hear the swish of Rory’s fidgeting fingers in his pocket. He was toying with his coin. An anxious habit, perhaps. His steps were unflagging, but his breaths were rough and uneven. “You lot seem tense,” I murmured. “Nervous about something, Myndacious?”

The fidgeting sounds stopped. “Do you have some moral compunction against saying my name?”

“Is Myndacious not your name?”

“I told you the night we met to call me Rory.”

“And I might have. But then we got to talking, and suddenly there was nothing about you that made me want to encourage familiarity.”

“Job well done. Vomiting on my favorite boots is a surefire way to keep things formal between us.”

I glared back at him. “You’re remarkably difficult to like.”

“You’d like me better if you called me Rory.”

“I’d like you better if you were on your back again.”

He smiled.

An unfamiliar heat burrowed into my face. “From throwing you and your inferior strength down, obviously.”

“Loud and clear, Diviner. I hear you loud and clear.”

A line of light drew before us, coming from the cracks in a wide oaken door at the end of the corridor. Maude put a hand upon it and pressed.

The door opened to a room with no windows, lit by sunlight cascading from a dome ceiling made entirely out of glass. Upon the walls, several stories high, were shelves stacked with books. Tens of thousands of books.

In the heart of the room, fixed upon fine woolen rugs, was a man.

An old man, with draping silken robes and long, gnarled fingers. He stood stooped, but his eyes were lifted. Lifted—and made entirely out of stone.

In his hand was the inkwell from my dreams.

He stared at me, drawing in a long, rasping breath. “A daughter of Aisling.” He lifted a hand, beckoning me. “Come in.”

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CHAPTER ELEVEN THE HARRIED SCRIBE

Denying. Every part of me was caught up, denying.

“This can’t…” My voice carried up, and the glass ceiling threw it back. This can’t, my echo mocked. This can’t…

The old man peered at me through stone eyes. His hands were thin, with bulbous joints, the undersides of his fingernails ink-stained. He had no hair upon his head or face. No color in his sunken cheeks.

He said nothing, slowly running a finger through his inkpot as he stared at me.

“Don’t be an ass.” Maude elbowed the king. “Tell her who he is.”

King Castor gave a shaky laugh. “I should think it rather obvious.”

When I looked over my shoulder at Rory, none of my shock was painted upon his face. “What kind of cruel trick is this?”

“It’s not a trick, Diviner.”

The old man watched. “I see,” he rasped. “You mean to rip the veil from her eyes. So to speak.”

I had the brimming compulsion to scream. “Who are you?”

On and on, the man’s finger stirred clockwise circles in the black ink of his inkwell. “Traum’s historian. Its knowledge. Its greatest craftsman.”

He came toward me with pounding steps, as if he weighed a great deal, and the echoes traveled far and near. “For nothing but ink and the persuasive quill can devise what is true.”

A chill set its claws in me. I could see his pores—the lines of his face. Save his eerie stone eyes he looked so… mortal. “Those are the words of the Harried Scribe. An Omen. A god.” I stared at his inkwell. “But you—you’re just a man.”

He blinked once, twice, then, far quicker than a man his age had any right to be, he flung the ink from his inkwell.

And vanished.

The ink came at me in a black glob. I winced, waiting for it to splash upon my face. It didn’t. There was a ripple in the daylight, and then the ink was gone, replaced by the man who’d thrown it. He’d traveled nigh twenty paces on that tide of ink, invisible until he was but a whit from my face.

“Are these the eyes of a mortal—the inkwell of a mere man?” His breath smelled of limestone rubbed too hard or too long. Rotten. “I am Traum’s Scribe. I’ve walked the cobbled streets of the Seacht for over two centuries, bearing magic. My ink never dries, a tool—a weapon. I can travel without being seen, lay waste to ravenous sprites. My writings have inspired reason, invention. My inkwell is a portent of things good or bad, but I have ever been an idol of knowledge. A symbol of truth. What is a god, if not that?”

I was shaking.

Rory’s hand found my elbow, a warm stanchion to keep me sound—

“Don’t touch me.”

I jerked away, carrying myself away to the nearest tower of shelves, fighting the rabid urge to be sick.

“And you—” The man, the Harried Scribe, turned his stone gaze to the others. “It’s been a long while since someone has stumbled upon my dwelling.”

King Castor cleared his throat. “It was I who discovered you, Scribe. Last night, in the market square. I placed a rather potent gift upon your altar. When you came to retrieve it, my knight and I followed you hence.”

The Scribe’s nostrils flared. “And you are?”

“I—yes, I can see why you might not know, given that I am new and not wearing my armor—” King Castor labored to swallow. “I am the king.”

The Scribe barked out a laugh. “Truly? Your ilk gets younger with time.” He looked fondly upon his inkwell. “Which is why my ilk remain ever at the helm.”

