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?

The only figures present were five limestone statues. Five faceless, hooded figures. They stood nigh ten spans high, their ancient arms held open in beckoning. All five were identical but for their left hands—each clasping a distinct stone object. One statue held a coin, another an inkwell. One bore an oar, another a chime, and the final a loom stone.

“I washed the Divining robes this morning.” The gargoyle led me down the nave. On the final pew, six silk robes waited. “It was an abundant chore. I am within myself with fatigue.” “Beside,” I murmured, peeling off my clothes. “‘Beside myself with fatigue’ is the proper expression.” The gargoyle’s stone brow knit. “If I were beside myself, there would be two of me, and the washing would have taken half the time.”

Above me, high in the cathedral’s cloister, five stained-glass windows loomed, each depicting a stone object—the same objects held in the hands of the courtyard statues. 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.

“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.”

“You know,” I said to One. “I think the king and his knights are not as decent as I imagined.” “Likely not. No one is as decent as they think. Not even us. Not even the abbess.” She ran her hand over the brightly dyed banners that hung over the mouths of tents. “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.”

A few knights danced, strangers with happy eyes, but I liked dancing with Diviners best. Hands, skirts, bare feet. The thump, thump, thump of my pulse in perfect time with the music. When we twirled in bold turns near the licking flames, I felt wildly astir. And 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.

He turned, walked down the nave, but stalled at the end of the carpet. His craggy voice became small—like a child’s. “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.” He slipped away, leaving me like he so often did—wondering what he meant.

“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?”

“Shhh.” She soothed my hair. “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.”

“Perhaps you think me superfluous.” “Not at all, abbess.” That earned a whispering laugh. “Do you think me oblivious? That I was unaware of your little jaunt to Coulson Faire? Or that I had not noticed you dream twice as much as the other Diviners? You are at war with yourself, Six, always thinking yourself stronger than them, better than them—martyring yourself for them.” Her shroud rippled as she shook her head. “But I know you, my special girl. And I know, beneath it all, you resent them, wishing yourself half as bold as them.”

I shook myself. “Don’t let your mind run wild.” “What pace should I let it run, then?” I screamed, and so did the batlike gargoyle behind me. “You idiot!” I put a hand to my breast. “You scared me.” “Don’t shout at me, Bartholomew.” He was crying. And not the sniffling, peer-through-his-fingers-to-see-if-I-was-watching cry. This was an all-out sob. “I w-worry, Bartholomew. It is undoubtably m-my w-worst quality. I worried you might be s-sad to be s-sick, all alone at the wall. I came back and—and—” He threw his head back and wailed. “You were gone.”

“That’s far too late,” I snapped. “And also too early.” The gargoyle was sniffing vines of greenery, unaware that he was roasting his own wing in an open torch. “I say, what sort of ivy is this? It’s wonderfully robust. Putalian? Wurspurt? Surely it’s Gowanth?” “Get a hold of yourself,” I hissed, swatting his wing out of the flame.

Rory’s horse was called Fig, and Fig’s greatest flaw—or virtue—was that she refused to be rushed. She sniffed my face for five whole minutes before she let me sit on her back behind Rory, then took ten minutes more snaffling boysenberries from a bramble. It was only after she’d finished, when Rory’s threats had increased tenfold, that she began to idly trot down the holloway road.

Rory shut the door behind him, expelling the echo of the Seacht and the gargoyle’s voice as he began to lecture Fig about varying sorts of ivy.

The gargoyle stood a pace away, humming to himself as he looked out a window with broken shutters. Next to him were a tin pitcher and a plate of bread and cheese and apples. My stomach yanked. “Where did you get that?” He screamed. “Sprites and spoons—you startled me, Bartholomew.” “Have you been stealing, gargoyle?” “Yes,” he said with delight. “I’m rather good at it. I was caught only twice. But you—you look stern. Have I behaved ignobly again by your childish standards?”

“You seem troubled.” The gargoyle looked up at me with wide, earnest eyes. “Would you like me to tell you a story?” “No one could craft a story fine enough to make me feel better right now, gargoyle.” He nodded, like I’d said something profound. “Then let us explore this strange mechanism named the Seacht instead. Our feet will take us where we need to go.”

“You seem contented,” I said, peering over my shoulder. “Being away from Aisling.” “Perhaps I am.” He pondered. “What does it feel like to be contented, Bartholomew?” As if I knew. The only happiness I’d felt was with the Diviners, in the tales of what we might do when we left the tor. My stock of joy was held in the future, ever out of reach. “I think contentedness,” I said bitterly, “is just a story we tell ourselves.” The gargoyle nodded. “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.”

“Well,” the gargoyle said, yawning as he watched her go. “I’m due for a good sleep. Where can I station myself so as not to hear the revelry of these”—he waved his hand at the knights and their whips—“riotous clods?”

I hurried to the table. Pulled my chair close to the gargoyle’s and hissed in his ear. “I need you to comport yourself.” “I have no idea what that means.” He sniffed the quilted blanket around his shoulders. “Sounds like something one does in a chamber pot.” “That. Right there. That is not a normal thing to say. Absurdity will throw the conversation off course, and I need clarity from this boy-king. For the next quarter hour, every time you feel the compulsion to say something peculiar, smother it.” He sank into his chair and sulked. “You ask a great deal of me.”

