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

by Rachel Gillig

You know this story, Bartholomew, though you do not remember it.

Why dows the gargoyle call everyone Bartholomew? Why is he only ever mentioned when it has to do with Sybil? Are Sybil and the others just manifestations or reincarnations of the first foundling boy? Was his name Bartholomew? Is the gargoyle really talking to Sybil here? Why doesn't whoever is being told the story remember it?

To tell a story is in some part to tell a lie, isn’t it?

Your craft was obedience.

Everyone has a craft

All the windows were dark.

What is the connection to One Dark Window?

“Because you have never lived beyond this place. And you never will.” His face twisted, as if he had not considered that. “Neither will you.” “But I am leaving, gargoyle. We all are. Our tenure will end, and the abbess will bring new foundlings to Divine in our stead. You know that.” “I see.” Oh—he was upset. His bottom lip was trembling, and so were the tips of his wings. He balled his hands to fists and pressed them to his eyes. I wondered if he was like this every ten years when the old Diviners left and the new arrived, poor soul. A torrential fit of tears at the changing of the guard.

Do they never actually leave? Why don't we hear about the ones who came before?

“To tell a story is in some part to tell a lie, isn’t it?

“The one with the tragic beginning, and the desolate, interminable middle.”

Is that because the cycle never ends/just repeats itself? Is this one story he knows the one we are being told?

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.

Sybil, I almost said, the word an ancient stone at the bottom of a deep, dark well. Once, my name was Sybil Delling.

If he were the abbess, he might have said the right words. May you be a witness to the wonders of the Omens. A pupil of their portents. Ever but a visitor to their greatness. But all he said, mournful, was, “Would that things were different.”

A shadow fluttered in the corner of my vision. I turned— There was nothing there.

The moth

I felt my shroud fall away. When I opened my eyes, I was no longer looking through gossamer, but the thin, veined wings of the moth.

A sixth figure stood at the mouth of the cathedral, hooded like the others. It bore no stone object—its hands were empty, arms held wide, as if it were beckoning me into the cathedral. As if the cathedral itself was the figure’s personal stone object.

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

“The abbess promised you’d be the one to stay with me.”

What the hell does THAT mean?

My visage fragmented in the broken mirror. For a moment it looked like there were still five other women in the room with me.

“Take me with you, Bartholomew! 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. Please.” He wrenched open the shed door. “Take me with you.”

Oh gods. The foulest knight in Traum… was an Omen.

“Bartholomew is quite old,” the gargoyle answered behind us, drawing an idle finger though Fig’s mane. “Though in a sense, she is prodigiously young—”

“You said it yourself. Two things can be true at the same time—people can believe in more than one thing at once.” “Like what is young, and also that which is rather old,” the gargoyle offered.

“Strange, that Aisling has sent you to me in this fashion. I’ve never felt a Diviner’s pulse before.

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. I tried to get away, but the Omen’s horrible eyes wheeled onto my bloody lip. Springing to his knees, he crawled like a beast toward me. He looked possessed, as if he’d forgotten his surroundings—his vast stores of knowledge—reduced to a primal urge to chase me. His cold hand closed around my ankle. Pulled me toward him. “I can smell it,” the Harried Scribe hissed. “It’s in your blood. Aisling’s waters—”

Like the abbess lapping it up

Even your dreams may not show you the truth, Bartholomew. I cannot remember it ever being proven that gods are more honest than anyone else.”

“And the sixth figure. The one with the foundling, who made the stone objects. That’s the sixth Omen. The one with no name.” My throat tightened. “The one we call the moth.” “Indeed. Though if anyone were to know her name, surely it would be you.” He paused. “She’s your abbess, after all.”

“You saw what the Harried Scribe looked like. Stone eyes.” The king studied me a long while. “No one at Aisling shows their eyes. And the magic stone objects—the sixth Omen would need tools to carve them from limestone.” His gaze lowered to my hands—my hammer and chisel. “Those look quite old. Did your abbess give them to you?” See what you make of them. Or what they make of you.

Their eyes are stone

Traum’s histories are forged by those who benefit from them, and seldom those who live them.’”

Faith in the Omens is like a dream. Shrewd, yet shrouded. The signs from the five stone objects are plain, but the Omens themselves are never seen, smoke and mirrors and rumors, seemingly wielding these signs from everywhere at once. It is their scarcity that makes them sacred, their distance that keeps them divine, for only the privileged can access them through Divination, thusly making the master of Aisling the most potent of rulers, and the cathedral itself the most prosperous of markets.

“You believed a story, and that story was a lie. The Omens are not divine. They are mortals who are paid like kings to live like gods.

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

You want to throw me down. And I, prideful, disdainful, godless, want to drag you into the dirt with me.

“After all, sprites have plagued Traum for centuries. Everyone knows that.” “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.’”

“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.”

“But you are not like that, are you, Diviner? You have not been brought to me like one of Aisling’s treasures. You’ve simply…” He opened his arms. “Come. Like a little insect, beckoned by a flame.”

And it seemed so impossible he should have come to know Benji’s grandfather, met Maude, become a knight—and that I had purposely chosen the short straw that day. Lingered along the Aisling wall. Looked down, seen him. I was losing my faith in everything. But the two of us meeting… it felt almost divine.

He waited at the gate of every place he touched until I granted him entry.

“Where would you bite me, knight?” “Wherever you told me to, Diviner.”

He drew closer, water sloshing around us, and I was aware of his body, mine—and the bareness of them beneath the spring’s surface. “The thing is—I think I’d do anything you asked of me.”

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.”

“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.”

“She came as they always do. Utterly still.” The Omen came closer, his steps crashing over the platform. “Every ten years, they come.” He took another step. “It’s the only spring water I’m given—their blood.” Another step. “I have my strength to keep up. My hunger to sate. And so”—he was upon me now—“I take my fill.”

But ever, I wonder. What horrible thing do they hide behind their shrouds?

“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.”

“For the sake of my sanity—” A dandelion seed flew up the gargoyle’s nose. He leaned back. Cried out. Sneezed in Rory’s face. I barked a laugh, and Rory shut his eyes. “That’s why you called me over? To sneeze on me?” “A thousand apologies. What was I saying? Ah, yes.” The gargoyle put a stone hand on my shoulder. “For the sake of my sanity, put Bartholomew out of her misery. Tell her you’re in love with her.”

We were just finishing up painting the gargoyle’s face. Maude had said it wasn’t necessary—that birke had no interest in eyes made of stone—but the gargoyle had been offended to be so excluded, and so we painted him.

“My mind is playing tricks on me,” said the gargoyle at my side. “What is magic, what is memory, and why are both so haunting?”

The gargoyle began to tremble. “I see young girls wearing shrouds, and I watch them age. The ones that do not vanish fracture and bend and cry out. But, like mine, their voices catch in the wind, distorting, then disappearing, over the landscape.” I looked down at him. “That sounds like my dream, gargoyle. The one I had of the moth.” His stone eyes held me. “I imagine it does.”

Because this sprite, this monster, took no interest in the gargoyle’s stone eyes, and no matter how it searched for mine, it could not glimpse them behind my shroud.

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

Maybe knights and boy-kings and Diviners weren’t the only creatures in the Traum who wanted to kill their tyrants, because when the great birke succumbed to the axe, dropping like a felled tree in the forest— It took Maude with it.

“That is unkind and unworthy, Bartholomew.” He’d been quietly crying in the corner of the room, and now appeared the spirit of righteous anger. “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.”