King Castor turned as red as a pomegranate.

“There are benefits to youth,” Rory snapped. “The mettle to break from tradition, for one.”

That seemed to hearten the king. He drew in a wavering breath. “We have come to challenge you at your craft and claim your inkwell, Harried Scribe. I, Benedict Castor the Third, am taking up the mantle.”

My gasp was a ghost, floating through the room. Claim your inkwell.

I looked to the Harried Scribe, expecting wrath. But he was still, standing in the middle of his great room, fixed in the light of the dome, surrounded by his books. He looked so untouchable, so solemn and imperious that for a moment I wondered if I’d been wrong. Perhaps he was more than just a man with strange eyes and a magic inkwell. Perhaps he was divine, an Omen—a true god.

Which would make what Rory and Maude and King Castor were doing sacrilege. Cold. Hard. Blasphemy.

“Take up the mantle, you say.” Stone of eye, stiff and wan of face, the Harried Scribe exhibited no emotion. But there was an air of menace about him when his attention fixed upon the king. “And when you fail to defeat me at my craft?”

Maude moved to stand closer to King Castor. “Then we will be at your mercy.”

The Scribe bared his teeth. I wished he hadn’t. They were gray and cracking, like he’d pressed his jaw down with too brutal a strength. “Then I accept.”

He flung his ink. Disappeared. When he was corporeal again, he stood directly in front of me. Hard hands found my waist. More ink was flung, and a terrible weightlessness touched my body. I went invisible and was lifted off my feet—flung upward.

I landed in the Harried Scribe’s clutches upon one of his shelves, fifty feet above the floor.

Below, the others were shouting.

“Fear not, my dear.” The Scribe brushed my hair out of my face as I grasped for something besides him to cling to. “I shall protect you against these disbelievers.” He reached for a book—began to thrum through its pages. “This has happened before, of course. Heretics have found me. Tried to take what is mine, tried to steal my inkwell—my power. They never do, and it always ends the same way.” He grinned at me, revealing those awful teeth. “In blood.”

Oh gods. It was a mistake looking down. My stomach was in my throat. “What is taking up the mantle?”

“Thievery. Dissent.” He closed the book he was reading and flung it, its responding thud against the stone floor echoing through the room. “A king’s quest to claim all five stone objects and take the power of the Omens for himself. But to succeed—” He pulled another book, then flung it as well. “My craft is knowledge, and they must beat me by it. Which, of course, they will not.”

He leaned over. Called down to the others. “There will be three questions. You must answer at least one correctly, then you must ask me a question that I cannot answer—”

Rory’s expert profanity drowned him out. “Bring her down, you fucking cur, or I will—”

Maude gripped him by the arm and said something I could not hear, silencing him.

The shelf creaked beneath my shifting weight. Sweat pooled in my palms. “I want to get down,” I told the Scribe.

“Shhh.” He sniffed the air, then drew closer. “I won’t let you fall.”

He put a cold finger under my chin and lifted it, baring my throat to him. He sniffed that, too. “Strange, that Aisling has sent you to me in this fashion. I’ve never felt a Diviner’s pulse before. Even stranger, that you come under the wing of a heretic.”

Once, back at the cathedral, a merchant had tried to pull One’s shroud off. He’d scratched her cheek. A moment later he was on his face, motionless, bleeding into the gravel. A gargoyle had hit him so hard in the head his skull had cracked. At the time I’d been reassured that such volatile, terrifying beasts were looking out for the Diviners. It was only after that I became unsettled. Volatile, terrifying beasts were, after all, difficult to read—impossible to predict.

I knew the machinations of the Harried Scribe’s inkwell, knew how to read his portents. And yet sitting on a shelf with him, so far above the ground… I was at the hands of something volatile, terrifying. Wholly unpredictable.

“I haven’t been sent,” I managed. “I’ve come because of my Diviners—”

“We await your questions, Scribe,” Maude called from below.

The Scribe forgot me, dropping my chin to look down upon the others. “Since you are a king, and these, I suspect, your appointed knights, I will transpose my questions into that which you can understand. Love, faith, and war—the virtues of knighthood.”

Rory rolled his eyes.

“Let us begin with a question of love.” The Omen flung his ink and vanished, reappearing on a shelf below me and pulling free a leather-bound book. “What, according to the Seacht’s poet laureate, Ingle Taliesin, does a king gift his bride upon their wedding night?”

I could tell by the tight lines of Maude’s, Rory’s, and the king’s mouths that none of them knew the answer. After a moment’s deliberation, King Castor said, “A dower share of his land and wealth.”

The Harried Scribe grinned, cleared his throat, and began to read.

How keen the young king to take up his bride, how noble and steadfast is he.