Rory came toward me until our noses were flush, speaking within an inch of my mouth. “You know what I think?” he murmured. “I think you like that I’m a bad knight. It’s why you feel so righteous, flaying me with your tongue—why you enjoy throwing me down and grinding your heel into my pride. It does something to you.” He wet his bottom lip. “I’d bet my oath your whole body is awake right now, aching and eager at the thought of putting me in my place.”

“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 say, Bartholomew.” The gargoyle was leaning over the lip of the cart. “Is a road still a road if no one rode upon it?” “Road and rode are two different words, gargoyle.” “Really?” A wayward branch swatted him over the face. “Perplexing.” Maude stared.

“Perhaps,” I murmured. “Then again, someone rather wise once said, ‘Traum’s histories are forged by those who benefit from them, and seldom those who live them.’”

The knights went quiet. Maude and Rory had twin reactions, both bristling, leaning forward, jaws taut— “I don’t like your tone.” It was the gargoyle who’d spoken. All eyes turned to him. And while his batlike face remained cold, his fingers trilled excitedly behind his back. He was enjoying this. “Swords and armor are nothing to stone. A Diviner has chosen to walk beside the king, and to question her methods is to question Aisling—and thusly the Omens themselves. Is that what you are doing, or is it the altitude that makes you such a mad apple?” Bad apple, I mouthed.

Rory’s gaze flickered to my face. “She’s a guest of the king’s. Affront her in any way, the knighthood will answer. Attempt to look beneath her shroud, she and the gargoyle will respond as they see fit. With full immunity to any carnage tended.” The gargoyle batted his eyes. “Oh, Bartholomew. He’s dreamy.”

The gargoyle was back. He landed with a huff, sticking his nose up at Rory and Benji and Maude in particular. But when he reached me, all haughtiness vanished. He looked up with an open face. In his hands, resting in the beds of his palms— My hammer and chisel. “It is important for a squire to carry a knight’s weapons,” he said, the words so stoic I wondered if he’d practiced them on the flight back. “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.

“You want me to tell you a story?” He placed the helmet on my head, over my shroud. His voice, trapped within the iron, hummed in my ears. “Once, there was a foundling boy who didn’t believe in anything. He grew up, became a worldly knight, and still he struggled to believe. He bore hardly any hope, and a mountain of disdain. And that should have been the end.” He took my hand, squeezed it, tightening my hold on my hammer. “But then he came to a cathedral upon a tor, and met a woman there. And all the tales he’d troubled himself with about cruelty, about unfairness and godlessness… he started to forget. He was afforded another chance, as if by magic, to believe in something. He’d never be a very good knight, but every time he looked at the woman, he had the distinct faith”—his eyes roved my face—“that things could be better than they’d been.”

On the fourth day in bed, I became too overcome to cry, to eat. The gargoyle sat in my room and hummed to himself. “Would you like me to tell you a story? The one with the tragic beginning and the desolate, interminable middle?” “I have no use for stories.” My eyes grew unfocused behind my shroud. “Tragedy and desolation are right here with me.” “Yes.” He went back to humming to himself. “But I am here, too, Bartholomew.”

Rory didn’t say anything. He just opened the door and came in. When he saw me lying motionless on the bed, his entire body went taut. I rolled onto my other side. “Go away.” “No.” “Bartholomew is in the throes of despair.” The gargoyle kept on humming. “A rather undervalued state of being, if you ask me.”

“The whole world is a wood, Bartholomew, and everyone in it is fashioned of birch bark. Frail as paper.” He began to cry, and I did, too. “Oh, gargoyle.” I used to think his sadness, his heavy emotion, such a futile thing. An irreconcilable flaw. But as I kept to Maude’s room, watching Benji drink and Rory go silent and feeling my own tongue struggle to put to words the defeat I felt, I began to think I’d been telling myself the wrong story about my peculiar batlike gargoyle. Sadness, like birch bark, had all the appearance of frailty. And yet… The tree prevailed.

“You know, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle said, just before we joined the others in the library. “It would be all right if you did not want to become a knight.” I turned. “What makes you say that?” “I don’t know why I say the things I do.” I’d given him my hammer and chisel to hold. He weighed them in his palms, his brows lowering in contemplation. “Only, you did not ask to become a Diviner, yet you swore all your worth to Aisling. It would be a sad story, were you to do that again.” His stone eyes rose to my face. “But if you wanted to—I would not blame you. 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.”

She faced me. “Why do we do these things to ourselves?” “The answer is rather simple.” The gargoyle swatted birch branches as we passed them by. “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.” “That is a very keen thing to say, gargoyle.” Maude put her uninjured hand on his shoulder. “How is it you came to know so much more about life than the rest of us?” His chest puffed with pride. “I am years beyond my wisdom.” I smiled and did not correct him.

We rode over the last finger of the Tenor River, saw the last birch trees, and then I was gasping—looking over the sea. “Oh, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle said, standing in the cart. “It’s like looking out over the edge of the world.”

“I am a battlefield of admiration.” He nodded at the horizon. “I cannot decide which I like best. The sunrise, or the sunset. They are like life, and her quiet companion, death.”

“Do you still think about Aisling, gargoyle?” “Endlessly.” He stretched his wings. Yawned. “The tor was the only home I ever knew. But I have stepped down from its height and seen the world with my own eyes. You can’t take something like that back. Even if I returned to the cathedral, nothing can be as it was.” His fangs pressed over his teeth as he smiled. “You can never really go home.”