The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)

by Rachel Gillig

I’ll tell it to you as best I can and promise to be honest in my talebearing. If I’m not, that’s hardly my fault. To tell a story is in some part to tell a lie, isn’t it?

One statue held a coin, another an inkwell. One bore an oar, another a chime, and the final a loom stone.

I looked down at my hands and feet and breasts and stomach and wondered as I often did how all that pain fit inside me.

“Did he just try to smite me, Bartholomew?”

“Brawling on the east side.” Rory’s smile vanished, his dark eyes skittering to a halt over on my face. My freshly bleeding bottom lip. He stared a moment, then another. Ever so slowly, his gaze rose to the guard at my side. “Which lowly picket of the Seacht struck her?”

“Her care came with conditions. You bent yourself to fit them, and now… now you see yourself as this terrible burden. Like you’re nothing if you’re not the best, the most useful version of yourself.”

“It’s not true, you know,” he said. “You don’t have to be good, or useful, for someone to care about you.”

You want to throw me down. And I, prideful, disdainful, godless, want to drag you into the dirt with me.

‘Traum’s histories are forged by those who benefit from them, and seldom those who live them.’”

Loneliness touched everything. And the aching beauty of the peaks, the pools, the incomparable night sky, made it so much worse.