With wine, with brine, the vows are all said, his heart hence taken by she.

But, pray, what gift should he tend his new queen—what token could ever compare?

No silk is so soft as the touch of her skin, no portrait, no jewel, so fair.

Perhaps a song, composed in her name, or maybe an altar, a shrine.

Or even the moon, brought down from above—

Nay. His cock will do fine.

The Scribe let out a raucous laugh. I stared at him, dumbfounded. “That’s horrendous.”

Below, Maude was rubbing her brow. “Poet laureate my ass.”

“Never trust anything written in rhyme,” Rory muttered.

“Not well-read, I see.” The Harried Scribed composed himself. “I find courtly love rather banal. But a laugh from the belly is a welcome occasion.” He snapped the book shut, vanished, then reappeared on the shelf next to me, making it shake. “Onto faith, then.”

This question required no book. The Harried Scribe leaned forward, perched like a gargoyle upon his shelf. His rasp dripped with mirth. “What was the name of the first Diviner? The foundling child who came to the tor and named the Omens?”

The trio beneath me balked. “The abbess does not speak it in her Divination story,” Maude called. “It’s never been spoken.”

The Scribe toyed with the sleeve of my cloak. “Is that your answer? That the first Diviner was without a name?”

Another biting moment, then King Castor said, “It is.”

“Pity. Once more, you are incorrect.”

King Castor and Maude were unmoving and Rory the opposite, slouched, boot tapping, hand fidgeting incessantly in his pocket.

Only one question remained.

“What was it?” I whispered. “The child’s name?”

“All that matters is that I know it and they did not know it.” The Omen rolled his jaw, his shoulders, joints cracking, pointing to his shelves. “Knowledge is mine to bear, and theirs to beg. Even if they manage to get the next one right”—his lips peeled back in a grotesque smile—“they are condemned.”

I looked down at the others and felt as though I was dreaming—prickling, sweating, afraid. “Please. You must be aware that Diviners have gone missing from the tor. I’ve left Aisling in search of them—”

The Scribe threw his ink before I could finish and vanished, then appeared on a shelf across the room. “My final inquiry,” he called down to the king and Rory and Maude, “is a riddle of war.”

“Another lovely poem, I hope,” Rory deadpanned.

“The Seacht keeps its books, but also its forges, its armories and arsenals. This composition, I penned myself.” The Scribe held out a leaflet. I was afforded the barest glimpse of its cover.

A moth.

Once more, the Omen cleared his throat and read.

Not hefty in weight or long in the arm, it’s thin as a reed in the ground.

Kept sharp or kept dull, however you’re fond, its customs and merits abound.

So, too, is it stocky—a blunt heavy head, with sturdy wood handle to grasp.

With bodily might, it swings and it splits, with one fist or two to hold clasp.

In battle or field or wherever you stray, keep fixed in slack loops on your belt.

For breaking and beating, passion or labor, there ne’er was a blow thusly dealt.

The Scribe’s stone eyes lowered. “Well, king? What weapon does this poet describe?”

The king, Rory, and Maude all wore the same heavy brow, as if burdened by their own contemplation. But I—I was back on the tor, back to my chores, back to the stone wall. I’d spent days feeling ignorant and unworldly and helpless, a victim of my own occupation and the cathedral’s tight fist.

How fitting that the answer to the Harried Scribe’s riddle should be that which I took from Aisling itself.

My posture went rigid, and Rory’s gaze shot up. He studied me a long moment, as if unfurling the riddle of me and not the one the Harried Scribe had posed. His lips pulled back in a smile and then he was leaning over, whispering in King Castor’s ear.

The king let out a fraught sound of relief, then straightened himself. “It’s not a singular weapon,” he said to the Scribe. “It’s two. A hammer, and a chisel.”

The Omen went still, and so did the sound in his cavernous room. He vanished—appearing once more on the shelf next to me. This time when he dipped his finger into his inkwell, he stirred it counterclockwise. “What would you ask me then, king of Traum?” he challenged. “To beat me at my craft?”

King Castor stepped closer to Rory and Maude. “Allow us a moment to confer.”

“Never say I am not a generous god.” The Harried Scribe watched them, drawing near to me—petting my head like I was a dog. “Do not worry,” he murmured. “They will not ask a question I have not already penned the answer to. Only ink and the persuasive pen—”

“If you know all,” I said, trying again, “you must tell me what has happened to my lost Diviners.”

The Scribe pulled away. I felt a sharp sting, several strands of my pale hair caught in the cracks of his aged hand. He brought them to his nose. Inhaled. “Your Diviners?” His mouth opened, a wide, black hole, and then he was tossing my hair into his mouth. Groaning in ugly ecstasy. “You belong to Aisling. To the Omens. That’s what I know, and what I know is ever the truth.”