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?

One statue held a coin, another an inkwell. One bore an oar, another a chime, and the final a loom stone.

The utter gall of men.”

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

“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?”

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.”

“I wanted to show you that I wasn’t too good for a knight—just too good for 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.”

“Bested by a shoe.” He shuffled over. “I realize we are beginning to lose our faith in signs, but really, Bartholomew, this does not bode well.”

No honor among thieves, and even less among gods.

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.

I was losing my faith in everything. But the two of us meeting… it felt almost divine.

“Aren’t you coming?” “I need a minute.”

Mans is bricked up

Bartholomew does not know how to swim. But worry not—” He looked up at me. Smiled proudly. “She has always excelled at drowning.”

“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.”

If the sprites are monsters, it’s because we’ve made them so.”

It is easier, swearing ourselves to someone else’s cause than to sit with who we are without one.”

“If I am wonderful and wretched for learning the truth of the Omens, your hands are marked by the blood of my metamorphosis.”

She’s the sixth Omen. Abbess of the tor.

How, like a god, she said she loved us but hurt us.”

“To the faithless, a god is a monster.

Starving things make for loyal pets, so long as you feed them just enough.

The only god of men is coin.”