The bear gargoyle tackled me to the ground.

We landed in the shed, the lump on my temple colliding with the hay-strewn floor. I coughed, groaned. The hammer and chisel were nestled in hay an inch from my nose. I tried to reach for them, but stone arms locked around my middle, pinning my hands to my sides.

I thrashed. “Get off of me!”

The bear gargoyle’s grip did not loosen. It dragged me, kicking and screaming, out of the shed, through grass and toward the cathedral. Then—

A ringing sound. Another explosion of limestone. I dropped to the ground. When I looked up, the bear gargoyle was headless—nothing but a jagged piece of stone, dust raining down around him.

At its feet, a small object sat in the grass.

A coin.

“Are you all right, Bartholomew?” The batlike gargoyle pulled me up, stretching his wings wide to shield me.

I dove into the shed. Yanked my hammer and chisel free.

Rory was several paces away, only now he wasn’t disappearing and reappearing but skirting blows from the remaining falcon gargoyle. He rolled, barely missing a blunt swipe, then sprinted toward me. Caught my waist. “Time to go, Diviner,” he panted, bending to pick up the coin. Behind him, the falcon gargoyle was getting closer, closer—

“Watch out!”

I shoved Rory down by his hair just before the falcon’s pointed wing collided with the back of his skull. I didn’t think—I just swung. The resounding crack rolled like thunder, my hammer colliding with the falcon’s face so viciously its entire head fissured.

It fell onto the grass and didn’t move again.

I looked down at Rory. He was on his knees in front of me, breathing hard. I let go of his hair instantly.

The corners of his mouth curled. His fathomless eyes held me a second, and then he was standing to full height, offering me his hand.

We ran, the batlike gargoyle right behind us.

Doors slammed in the distance, the low pulse of footsteps echoing around us. More gargoyles came from the shadows, screeching as they spilled from their outbuilding. I kept running, hammer and chisel in one hand, Rory’s hand in the other. I steered us to the west side of the wall, bracing to climb. “We need to be careful when we climb down—”

“We’re not climbing.” Rory tossed his coin through the wall, and we disappeared through stone, through branches, through air.

And then we were falling.

Rory caught the coin midair, our bodies rematerializing—our feet slamming onto the road.

“Ugh.” Pain shot up my legs. “My poor knees.”

Rory bit down on a laugh, then pulled me by the hand down the holloway road, wedging us between two beech trees. We stood close together, gazes tilted up, watching the shadows of Aisling’s gargoyles as they flew overhead.

They passed by, and the night quieted.

Rory stepped out onto the darkened road, frowning. He peered left, then right, then jerked his head at me to follow him. I looked back only once, but the hill was too steep to see Aisling. It didn’t matter; I knew the cathedral was watching me, cold and beautiful and disapproving, as if to say, You’ll come crawling back soon enough.

Then, high in the sky, a dark shape flittered over the moon. I heard a humming sound—an off-pitch tune.

I grinned. “There he is.”

The batlike gargoyle was there, singing to himself as he followed us from above, stone wings flapping as he soared through the air.

Rory’s gaze traced my smile. “He’s your pet?”

“I imagine he thinks I’m his.”

“Funny. He’s not coming along.”

“Looks like he is.”

Rory muttered to himself, fidgeting with something in his left hand. I caught a proper glimpse of it before he stowed it in his pocket. The coin. The thing he’d been throwing. It was larger than a normal coin. Oblong and made of stone. One side was smooth, the other rough.

I lost a step. I’d seen that exact coin before. Many, many times.

But only in my dreams.

“Your abbess is right,” Rory called. “There are terrors in Traum. Vicious sprites—and they’re nothing to the nobles you’ll meet. We’ll join the knighthood in Seacht. See what we can learn about your lost Diviners.”

He must have sensed I was no longer directly behind him, because he turned. He could not tell, but he was looking directly into my eyes. “Allow me the privilege of taking you to the king.”

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The Seacht

Ink.

Nothing but ink and the persuasive quill can devise what is true.

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CHAPTER TEN YOUNG, AND RATHER OLD

Rory’s horse was called Fig, and Fig’s greatest flaw—or virtue—was that she refused to be rushed. She sniffed my face for five whole minutes before she let me sit on her back behind Rory, then took ten minutes more snaffling boysenberries from a bramble. It was only after she’d finished, when Rory’s threats had increased tenfold, that she began to idly trot down the holloway road.

It was my first time on a horse.

I hated it.

“You’re too rigid,” Rory called over his shoulder. “You’re going to knock the wind out of yourself. Relax, Diviner.”

Relax. Sure. Maybe in my next life.

All I could think about was Rory’s coin. The Artful Brigand’s coin.

How many times had I dreamed of it, hovering, turning this side or that? Smooth side up, a good sign. Rough side up, a bad portent. The Omens were my life—I’d read those signs thousands of times.

Still. I wasn’t blind to the fact that the lore of the Omens, like a Diviner’s eyes, was shrouded. Even if they did hide in the hamlets as the abbess said, killing sprites and swaying the fate of Traum with their magical stone objects, no one had actually met an Omen. That was part of their appeal. Gods that couldn’t be seen, even in dreams, were effective. You never knew when they were watching.

But this was no dream. This was a coin, wholly corporeal, with the ability to destroy—to shatter stone gargoyles—or transport its users through doors, through walls. I’d never heard of magic like that in Traum. Hardly believed it.

But I’d seen it. And if the Artful Brigand’s coin lived on the other side of dreams, perhaps he did, too. Which meant Rory was—

Oh gods. The foulest knight in Traum… was an Omen.

I nearly fell off the horse.

“Pith.” Rory reached back. Caught my thigh just below my hip and yanked me forward. “Put your arms around my chest.”

When I didn’t, he took my arm and slung it over his shoulder. We rode on. Once, twice, thrice I opened my mouth to ask about his coin—and snapped it shut every time. No, I reasoned. There must be an explanation. A coin forged to look like the Artful Brigand’s—some magic or trickery that I, within Aisling’s cloister, knew nothing about. Rodrick Myndacious was many things, and two of them vital. He was a blasphemer, and a mortal one at that. Flesh and blood and bone.

Decidedly not a god.

Better to ride along, say nothing, and see what answers awaited with the king.

Overhead, the gargoyle was soaring and spinning, bidding “welfare” instead of “farewell” to the fading night.

When the sky grew pink and the first fingers of sunlight made their way through the trees, I heard the rushing sound of water.

“Is that—are we—”

“The Tenor River,” Rory said through a yawn.

The holloway roads sloped, then leveled, and when the hills opened, I sucked in a breath.