“I don’t care that you steal things, Rory.”

His shoulders eased a whit, but his gaze remained strained. “Then why are you looking at me differently?”

“How could you say I was beautiful?” My whisper was a horrible rasp. “My eyes. I’m like them.”

It took him a moment to catch up. When he did, his face was a charming conflict of relief and concern. “It’s Aisling’s spring water,” he said. “You’ve been swallowing it for ages.”

I didn’t want to look at him. “I guessed they’d be horrible. That they might be stone. That dreaming and drowning had altered me in some vital way. When the Ardent Oarsman knocked off my helmet and glimpsed them, he dropped his guard, like he couldn’t fathom what he was seeing.” My chest was heavy. “Maybe he couldn’t believe, beneath gossamer, that a Diviner and an Omen were not so different.”

Rory’s throat hitched and his voice hardened, like he was trying to steel me with his assuredness. “You’re nothing like them, Sybil.”

“I needed to know. I’ll never be able to see myself clearly if it is ever through Aisling’s shroud. But knowing you’d seen my eyes and had left the room… I thought maybe you’d changed your mind about me. That you were repulsed or regretful—”

Rory was across the room in a moment. His tray hit the table with a raucous clatter and he ripped the shroud from my hands, tossing it onto the floor. He kissed me. Hard. “You don’t like me when I’m a good knight,” he said over my lips. “And you don’t like me when I’m bad.”

I let out a startled laugh, nodding at the mess of blankets upon his bed. “Evidence to the contrary.”

He grinned against my skin, then withdrew to look into my eyes. “You are beautiful, Sybil Delling. So fucking beautiful. You’re strong and smart and noble.” He grasped the nape of my neck, and I wondered if he liked to touch me there because he could aim my gaze. “But I think I like it best when you’re wrong.”

I shook my head. But I was a poor player at derision—I smiled.

“I left to get us food.” Another kiss, this time on my cheek. “I haven’t changed my mind about anything.” Another, on my neck. “I’m so far the opposite of repulsed or regretful about you that I’m lost.”

Rory took my hand. Put my fingers to his lips. “Don’t go.” The moon shone over us, just a young man and a young woman standing together, a strange sacrality between us that had nothing to do with portents or Aisling Cathedral or Omens. “I want to keep looking at you,” he murmured into my knuckles, “all night.”

“And the rules?” My pulse was a torrid rush. “The knighthood bans bed relations. You said so yourself.”

“I never said anything like that.”

I pulled his hair.

Rory slouched forward, smiling. “It’s not a vow. Just an arbitrary rule. Fuck the rules, Sybil.” His eyelids grew heavy. “Fuck me, and fuck the rules.”

We unraveled all night long.

We lost our gods, our armor, our own names. We spent ourselves on each another, completely and utterly vanishing into the craft of desire. Completely, utterly—

Gone.

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The Cliffs of Bellidine

Loom stone.

Only love, only heartbreak, can weave the thread of all that came, and all that is yet to come.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME

I didn’t want the rest of the world to see my stone eyes. Not yet. I wore my shroud, and my armor, when we rode out of the Chiming Wood to the fifth and final hamlet—the Cliffs of Bellidine, where the Heartsore Weaver dwelled with her magic loom stone.

Not all the knights rode with us. Several stayed to assist the folk of the Wood with the reconstruction of their sacred glen after the sprite attack. A memorial for Helena Eichel would be built, the glen cleansed of blood and the remains of the birke.

Benji paid eighty gold coins of his own money to see it done.

“Good of him to do that,” I said to Maude, settling her bandaged body into a cart for travel.

Behind me, someone chuckled.

Hamelin was there, saddling the horse to our wagon.

I walked over. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. Only—” He smiled, like he was telling a joke I was not in on. “Benedict’s hamlet is Coulson Faire. He’s taken it to heart, that creed. ‘The only god of men is coin.’”

He handed the reins to the cart driver, then left to find his own horse.

Folk of the Wood came to watch us go, many dropping their hoods—pressing their axes to their chests in salute—to see Maude go by. Mouths turned, faces drawn by adoration and reverence lining the road, tales of her bravery abounding, the awestruck words sprite killer echoing through the trees as we rode out of the Chiming Wood.

She was in pain. That was why she preferred the cart and not her horse. The morning surrendered to day, and while the roll of the cart wheels and the wind in the trees and even the off-tune hum of the gargoyle was a soothing lull, Maude could not get comfortable, twisting and wincing in her seat.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“In truth?” She was looking up at the trees, the fingers of her uninjured hand idling over her axe. “Like a fool.”

“You’ll heal, Maude. You’ll get better, and you’ll be useful again and not feel so helpless—”

She put up a hand, stopping me. “If I was fixed on being the most useful version of myself”—she gestured at her bandages—“it would be all too easy to hate my body when it was not. I don’t. People who love you for your usefulness don’t love you at all.”

Her words shamed me. “Then why do you feel like a fool?”

She sighed. “Because my mother killed sprites, and her mother did, too, and they were noble women. We grow up, searching our guardians for what is right and what is true, thinking they have all the answers, like they already understand the signs of life. But they don’t. No one does.”

She looked away. “I see how Benji is, desperate to achieve what his grandfather could not. How you are, fighting to unstitch all the lies the abbess sewed into you. And while I am a hunter, a killer, like all Bauer women, I should have looked harder at myself and less at them.” There were tears in her eyes. “I always hated killing sprites. They are just creatures, trying to live, like the rest of us. Maybe I never knew that until I killed the Faithful Forester and finally felt what a righteous kill could be like. But I kept slaughtering sprites. I might kill one now, if it came onto the road.” Daylight dappled in through the trees, painting her tears gold. “It’s hard to see who I am when I am lost in what’s expected of me.”

I brushed my thumb over my shroud. If it would not pain her, I’d lay my head in Maude’s lap and let her tears fall onto my face, because it would cleanse something in me no spring water ever had. “I hated dreaming,” I said. “I hated it so much I decided I’d be perfect at it so that no one ever knew.”

She faced me. “Why do we do these things to ourselves?”

“The answer is rather simple.” The gargoyle swatted birch branches as we passed them by. “When you do the right thing for the wrong reason, no one praises you. When you do the wrong thing for the right reason, everyone does, even though what is right and wrong depends entirely on the story you’re living in. And no one says they need recognition or praise or love, but we all hunger for it. We all want to be special.”

“That is a very keen thing to say, gargoyle.” Maude put her uninjured hand on his shoulder. “How is it you came to know so much more about life than the rest of us?”