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

by Rachel Gillig

“Something the bastard conveniently failed to mention while his mouth was between my legs,”

“Of course knights keep rules.” One rubbed her eyes. “The utmost being never mention wives. The next—” “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I offered.

“Which is more intricate?” he mused. “The designs of men, trying to reach gods, or that of gods, trying to reach men?”

“What the honest fuck are these doors made of?”

“It is all the same, then. Contentedness. Truth and honesty and virtue. Omens. They are all stories, and we”—he gestured to the Seacht’s climbing walls—“tread the pages within them.”

“I wanted to show you that I wasn’t too good for a knight—just too good for you.”

“You want to throw me down,” Rory said, eyelids dropping as he whispered into my parted lips. “And I, prideful, disdainful, godless, want to drag you into the dirt with me.”

there was no more time to train, no more time to prepare— And hardly any to live.

“If you were to bite down,” I said to the sky, “your bottom teeth would leave a crooked mark, unique as your fingerprint.”

“I will carry them for you, Bartholomew. I will shoulder any weight you give me.”

Oh, I thought, a great swelling in my chest. To be a gargoyle. To be my gargoyle.

“Just don’t give up.” “I can’t keep going.” “Yes, you can.”

“For the sake of my sanity, put Bartholomew out of her misery. Tell her you’re in love with her.”

“I’m about to pass my own wind if they don’t wrap this up,” the gargoyle muttered.

“Don’t fucking touch her again.”

“If you value your friend when he fights your battles for you—when he is rogue and ruthless—you must value him when he is gentle, too. Otherwise you do not value him at all.”

It is easier, swearing ourselves to someone else’s cause than to sit with who we are without one.”

“I think I would like to stop promising myself away, or else there will be nothing left of me to give,

“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.”