The Knave and the Moon

Book 2: The Stonewater Kingdom

by Rachel Gillig

Genres: Dark Fantasy

Synopsis

Rachel Gillig, the queen of gothic romantasy, returns with higher stakes, darker mysteries, and deeper longings in this gorgeous sequel to the #1 New York Times bestselling sensation The Knight and the Moth.

Aisling Cathedral is in ruins. Rodrick Myndacious, Bartholomew, and Maude Bauer are rumored to be dead—and the king has taken Sybil Delling as his bride. To show off their union and solidify his power over Traum, Benji proposes a series of tournaments throughout the hamlets. Captive and drugged, Sybil remains determined to vanquish him as she once did the Omens, even if she destroys the kingdom’s faith—and herself—in the process.

But then a mysterious knave rises to the top of the tournament lists, a man with no name and no memory who may just be Sybil’s ticket to undoing Benji’s power. For in a land where stories repeat themselves, where a king can prove as cruel as a god, the only way to truly destroy the Stonewater Kingdom’s faith is to save it.

Release date: September 1, 2026

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 432

Sample

I had no hammer, no chisel, just the bareness of my palms and the bloodstains upon them.

The knights put me on a horse and ripped me from the tor. We rode down the holloway road, that tunnel of trees and brambles, with a haste so thundering it sent owls screeching and darting from the branches above. Vines lashed my armor. The road was a dark throat, swallowing our party down until it spat us back out among fields speckled with brightly dyed tents.

Coulson Faire’s pyres were not lit. Our horses clattered down the road, dirt and grass giving way to cobblestones, then the wooden slats of a drawbridge.

Ahead, a castle loomed.

Purple banners caught the wind. We crossed the drawbridge and dismounted in the bailey, and two knights took me by the arms. They did not have an easy time of it getting me off the horse.

Guards straightened their backs as we approached the castle doors. They wore helmets and chainmail, and bore spears with leaf-shaped blades—small enough to throw, short enough for close combat. “Diviner,” they whispered as I approached.

“There’s blood upon her,” another said. “Should we call for the surgeon, sire?”

“No.” The king pressed forward, stripping his gauntlets and throwing them on the bailey stones. “It’s not her blood.”

He was just about to step into the castle when I called after him. “Benji.”

He didn’t turn.

“Benedict.”

The king’s golden head lowered. Still, he kept his eyes forward except to mutter to one of his knights. “Put her where we discussed.”

Castle Luricht’s doors banged open.

It did not take me long to lose myself in the labyrinthian space. There were too many turns, too many stairs, too many suits of armor and faded purple rugs—and the knights at my side walked too quickly. I lost sight of Benji, and three guards took up my watch, leading me up one, two, three more staircases, then a ladder, then through a trapdoor, down a long hall and—

My throat closed. We reached an iron door that stretched the entire height of the corridor. And I knew with raw assuredness, like I knew when I was going to vomit, where I was. “Here?”

“That’s what His Majesty said,” a guard answered. “Somewhere out of the way. Safe.”

They unlocked the door and ushered me in. “We’ll be outside, Diviner,” another said. “Should you need anything.”

I stared at him until he could no longer stand it. The door was shut. Locked.

The room was long, hollow, the air thick within it. Situated on the top floor of the castle, where dampness from baths and laundry came from below and rain seeped in from above, the space was clammy, the wood planks beneath my feet supple. Fleshlike.

There were no furnishings, just mottled stains upon the floor. Without hearth or torches, the only light that touched the room came from the single barred window on the south wall. Behind it, a bare finger of silver gleamed, the moon’s aura smothered by clouds, its vibrancy choked.

I stared out the window. When the clouds thickened and the moon was gone, I rolled my wrists. My shoulders.

And began to cough. “Guards.”

Footsteps rattled outside my door. I clambered forward, lowering my hands to my knees as I peered like a thief through the door’s keyhole. Beyond, three shadows moved.

