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

by Rachel Gillig

His armor was not the same silvery iron as his knights’ but gilt, as if he were the sun and they a cluster of lesser stars.

“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.”

It was a sacred act—giving a bit of oneself up for the art of Divination.

I opened my mouth, and the king’s blood poured over my tongue, viscous and warm. It tasted vile. Blood always did. I swallowed, straining against the urge to be sick.

A strange laugh bubbled in my throat. I always felt a mile wide after swallowing blood and water and drowning in the spring. As if I were infinite, holding all that discomfort so well within my body. It made me sick with self-loathing—and flushed with pride.

The years came and went. Again and again, I stepped into cold, oily water. Looked up at the stained-glass window, petals and wings blending into a bizarre visage. Again and again, I drowned and dreamed. And in all that dreaming, in all the holy things that came of it, I broke my promise.

I looked back only once at Aisling Cathedral, who, cold, beautiful, and disapproving, watched us disappear into the night.

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.”

If I am as indistinct as Rodrick Myndacious says, I thought as I looked at the other Diviners, their cloaks and shoeless feet just like mine, what a happy thing to be indistinct from them.

“The virtues of knighthood are love, faith, or war. Rory must accept one of those challenges. If he doesn’t, the knights will chase him through the field. Naked.” “Really.” My gaze sharpened. “And if he accepts the challenge?” “If he loses, he does whatever Benji tells him to. If he wins”—she shook her head, smiling at the king—“Benji will have to strip and run naked instead.” Three grinned. “Sounds like a happy ploy to get everyone’s clothes off.” “Bless the knighthood.” Four cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. “Challenge him at his craft!”

“To tell a story is in some part to tell a lie, isn’t it? And I know only one story besides.” His voice quieted. “The one with the tragic beginning, and the desolate, interminable middle.”

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.”

If the Diviners have run off without a goodbye, then all your love and resentment and martyrdom were for nothing.

Her gasp filled the room. Soft, quiet horror. “What’s happened to us?” My voice shook. “What? What do you see?” One did not answer. When she returned to the mattress, she was wearing her shroud once more. She didn’t say what she’d seen in the looking glass, and I was too afraid to ask again.

I don’t want to start over again and again and watch children dream and never see beyond this place. I don’t want to be in the middle of the story anymore.

If I told him, No, I’m not a pair—I’m one of six and there are five cracks in my heart for it, he would laugh at me.

They turned, six eyes combing me. They were like the three leaves of a clover, conspiratorial and exclusive in their trio.

The gargoyle puffed his chest out with pride. “Bartholomew is a daughter of Aisling, a harbinger of gods—the most dedicated dreamer I know.” He patted my shoulder. “But no, I’m sorry to say she is not especially useful. I, on the other hand—”

He fell to his knees instead. The Scribe lay out upon the ground, prostrating like an overturned book, like a supplicant. He stuck out a mottled tongue. And began to lick my blood from the floor.

when your god starts doing this things are pretty bad.

I kept my hood low, and the gargoyle, not one to be left out, stole a tablecloth from a clothesline to drape over his head, obscuring his face in shadow.

“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?”

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.

“I saw you on the wall that first day at Aisling, all in white, looking down your nose at me, so patronizing and pious. I wanted—” He peered over his shoulder at me. “I don’t know. To sully you, maybe. To rip the shroud from your eyes so you’d know what I knew—that nothing is holy. That the Omens were a lie. That you were no better than me.”

“It’s not true, you know,” he said. “You don’t have to be good, or useful, for someone to care about you.”

“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.”

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.”

I heard the slow sound of his exhale. “And if I was married? That would, what? Bother you?” There was a monster in my gut, scratching its way up my throat. “Are you?” He took his time answering, like he knew I was suffering and wanted to savor it. “No, Diviner. I’m not.”

You are not a dream. You’re just a man, paid like a king to playact as a god.

No honor among thieves, and even less among gods.

thinking on dying and killing and living, and how I was unsuited for all three.

Everything was languid. Slow. As if night itself had dipped its long finger in the pool and stirred the water backward.

A flush rolled onto my face. “That’s what I thought when we first spoke at Aisling,” I muttered. “Outside the Diviners’ cottage. You smiled.” He looked half amused, half something else. “And you were imagining what pattern my teeth might leave on your skin?”

He was a thief, stealing my breath, my reason.

I dreamed of a knight with gold in his ears and charcoal around his eyes, who did all the ignoble things I asked of him.

“It is not like me to be the bearer of bad tidings,” the gargoyle said. “Bartholomew does not know how to swim. But worry not—” He looked up at me. Smiled proudly. “She has always excelled at drowning.”

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.”

He always seemed to open a door to himself the moment I needed somewhere to go.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

I wanted to throw him down so hard the earth cracked. I wanted to break something for needing him so badly. I wanted him to break me, too—for him to sink his teeth into my neck or breasts or thighs. After so long thinking there was sacrality in drowning, I worried nothing was divine unless it arrived on the beckoning hand of pain.

“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.”

“How could you be so monstrous?” “To the faithless, a god is a monster. And I am certainly a god.”

Again, she pushed me into the water. Held me down, longer this time, yanking me out just before I lost consciousness. “Was I not like a mother to you?” she whispered over my soaked face. I couldn’t hear the noise in the courtyard anymore. My gasping lungs, my pulse, were too loud.