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

by Rachel Gillig

“Swords and armor are nothing to stone.”

“You’d think one versed in dreaming would know it is rude to wake someone from sleep.”

“I confess horses are not the intelligent beasts I imagined them to be. Though I don’t think that merits the abuse they suffer postmortem.” That one took me a moment. “No one actually beats dead horses, gargoyle. It’s an expression.” “Really? How morbid.”

“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.”

“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.”

Faith requires a display. The greater the spectacle, the greater the illusion.’”

“You don’t like it when I’m a bad knight,” he muttered, “and you don’t like it when I’m a good one.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Is a road still a road if no one rode upon it?”

“Good. You’re mad.” He turned the coin over in my palm. “Time to break things.”

I pulled my blankets over my ears and faced the wall, thinking on dying and killing and living, and how I was unsuited for all three.

“Are you still in pain?” He shivered. “Near you? Always.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It’s a good story, Myndacious. I liked it.” He held me in his gaze like he needed to. “Do you want to know how it ends?” “Does it end?” He nodded. “It ends a handful of minutes from now. After you’ve won, and there is one less Omen in the world.” He grinned. “It ends when you kiss me.” “You mean it ends after I’ve won, and there is one less Omen in the world—and I hit you as hard as I can.” “With your mouth.”

I’d become molten iron, hit so many times by everything that had happened since the king had come to Aisling Cathedral that I no longer recognized myself.

“I’m about to pass my own wind if they don’t wrap this up,” the gargoyle muttered.

“What is magic, what is memory, and why are both so haunting?”

“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’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.”

Not everything had to hurt to be holy. Bad, to be good. But damn me if I wanted it to sometimes.

“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.”

“To live again after death is strange magic, and an even stranger fate. Would that things were different, Bartholomew. Would that we had never been reborn. But if we hadn’t… well. I have wondered, and pondered, and now I am sure. For better, for worse— “The rest of the story could not exist without us.”