I coughed louder. Wet, choking sounds. “Please. I’m—sick. Need water.”

Iron grated against iron, and a key slid into the lock. When the door opened, revealing the three guards with spears, I swayed on my feet. Took a tumbling step forward.

And hit the first guard on the chin with the heel of my palm, knocking his head back.

He gasped—tottered—tripped on his own feet and fell. The second guard began to shout. A knee to the groin, an elbow to the jaw, and he joined his companion on the floor, wheezing and groaning.

The third guard managed to raise his spear—but not before my hand was a shackle upon his wrist. I twisted it, and he cried out. “Please. Don’t hurt me.”

“Drop your weapon.”

He did. When I asked the guard for his key, it didn’t matter that his spear was on the ground—he gave me what I asked for as if I’d held its tip to his throat.

“Go into the room,” I said. “Take your friends with you.”

By the arms, the ankles, the guard brought his groaning comrades into the room in turn, muttering what sounded like prayers to the Artful Brigand. When I laughed, putting the key into the lock, he looked up, eyes full of fear. “Diviner?”

“This room was his haunt. The Artful Brigand’s.” My laugh edged away, lost in a chill that took hold of my entire body. “He can’t hear you now.”

I slammed the door shut. Locked it.

And ran.

Once, in Aisling Cathedral, I’d walked on tiptoe, afraid to make the barest echo upon the cold stone floors. Now my boots pounded and my armor rattled, the sound of me immense, the mightiness of my body my final companion.

On into darkness I went, treading the same floor that the Artful Brigand, that wretched beast—that Omen—had once walked. Now a new kind of false god walked the path, and, if tonight went to plan, a far worse beast.

Me.

I didn’t know where to go, only that it must be down.

I raised the trapdoor and climbed down the ladder beneath it, then two flights of stairs, and suddenly I was in the heart of the castle, where the air was colder, the torchlight stronger, the walls decorated and the carpets intricately woven. I was indifferent to it all, my sights swinging from wall to wall—not for their adornments, but for a sign of something.

Of someone.

One flight, then another, I descended. Below, voices echoed, the castle full of verve despite the hour. Then, four flights below the Artful Brigand’s room, I came upon a corridor. There the curtains were wider, thicker, finer: a richer shade of purple. Even the air smelled better—aromatic, like citrus paired with herbs and meat fat. Those things alone might have told me I was in the right place.

That and the guards.

There were two of them, armed and pacing near the gilt door at the end of the corridor. Unfocused, slouched and playing with the straps of their leathers, they did not see me. Not at first. Then I came forward, my steps so heavy they rattled the walls, making the torches jump and the portraits quiver.

The guards snapped to attention, knuckles white on their spears. “Who is it?” said the one on the left.

“Where is the king?” I asked back.

“Abed. He aims to rest—Oh. Diviner.”

Their eyes went wide, the first guard’s jaw so loose I glimpsed dark holes where he’d lost several teeth. The second guard, who seemed equally incapable of forming words, stared fervently into my eyes until his own began to water.

“Open the door,” I told them.

“You should not be about,” said the second guard. “The king bade us to keep you secure atop the castle; it is not safe for you to wander unprotected. Let us take you back—”

“Open. The. Door.”

The first of the two fumbled with the latch, his hands useless as hooves, until the door opened as meekly as the lid to a music box. The guards cowered back into shadow, watching me as folk always watched Diviners in the Stonewater Kingdom: awestruck and afraid.

I slipped behind the door.

There was a wide hearth, a dark mantel, and dying embers—I could barely make out the shapes in the room. Carved furnishings. Walls with carefully crafted molding. There was a mirror, as tall and twice as wide as my body. When I passed it, my silver hair and armor looked like the moon had in the sky—a smudge of light in a despotic, infinite darkness.

No sound came but the beat of my heart. Then, in the center of the room, from a bed so huge it looked like a slumbering bear, I heard little snores. Fitful breathing.

