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

by Rachel Gillig

“No one’s as strong as you, is that it, Diviner?” “Put you on your back at Coulson Faire easy enough, didn’t I?” That got a smile out of him. A moment later I was in the air, slung over his shoulder like a dead deer. I swore and he chuckled, glass crunching beneath his boots as he moved through the room. “Threw you on that bed easy enough, too,” he murmured.

“You don’t have to be good, or useful, for someone to care about 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.”

I thought he’d laugh at me. Or be incredulous, like he’d been when I told him I didn’t have shoes. And that was my own fault, thinking I’d charted him—that I could predict his derision or humor or humanity. He opened another door to himself every time.

There was a world behind Rory’s dark eyes. It was as if he could see everything all at once when he looked at me, and it was far too much, but he wanted all of it.

“So if I were to throw it rough side up, let’s say, at your head—” “You’d be picking the pieces of my brain off Benji’s cloak.” “Not much of a mess, then.”

I was losing my faith in everything. But the two of us meeting… it felt almost divine.

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

“It’s hard to see who I am when I am lost in what’s expected of me.”