Sybil Delling (or “Six”) is forcibly taken by knights to Castle Luricht. The knights do not know her name but refer to her fearfully as “Diviner.” King Benedict “Benji” Castor the Third orders her locked in a damp room at the top of the castle, which she recognizes as the former quarters of the Artful Brigand, one of the god-like Omens who ruled over the corrupt religious order of Aisling Cathedral before Benji, Sybil, and the knight Rodrick “Rory” Myndacious overthrew the order. 

Sybil feigns a coughing fit to lure the guards and then swiftly attacks and incapacitates them, locking them inside. She finds Benji’s chambers and attempts to strangle him, enraged that he has betrayed her and Rory in order to consolidate his own power, but she relents when his terrified expression reminds her of the boy she once knew. When she says, “You should have killed me, too,” Benji replies, “You’re already dead, Six. That’s what makes you so special” (9). He then uses a magical stone coin to vanish.

Knights Tory Bassett and Hamelin Fischer recapture her and return her to the room. Hamelin reveals the lie that the king has told the public: that sprites destroyed Aisling Cathedral, killing its inhabitants, including the gargoyles and other Diviners. Benji claimed that the abbess gifted him five magical objects—tokens of gods—before she died and that the only way to communicate with the Omens now is to look into Sybil’s stone eyes. Left alone, Sybil wonders fearfully what has become of Maude, whether the cracks in the gargoyle’s body will spread, and whether Rory succumbed to his wound after Benji stabbed him in the confusion of the battle over Aisling Cathedral. She vows to kill Benji. The next morning, knights remove her armor, and she’s given a white silk dress. She realizes that the king intends to marry her.

Six hours earlier, Rory awakens on a grassy hill with no memory of who he is. After seeing a woman holding an axe and a batlike stone gargoyle with a single wing standing over him, he flees in terror. The gargoyle swiftly catches up with him, and as he begs for his life, the gargoyle addresses him as “Bartholomew” and tells him that his dream is at an end. The woman catches up, kneels beside him, and introduces herself as a fellow knight named Maude Bauer, telling him that his full name is Rodrick Myndacious. The gargoyle then informs a bewildered Rory, still addressing him as “Bartholomew,” that he is dead.

Maude, Rory, and the gargoyle (whose name is Bartholomew, though he refers to himself as “Bartholomew’s squire” and addresses every trusted person, including Maude and Rory, as “Bartholomew”) travel across a moorland, stopping briefly to hide from a herd of sprites—huge, animal-like beings that Bartholomew implies are unjustly persecuted by humans. Maude explains that they’re heading to her home, Petula Hall, where she hopes a magical loom stone will restore Rory’s memory. They encounter the corpse of a giant mountain sprite with gowan flowers growing from its wounds; Bartholomew attributes the killing to the knighthood. Maude confesses that after Rory died, having been stabbed in the stomach by Benji, she used water from the tor’s spring—intended to lure out the Heartsore Weaver, one of the six Omens—to resurrect him at his own request. The process caused his amnesia and turned his eyes a pale, stonelike color.

After an encounter with locals who recognize his pale eyes as being like the Diviner’s, Maude tells Rory that before his death, he had a romantic partner named Sybil Delling, whom Maude characterizes as exceptionally strong and brave. Rory is devastated to learn that Sybil is now with King Benji, the man who killed him. Maude explains that the king is holding Sybil captive as a “holy symbol” to legitimize his power and vows that the four of them—Rory, Maude, Bartholomew, and Sybil—will unite to bring the king down.

The group arrives in the Chiming Wood to find Maude’s home occupied by the king’s knights. They take refuge in a sacred grove, where they’re confronted by a birke, a treelike sprite that eats eyes. Maude soon returns with her blacksmith, Victor, and food. Victor tells them what Benji has told the public: that she and Rory were killed in the destruction of Aisling Cathedral. The group is then ambushed by a dozen knights led by a man named Rothspar, who remembers Maude and is astonished to find that she is alive. Rothspar recognizes Rory by his voice and stance. While he speaks to Maude with evident fondness, he appears to hold Rory in disdain. 

As the knights attempt to capture the group, a fight breaks out. Maude fights with great skill, defeating many knights singlehandedly. Rory, too, discovers that he is a skilled fighter, and when Victor throws him a hammer, he uses it to dispatch several of the attacking knights. Rothspar knocks off Rory’s helmet while grabbing for his gold ear bands, revealing his pale eyes. The battle is interrupted when three birke sprites emerge from the woods and begin killing the knights; Victor and Fig also play a role, knocking the fleeing Rothspar to the ground so that the birke can consume him. The group escapes to Petula Hall. Maude produces a royal invitation announcing a kingdom-wide tournament pilgrimage that will conclude with the king’s marriage to the “last Diviner of Aisling Cathedral” (42)—Sybil. Maude declares that she and Rory will enter the tournament to reach the king and rescue Sybil.