Benedict Castor the Third rested on the bed. His golden hair was dark, freshly washed, and his eyes tightly shut. He lay like I imagined he would, curled in on himself as if to protect his vital organs. Shirtless, his bare shoulder peeked from beneath several thick quilts, and his skin was covered in gooseflesh. For a moment I thought about pulling the quilts up and covering him.

I ripped them away instead.

The king shuddered, holding tighter to himself, his eyes shooting open. “Who’s there?”

I leaned over him like a serpent over a nest of delicate blue eggs. “Who do you think, Benji?”

For the briefest moment, Benji’s muscles eased. A second later they were taut. “You startled me. Your eyes. I thought you were—”

“An Omen?”

He sat up. Held the blankets close. “How did you get in here?”

“I walked.”

Slowly, Benji’s left hand slipped beneath his pillow. “Did you kill the guards?”

“They cowed well enough.”

There was no more light in the room. The last ember in the king’s fire had died. “What do you—” Benji’s voice trembled. “What do you want, Diviner?”

“For you to look me in the eye. One last time.”

When he did, I saw a world in vivid blue waiting behind Benedict Castor’s eyes. I had no hammer, no chisel, to put to that world, only my sorrow, my fury, and so with bloodstained hands, inevitable as the serpent over the nest—

I struck.

The king shouted, but I already had him by the throat. Benji grasped my wrist. Twisted it. When that did not work, he withdrew his hand and struck me over the arm. “Please don’t,” came his choked entreaty. His voice was desperate, a frayed piece of string. “Please.”

My grip on his neck tightened. But then—his eyes. Gods. Those eyes.

The king had begun to cry. He looked up at me, searching for pity, for more wrath—I didn’t know—but it was as if I was peering through time at the boy who’d come to Aisling Cathedral, small and afraid. Who’d sat me down and told me the truth of Traum, of the Omens. Who’d put power in my hands and harnessed it.

The king, the boy, who always seemed to look up to me, was looking up to me still.

But then he struck me again, his fist finding the crook of my arm. Benji hit me once, twice, thrice, until my conviction fell away. I let go of his throat, and for a moment neither of us did anything but struggle to breathe.

“You should have killed me, too.” Despair pressed itself upon me with bruising force. “You should have killed me.”

“You’re already dead, Six,” Benji whispered. “That’s what makes you so special.”

The king pulled a stone coin from beneath his pillow. Tossed it into the air—

And vanished.

The door burst open.

The guards from my room and the two from outside shoved their way into the chambers. Behind them, armor glistening, stood a pair of knights. A woman with a pinched face and dark eyes, and a man with sand-colored hair and perfect teeth.

Tory Bassett and Hamelin Fischer took in the room, then turned their gazes on me. Tory’s dark eyes narrowed, and Hamelin held out his arm, the guards around him cowering. “Lost, Diviner?”

The two of them returned me to the top of the castle. Tory did not touch me, but Hamelin reached out every ten or so steps to softly graze my elbow. A reminder that he was there. A threat.

They led me up the final stairs to the highest floor. “You were as docile as a lamb all the way here.” Hamelin’s laugh rumbled behind me. “A ruse, I see.”

I stepped into the Artful Brigand’s room, keeping my back to him. Hamelin slammed the door shut, closing the three of us in together.

“That was foolish,” Tory said, clipped. “Waltzing around the castle. You’re an important woman—what if something had happened to you?”

I gave them nothing but my rigid spine.

“Benedict gathered the knights and told them everything a few hours ago.” Hamelin’s voice was close to my ear. “He told us that sprites attacked the cathedral, killing its abbess, its gargoyles, its Diviners. He said, before she died, the abbess gifted him five magical objects, all different in variety; tokens of gods that he used to reduce the sprites to pieces.”

