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?

“Never trust anything written in rhyme, Bartholomew. It is trickery—a pretty falsehood. That is something I intend to tell everyone when I pen my own book of tales. Firstly, of course, I must learn to read and write.” Rory angled his brows at me. “An army of wits, you two.”

“You will stay with Fig.” When the gargoyle’s bottom lip began to quiver, Rory hastily added, “She gets lonely.” The gargoyle looked up at Fig, who was contentedly eating ivy off the wall, and sniffled. “Very well. If my presence will ease her suffering, I shall weather my own.”

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.”

“Bartholomew is in the throes of despair.” The gargoyle kept on humming. “A rather undervalued state of being, if you ask me.”

“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.”

I would not blame you. It is easier, swearing ourselves to someone else’s cause than to sit with who we are without one.”

“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 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.”