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

by Rachel Gillig

To the child in each of us, yearning to be special. Take my hand, you strange little creature, and together we shall walk beyond the wall.

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.

“Six maidens upon the wall. Diviners!”

A horse whickered from below. Stalled on the road, a final knight remained. His horse had come to a full stop and was chewing noisily on something it had found in the greenery beside the road. My apple. The knight tried to spur the animal on, but the horse, grunting its contentedness, was having a love affair with the apple. It did not budge.

“I was chastising an idiot.” “A happy pastime, as you’ve proven to me on many occasions. But, the king is upon us, with nary a warning. The utter gall of men.”

A coin, an inkwell, an oar, a chime, and a loom stone. The sixth and final window was centered on the east wall—an enormous rose window, fixed with thousands of pieces of stained glass. Its design was different than the others, depicting no stone object, but rather a flower with five peculiar petals that, when I studied them, looked all the world like the delicate wings of a moth.

The spring I stood in was the holiest place in Traum, and yet I was in darkness.

The difference was— A bride does not hold a knife.

“We know Traum and its hamlets like our own five fingers. Coulson Faire, the hamlet of merchants. The scholarly city-heart—the Seacht—the hamlet of scribes. The Fervent Peaks, near the mouth of our river, the hamlet of fishers. The cosseted birch forest, the Chiming Wood, where the foresters dwell. The florid Cliffs of Bellidine, occupied by weavers.”

“The Omen who bore a stone coin, the child named the Artful Brigand. The Omen fitted with the inkwell was christened the Harried Scribe. The Omen who wielded a stone oar was called the Ardent Oarsman. The Faithful Forester carries the chime.” She pointed at the last arched window. “And the Heartsore Weaver employs her sacred loom stone.”

“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.”

And for some perverse reason, I liked that. Knowing I could hold so much pain without anyone being the wiser made me feel… Strong.

Were he to bite me, I imagined the indent would be as unique as his fingerprint. What a horrible thought.

“My armor may dent, my sword may break, but I will never diminish. Isn’t that their creed?”

But just as we hid our eyes, our names, and the illness we felt after dreaming, it was important for us Diviners to hide our hearts from the strangers we bedded. To encourage the air of detached mysticism our profession required—oracles, seen and revered but never known. Divine in public, human in private.

“Swords and armor are nothing to stone.”

He’d drawn fresh charcoal around his eyes and secured his black hair with a strip of leather. His clothes were clean, and there was even a whit of warmth in his cheeks. Daylight, and an obvious bath, had made a new man of him. I had the rousing vision of crashing my hammer onto his skull.

“Six Diviners, just… ambling down the road,” Maude said. “Quite the spectacle,” Rory muttered. “We’ll wear cloaks,” I bit back.

King Castor and Maude and everyone else in the commons sat frozen, some mid-bite, transfixed by the Diviner and the knight putting on a proper show.

Coin. The only portent, the only prosperity—the only god of men—is coin.

The king’s castle was near, yet it was coin that reigned.

“I wouldn’t worry over it. Knights are shooting stars, Six. They come and go. But you and me, our sisterhood of Diviners—we’re the moon.” She smiled. “We’re eternal.”

He was smiling—sickeningly handsome. His sneers, it seemed, he reserved only for me.

“I will tell you the story I know someday, Bartholomew. Would that we were living one of your tales instead. Would that things were different for you and me.”

But all he said, mournful, was, “Would that things were different.”

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.

“Swords and armor,” came a voice, “are nothing to stone.”

“Which is more intricate?” he mused. “The designs of men, trying to reach gods, or that of gods, trying to reach men?” My hammer collided with a chunk of granite. “What is either to the intricacies of women, who reach both?”

“Fear is not an outward-pointing compass, my girl. You should not let it guide your way. The Omens—their signs—are the only true measure of what is to come.”

He plucked a flower from the side of the road and examined its petals as he walked. “Why not?”

The abbess had told me fear was not an outward-pointing compass. And maybe that was true. My own fear was deep within me, piled so high it had begun to rot, emanating its own putrid heat.

“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.

Rory’s thumb was on his bottom lip, tracing a smile.

Rodrick Myndacious was many things, and two of them vital. He was a blasphemer, and a mortal one at that. Flesh and blood and bone. Decidedly not a god.

Nothing but ink and the persuasive quill can devise what is true.

“Two travelers.” “Much obliged.” Letters scratched onto parchment. “Occupations?” Rory looked back at me, lip curling. “A knight and his lady.” “That,” I snapped, slipping from the saddle, “may be the worst thing you’ve said of me.” “That you know of.”

The gargoyle landed upon grass. Sneezed, then toppled. “Did that man just call me foul, Bartholomew?” “He mistook you for a bird.” “An even greater slander!”

“Swords and armor are nothing to stone.”

“No.” “Why not?” “No is a sufficient answer.”

Knowledge is a wellspring, and I happily drink from it.”

“You’re remarkably difficult to like.” “You’d like me better if you called me Rory.” “I’d like you better if you were on your back again.” He smiled. An unfamiliar heat burrowed into my face. “From throwing you and your inferior strength down, obviously.” “Loud and clear, Diviner. I hear you loud and clear.”

“For nothing but ink and the persuasive quill can devise what is true.”

“It sounds awful when I say it out loud.” “True things often do.”

“I think contentedness,” I said bitterly, “is just a story we tell ourselves.”

“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.”

We will only ever be Diviners. Harbingers of gods—not real women. People will want us without ever wishing to know us. A daughter of Aisling is not a real daughter,

Diviners are but the tools of the craft of Divination. Holy, not human.”

“The cathedral, its Omens, its Diviners sit on high,” the gargoyle said plainly. “If you only ever look up at something, can you ever see it clearly?”

“She said that girls bear the pain of drowning better, and that sick ones always wake strange, special. And new.”