His voice went low. “He also said that with Aisling gone, the spring buried, the only way to reach the Omens now is to look into your stone eyes.”

My stillness must have aggravated him, because Hamelin’s tone turned goading. “A shame about your pet gargoyle. About Maude and Myndacious. The lot of them, crushed by rubble.”

My entire body locked.

“Too easy a death for a prick like Rory if you ask me—”

I turned on my heel, shoving Hamelin so hard he hit the floor. “Get out.”

His armor groaned as he struggled to a stand. He stared at my stone eyes, fear wafting off him like smoke. Tory picked him off the ground and led him to the door. “Get some sleep, Diviner,” she said. “The ceremony begins in the morning.”

“What ceremony?”

Hamelin closed the door. I heard the click of iron, and then… nothing.

I hauled myself to a dark corner of the room and lay with my arms wrapped around my knees as well as my armor allowed. So this would be Traum’s new story, then. Its new lie. That sprites had destroyed Aisling Cathedral. That the only magic that remained in the world was the stone objects the Omens had once held—coin, inkwell, oar, chime, loom stone.

And me.

Amazing how the boy-king could take everything from me and make me holy in the same hour.

I lay on the floor of the Artful Brigand’s chamber, weighed down by certainty. All that I loved was gone, and all that I’d done ridding the kingdom of false gods had been for naught. The cathedral had fallen, but its shadow remained over Traum, and not even the tallest building or birch tree or mountain peak could pierce its darkness to reach the light.

I was a failed Diviner, and barely even a knight, but I knew well enough how to make a vow. There in the Artful Brigand’s chamber, tears journeying from my eyes, I swore that for what he’d done, Benedict Castor the Third would die. Tonight’s failure was a gift; death in the dark was too good for him. Whatever tomorrow promised, I’d kill the king of Traum the same way I’d Divined for him at Aisling Cathedral.

With a ceremony.

I shut my eyes. When I wept, the noise in my throat was the same as when I’d drowned in Aisling’s spring water, and when it finally faded, I spent the night listening for things I would never hear again. The rhythm of the other Diviners, breathing in their sleep. The gargoyle, humming out of tune. Maude’s steady laugh.

Rory’s voice.

Tears dripped from my jaw, wetting the chain netting of my coif and then slipping into the cavern of my breastplate, where they pooled and chilled me until I began to shiver.

When sleep finally came, I was wondering at stories—at truths and falsities and how neither kept me company, but both kept me wondering. What had become of Maude? Would the cracks in Bartholomew’s body spread until he was nothing but shattered stone?

Had Rory succumbed to his wound?

Was it a lie if I told myself that, before he slept the endless sleep, Rodrick Myndacious, the heretic, the beautiful rogue—the best knight I’d known—hadn’t bothered calling out to gods or men? Was it wrong to hope that, just before he died…

… He’d said my name instead?

The Artful Brigand’s chamber opened and gray morning light poured in. Above me, four silhouettes loomed.

Hamelin Fischer from the Fervent Peaks, Tory Bassett from the Cliffs of Bellidine, Dedrick Lange from the Seacht, and a fourth knight with short, dark hair and copper skin and charcoal around his eyes. Samuel Eichel, I remembered. Son of Helena Eichel, the noblewoman from the Chiming Wood who had presided over the king’s ceremony. The one we’d stolen the Faithful Forester’s chime from. The one who’d been eaten by a birke.

“We’re to take off your armor,” Tory said to me.

They tried not to touch me as well as the task allowed, but their eyes were upon me, searching mine, as if they might see an Omen in the pallid nothingness of my gaze. When breastplate and cuisses and greaves and all the other pieces were off, all four led me away. The last thing I saw in the Artful Brigand’s chamber was my armor, crumpled and spineless upon the floor like it was my own dead body.

They took me to a washroom, where women scrubbed my skin until it was pink. And while they each searched my gaze, nothing in their own indicated they even saw me. They, like the rest, had undoubtedly been told they might glimpse an Omen if they peered long enough at my eyes.

