I put a hand to my bandaged neck. “So the king decides when I should bear pain and when I shouldn’t, so long as it serves him best?” I said it with the tastelessness it was due. “Not so different from the abbess, are you? From an Omen.”

Benji flinched. “It sounds horrible when you put it like that.”

“True things often do.”

Shoulders slumping, mouth struck down, the king looked helpless. “I’m sorry, Six. It is very difficult for me, with all of Traum’s opposing stories, to know what to say, or what is right. I usually ask Maude or Rory to tell me what to do, because most of the time I simply don’t know. I should have just been honest.” His chin began to tremble. “There is a very good chance we will not find your Diviners.”

Dead. Your Diviners are all dead.

“Because of Aisling’s spring water. Because the Omens crave it, and we have spent our service drowning in it. So when our ten years are up, the abbess—” But I couldn’t say the rest. “Where is my gargoyle?”

“He’s with Maude in the village. Pith, I’m sorry, Six. It’s—oh. You are…” Benji’s gaze lowered to my tunic. “You’re bleeding.”

“I’m fine.”

“We thought you were dead, you know. We got the oar off the platform before it sank. Kicked the Ardent Oarsman’s corpse for good measure. We pulled you out of the water and Rory beat your chest, but we thought—” Benji’s voice was small. Frayed. “You should rest. I’ll send for some fresh clothes.”

He left me the way he’d found me. Alone with the unbearable truth.

I didn’t go back to my room. I didn’t know where I was going—but I went.

Bare feet slapping against stone, I took to the stairs. When I reached the entry, the punctures in my neck swelled as I hauled open the great wood door.

The stormy skies I’d known in the Fervent Peaks were gone. The Chiming Wood’s night was still, with blue heavens and a glowing moon that hung over a dense forest of birch trees.

I limped away from Petula Hall down the drive until I stood at the edge of a vast wall of trees. Slipped into the arms of the Wood.

And screamed.

My feet couldn’t take me where I needed to go, because my feet were bleeding. Just as well. I had nowhere to go. I tripped over rocks, roots, brambles.

Fell.

I lay utterly still upon dirt, bleeding moon’s blood, praying for a way to sink my teeth into earth and stone and flesh and rip Traum open until the entire world was a gaping wound. To wipe Aisling Cathedral from existence. Obliterate the Omens from lore, from memory, from the annals of time.

I lay there and lay there, and my prayers weren’t answered. Nothing answered, save the wind.

It wasn’t a mournful note like it was upon the tor. The wind in the Wood was a chime, dissonant, discombobulating, flinging itself near and far. It reverberated through the trees, the leaves, the thorny vines that lay over the road.

The Wood suddenly felt tighter, the air closer, as if the spaces between the birch trees had narrowed. I looked up. Studied them. Their pale bark wasn’t translucent or papery, but mottled. Heavy. Like old flesh. And the knots in the trunks—gashes of darkness in all that pale, sloughing bark—

The knots were eyes. Hundreds of black, lidless eyes, watching me.

I jerked back, my hands, my feet scraping over thorns, scoring the road red.

There was a noise. The groan of wooden wheels.

Yellow light split the darkness. I blinked against it, and saw that there was a cart on the road, drawn by a gray horse, coming toward me. Driving the cart was a man with a gray beard, stooped over the reins. Next to him, lantern light catching along the angles of his face, his black hair, the rings in his ear—

Rory.

When I looked back to the birch trees, they were eyeless once more. Just wood and bark and branches and leaves.

I slipped into their gaping shadows.

From between thorns, I watched the cart roll past. Then—

“Whoa.”

The horse whickered a complaint, and the cart groaned to a halt.

“Go ahead, Victor.” Rory’s boots hit the ground. “I’ll be there shortly.”

The cart resumed its journey, but those boots stayed firmly in my line of sight, rocking back and forth onto their heels. “Whoever you are who’s bled onto the road,” Rory called, “I hope you’re enjoying your night.”

When I stepped from my hiding place, Rory’s eyes widened, roaming over my clothes—and the blood upon them. “What the fuck, Diviner.”

I touched my new shroud. “Did you put this over my eyes?”

He blinked confoundedly, like he’d been thrown into a horse race with no horse. “Did I—yes, I put that there. I’d thought you’d—” He shook himself. “The Wood is dangerous after dark. What the hell are you doing, bleeding out here in the middle of the night?” He hissed out a sigh. “And would you look at that. You’re not wearing shoes.”

“I’ve spoken to Benji. He told me what his grandfather knew. That there are no records of Diviners after they leave the tor. That’s why”—I spoke too fast, rushing through the atrociousness of it all—“the Ardent Oarsman bit me, because he’s put his teeth in Diviners before. Lapped up their blood. They’re—” I forced myself to say it. “They’re dead.”

Warmth fled his face, silence taking us in its fist. Rory did nothing to dispel it, then—“The Artful Brigand always wanted the spring water. But the rest—” He was too anxious, too furious to even fidget, standing perfectly still. “I didn’t know.”

I was struggling to breathe. Underwater. Drowning all over again. “The abbess never told us how the spring works. How the dreams come. But it’s fearsome magic. When I Divined for you, when the gargoyle drowned me, I didn’t dream of the five Omens… I dreamed of the sixth. The moth. The Diviners vanished after that.” I put my hand to my chest. “Maybe I’ve known this entire time that something horrible had happened. That I’d never see them again.”

Rory shook his head. “If the spring upon the tor truly grants its dreamers signs, then it is cruel magic. Why show you something and give you no power to change it? There was nothing you could have done, Diviner.” Rory cusped the nape of his neck. “But you can do something now. Put the other Omens down. Destroy Aisling.” When I looked up, I saw fear in his eyes. “Just don’t give up.”

“I can’t keep going.”

“Yes, you can.”

I felt the truth in all my bruised and broken skin. “I always had strength—and ever just enough. Being a Diviner, being one of six… I loved it and hated it and bore both so well. And now that it’s all gone…” A great agony pressed behind my eyes. “Everything is too heavy.”

My vision blurred. Sorrow, I realized. That was the agony behind my eyes. Sorrow, who came like a shepherdess, leading a flock of tears. “I wish I was still a girl, made special for dreaming upon the tor.”

For the first time since before I could remember, I cried.

It hurt more than drowning.

Rory’s hand moved from my neck and hovered just at my face, not touching the tears that fell from beneath my shroud but guarding them against the breeze, as if they deserved their own tender pilgrimage down my cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for the Diviners. I’m sorry the people who best understood what you’ve endured were taken from you, and that so much of living without them feels like dying. But if you hadn’t left that tor—”

He said it with a deep familiarity. Like he’d thought to say it a million times, and the thinking of it had worn down all the sharp edges of saying it aloud. “I’d have come for you. I’d have killed or stolen or done any ignoble thing to see you free of that place. You are more special than you realize. I don’t even know your name”—he drew in a breath—“and I would do anything for you.”

I cried in front of him and hated myself for it. But the tears were hurried, as though they’d waited lifetimes to come. I cried and cried and then… I don’t know why I did what I did next. Maybe because my darling One—Two and Three and Four and Five—were gone, and I had never learned their names. Maybe because the Divination ceremony at Aisling meant something to me yet, or maybe I was merely forgetting my faith in dreams, in the Omens, in faith itself. And maybe, in all the forgetting…