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

by Rachel Gillig

“But the sixth Omen bore no stone object. It revealed nothing of itself at all, appearing only as a pale moth on tender wing. Some say it shows itself the moment you are born, others believe it comes just before you die. Which is true”—she opened her palms, like two pans of a scale—“we cannot know. We may read their signs, but it is not our place to question the gods. The moth is mercurial, distant—never to be known, even by Diviners.”

I told myself it was better sharpening the qualities that made me divine than those that made me human, even if, in a deep, ugly place, I worried I’d made that choice because I did not know how to be human.

“Swords and armor are nothing to stone.”

I wondered why. Why didn’t the Omens speak to me like this? In a melody or a spin or the heartbeat of a drum? Not in the spring, in dreams, where I was in pain and afraid, but like this, loose and infinite, when my soul was split open and thrown skyward in delight.

There was blood on his bottom lip. Some near his left brow as well. The charcoal around his eyes was smeared, staining his sweat black. I’d never seen a knight so filthy—so physically degraded by his craft. He looked entirely ignoble. I couldn’t look away.

compassion is a craft.

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

“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 thought I must be the stupidest woman alive, that I’d spent so much time fighting with him when I could have been fighting with his lips instead.

Daylight dappled in through the trees, painting her tears gold. “It’s hard to see who I am when I am lost in what’s expected of me.”

“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.”