My scalp was cleaned and my hair combed. Tory returned then. In her arms, long and white like a sallow eel, was a silk dress.

And I understood why the armor had been left behind. The ceremony that had been intimated. Today, I would not be a Diviner or a knight, but a martyr. If not the holiest, then surely the most tragic—the unwilling bride.

Today was my wedding day.

Six hours earlier

The door between sleep and waking did not open readily, and I made no attempt to shift it. Slowly, there came the feel of my pulse, its greeting a thud, thud in my ears and throat. Annoying. I’d made a friend of the dreams I’d already forgotten and didn’t yet care to bid them goodbye. There was comfort in the subdual of my senses. Peace, in oblivion.

Two seconds later, it shattered.

“What an arduous process it is to wait,” said a strange, jarring voice. “I say, Bartholomew, I am not made to be kept on my fingers like this.”

A woman’s voice sounded, low and choked. “His bleeding has only just stopped.”

Muscles strained throughout my body. I kept my eyes shut, but there was no holding sleep captive. I was waking up. Waking—

To nothing.

My mind was a cavern, its walls made of scratchy wool. I reached into it and touched nothing but an uncomfortable bewilderment. I had no past, no present—not even a name.

The thud, thud of my pulse hastened. Was I injured? There didn’t seem to be any pain. I lay on my back, and my spine felt straight and unbroken, but then I wondered how I would know if my spine was broken, so I wiggled my toes and felt the confines of boots. All right, then. My feet were working, and I was fitted in clothes, and those clothes were a burden—whatever I was wearing was wearing me. Heavy, stiff.

Armor, came instinctual knowledge from nowhere. You’re in armor, and you’re lying on grass, and the two voices overhead could very well be the reason you can’t remember your own name. Get away from them. You’re good at running.

Was I?

I didn’t know.

I didn’t know anything, except that I was afraid.

Meanwhile the craggy voice carried on, its tone lecturing. “I don’t expect there’s any particular rules about waking after consuming the tor’s spring water, except perhaps that it makes everyone frightened and dim-witted and open to suggestion. Not me, mind. When I woke from that forever sleep, I was the model of bravery and intellect and unsuggestion. I don’t remember any of it, but—”

“Bartholomew,” the woman said. “How long? Roughly?”

“Some time yet, I’m afraid.” There was a tutting sound. “I can always smell when a dreamer is going to wake, and this one smells entirely of blood and not sickly sweet at all. He’ll need several more hours.”

I opened my eyes.

A stone monster and a woman loomed over me. When they saw that I was awake, their gazes widened. The monster opened his mouth, let out a bloodcurdling shriek—

I ran.

Stumbling over myself, heavy in armor, I fled into an open place; a windy slope upon a reaching, rocky hill. A breeze blew, whispering through bromegrass and gowan flowers and over the hard backs of pale stones. Above, the night sky stretched out, painted an incomparable shade of purple and lit by its denizen, a silver moon.

Voices called behind me.

My breath came in short, juddering gasps. I ran for all I was worth, but breastplate and greaves and pauldrons slowed me, and fear made me clumsy. I tripped between stones. Fell. Looked over my shoulder—

And saw a great stone bat with one vengeful wing spread out behind it.

My chest seized, a mule’s kick of terror hitting me in the sternum. “The fuck?” I scurried to my feet, then slipped on grass.

The woman chased me. She was middle aged, with dark hair and charcoal smeared around her eyes and a lethal-looking axe in her right hand. She ran at me with a strange limping gait, like she was injured. “Wait!” she called. “Rory, it’s all right—”

“I don’t know you.” My voice was the snarl of a cornered animal. “Get away from me.”

They kept coming. The stone bat began to clap. “What a sneaky little worm you are! We thought you were dreaming.”

I was. I had to be. I shut my eyes and crawled through grass on shaking limbs, my blood rushing. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

“Please.” I was curled around myself, clutching my side, the chainmail slick with blood, though I felt no wound, no pain. “Don’t—don’t—”

The stone bat got to me first. Fangs peeked from his lips and claws tipped his fingers. A dusting of limestone followed him like a hazy cloud, its source the jagged edge on his shoulder that had no doubt once been his left wing. He crouched, examining me with what might have been scrupulousness were it not for his stone eyes, which were impossible to read. “Settle yourself, Bartholomew,” he said to me. “Your dream is at an end.”

The woman came beside him. She dropped her axe and fell to both knees at my side, putting one hand on my shoulder and pressing the other upon my breastplate directly over my heart. “Breathe. You’ve had a terrible shock.”

She looked so severe with her heavy brow and sharp nose and fearsome green eyes. When she pressed her palm harder against my heart, I was overcome by the feeling that she was braver than all the world, and that she would stand between it and me if I needed her to. “You’re Rodrick Myndacious,” she said, her voice like iron. “You’re a knight, and so am I. My name is Maude Bauer. You don’t remember me yet, but you will. I’m here to keep you safe. I’ve always kept you safe.”

The wind was cold against my cheeks, my eyes full of tears. “I don’t know who I am.”

The bat’s voice quieted. “Would you like me to tell you the story?”

I looked into his stone gaze.

“You’ve heard it before, I’m afraid. That is how stories are. They echo to stay fed; the snake, consuming its own tail.” This close, I could see that it wasn’t just his wing that was broken. There were cracks, like veins, running down the entire left side of his body. “It begins where it ended and ends where it began: here, on the tor. And now you are as an Omen, as a Diviner—a holy thing in the Stonewater Kingdom, and a contradiction. Strange, special, new—and yet ever repeating.” He sighed. “All this is true, I’m sorry to say, for the exact reason you cannot remember who you are.”

The bat leaned close, the moon a pale eye over us both. “You’re dead, Bartholomew.”

Maude Bauer and the stone bat took me away with a frantic kind of haste, peering over their shoulders and flinching like the landscape behind us bore a whip. We hurried over rocks and through brambles, running and panting and tripping until finally the looming shadow of the tor was gone, and nothing stood before us but a great open moorland.

I fell onto cold ground and coughed up bile. I must have fallen asleep like that—keeled over, fisting the ground like it was the only thing keeping me from falling off the earth—because when I woke there were clumps of grass in my hands.

“It’s the spring water,” Maude told me, touching a silver flask on her belt. “It’s made you sick.”

“How?” I rasped, though I might have asked what or why or when, such was my bewilderment. “How am I dead?”

Maude put up her hand, silencing me. A moment later she was prone on the ground next to me, and so was the gargoyle. There was a sound like thunder, a heaving rumble, then several sharp shrieks. When I peered through grass, my heart caught in my throat.

A herd of creatures moved over the moorland, fifty paces away. Dozens of them. Some looked like animals, deer or bovine, but there was always something uncanny in their slender limbs, their limping gaits, their hollowed cheeks and eyes that made them unmistakably other. Some walked on all fours while others traveled on two legs or with none at all—there were treelike creatures who had nothing but roots to travel on—while others flew on feather-less wings. Some were small as rodents, others the size of bears.

But none was as great as the boar with rocks and grass growing from its back that led them along.

“Sprites,” Maude murmured. “A whole lot of them.” Her brow knit. “Strange for them to travel together.”

“Stranger still that they should travel at all,” the gargoyle said. “Where do creatures go when nowhere is safe enough to call home?”

Maude didn’t answer. When the thundering and shrieking stopped, the earth and the sky clear of sprites, she helped both the gargoyle and me to our feet and carried on. We passed over windswept hills, the breeze wet, the clouds dark, but it never rained. Beyond, the moorland seemed endless, no trees, no road, just rocks and grass that slithered over my greaves.

That evening, when we stopped to sleep after hours of walking, Maude took to her axe, sharpening it to perfection, then staring down at its blade like she was swearing some kind of fealty to it. And the gargoyle… I didn’t understand exactly what he was doing, but he went off to his own little corner of our rock and dirt and grass camp and simply cried.

The whole world unnerved me, his sadness most of all. “What’s wrong with him?”

Maude did not look up from her axe.

“He doesn’t even have real eyes,” I muttered. “How can he weep?”

“He has his reasons.”

The next morning, I jolted awake from a dream that left no imprint upon my mind. But my eyes were full of tears, and I was panting and shivering and curled in on myself, both hands pressing against the left side of my waist, where old blood upon my chainmail had turned brown and dried and begun to flake away.

The gargoyle sat beside me. “Hush, Bartholomew.” He patted my shoulder. “There is no pain now.”

We walked in silence, stopping occasionally to eat meager berries and other flora that did nothing to sate me. On the morning of the fourth day, I heard a rushing sound. An hour later, a large river came into view. When Maude saw it, the strain in her shoulders eased a whit.

“I suppose you’re not going to tell me where we are or where we’re going,” I said, kneeling, my stomach rumbling as I shoveled river water into my dried-out mouth.

“We’re between the Fervent Peaks and the Chiming Wood,” Maude said. “That there is the Tenor River.”

She moved upstream and crouched by the water, dropping her hand into its depths in quick intervals, trying to catch a fish, the rest of her answer as clipped as it had been the ten times she’d previously given it. “We’re going to my house, Petula Hall, where it’s safe. After that—” Her hand darted into the river with a splash and returned empty. “There’s a stone object. A magical loom stone. It will bring your memory back. I’ll find a way to get it. Everything will make sense after that.” Not even the steady rush of water could mask the tremor in her voice. “No need to tell you the whole bitter story twice.”

My stomach rumbled. “Difficult to have faith in a knight who can’t even catch her own lunch.”

Maude flinched, and the gargoyle slapped his foot against the river like a petulant child, making an enormous splash. “Don’t be a donkey! Can’t you see she’s in anguish, puzzled with guilt?”

Maude kept her eyes on the river. She did not look like how I imagined a knight would—weapon down, kneeling by the water, cheeks red with shame. “He means riddled,” she murmured. “I’m riddled with guilt.”

“Why?”

“Really, Bartholomew. I’ve explained this already.” The gargoyle sat near me at the river’s edge, patting my head with exaggerated slowness like I was his dim-witted pet. “We are running away from that boy in his big gold crown, because he broke my wing and killed you and stole our beloved Bartholomew from us.”

He hadn’t explained that. Neither of them had. “And in this scenario, Bartholomew is… who, exactly? Me? You? That stump over there?”

The gargoyle stuck his nose up and made a hmpf sound. “Bartholomew is Bartholomew and I am her squire.” He reached up as he spoke, idly petting the crumbling root of his left wing. A chunk of limestone the size of my fist fell from his back. “I don’t see how I can be any more clear.”

Perhaps his injury had addled his mind. I waved at the cracks in his body. “Do they hurt?”

He faced me. Said, in a wistful voice, “No. And also, terribly.”

Maude called from upriver. “We’re not catching anything today.” She picked up her axe. “Let’s go.”

On we walked, three tiny specks in a vast, windy land.

Hills dropped into valleys, and both were covered in clumps of granite. We strayed back into the moorland, never far enough that we couldn’t hear the song of the roaring river, never near enough to anything that might be remotely mistaken for a road. Up and down we went, Maude ever at the lead. Then, upon the grassy crest of a knoll, she stopped mid-step.

The gargoyle came to stand next to her, and I followed. We looked down into a valley, and for a moment I didn’t know what we were looking at. There were rocks and bromegrass and a few patches of pale gowan flowers. But then I l