Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
“He didn’t even invite me in.” The gargoyle stuck out his stone tongue. “A prodigious idiot.”
We waited. The night was a purple blanket, soft and silent. Then-
Laughter echoed behind me, and with it, the rolling noise of a cart.
“Told you,” came a loud, slurring voice. “Gargoyle. Right fuckin’ there.” There were shouts. Gasps. “And a Diviner!”
It was the same cart as before, only now it was coming toward me, rolling onto the drawbridge. Bathed in Castle Luricht’s torchlight, I noted several men inside. Their clothes were wrinkled, their eyes glassy, their mouths drawn in lazy smiles. Even at a distance I could smell the ale.
“How much?” a gray-haired man shouted. He pulled a coin purse from his belt. “How much for my future, Div-oh shit.” He dropped the purse, silver coins spilling onto the bridge.
I pulled up my hood. “We should go,” I whispered to the gargoyle.
Two men dropped from the cart. The gray-haired one made a horse’s ass of himself collecting his coins, falling over and hooting with laughter, while the other approached me with bold steps. “The things you must know, speaking to the Omens,” he slurred. He reached for my shoulder-
And screamed. When he doubled over, grasping his arm, I could see that the bone was broken, bent at a grotesque angle, skin already mottling.
The gargoyle stood over him, eyeing his arm with the same rapt attention with which he had tended the ivy on the wall. “The human body is such a fascinating machine, though I forget the fragility of the design.” He turned to me, smiling. “Well, Bartholomew? Shall we be on our way back home?”
We ran, though the men were too drunk to do anything but roar after us. Down the holloway road, into trees teeming with sprites, we hurried. Even through the dense canopy of treetops, I could see the moon was terribly low. The night was fading.
A night utterly wasted.
“You’ve been no help,” I said, throwing my fury at the gargoyle. “You shouldn’t have been so brutal.”
He plucked a flower from the side of the road and examined its petals as he walked. “Why not?”
“Because.” The snap of bone still echoed in my ears. “Violence is ignoble.”
“That is a very childish thing to say, Bartholomew.”
I whirled on him. “Of the two of us, I am not the one who behaves like a child.”
He rid the flower of its petals one by one, ignoring me.
When we returned to Aisling, the gargoyle unlocked the gate-ushered me to my cottage and unlocked the door. I pushed past him. Scrambled up the stairs. Called out for the Diviners. “One! Five!”
One sat, slouched over herself, asleep at the vanity table.
Five was gone.
The bear gargoyle hammered three iron bars across each of the cottage windows, the day punctuated by a menacing clang, clang, clang.
The cottage door was locked, and not just for the evening. This time, One and I found it locked at dawn. A flagon of water and a plate of honey bread that had gone stale were delivered by the falcon gargoyle, who locked the door behind it, and we watched the day pass through the washroom’s barred window on the first floor.
One tapped the iron bars. “Clearly the abbess doesn’t want us sharing the tale of vanishing Diviners with the tor’s visitors.”
“Why hasn’t she come to speak to us?” I said. “How could she let this happen?” The abbess had told me fear was not an outward-pointing compass. And maybe that was true. My own fear was deep within me, piled so high it had begun to rot, emanating its own putrid heat. My knuckles went white over the bars. “How could she treat us this way?”
One had no answer. She turned away from the window and climbed the stairs. I followed and sat down next to her upon a mattress, trying not to look at the empty beds around us.
“I’ve been praying.” One looked so, so tired. “You’d think, after all we’ve done in their name, that the Omens would help us in some way.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, but One did not wait for my answer. She was on her feet again, moving slowly to the cracked looking glass. She stared at her reflection. Then, with a ghostly hand, reached behind her head into her cropped, tangled hair.
And began to untie her shroud.
My body seized. “What are you doing?”
“I’ve waited forever to take this thing off.” Her voice was harder than before, as if she was putting the last of her vigor into it. “I’m starting to think if I wait for permission, it will never happen.”
Her courage was a gale-a bold wind. And while it stirred me, it could not dismantle ten years of doing as I was told. I’d broken more rules in the last week than I had in a decade, but this was not one I could bear. I kept my hands in tight fists at my side and did not touch my shroud. When One’s fell, silent as it hit the floor, I turned my gaze to the wall.
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.
The day slipped into night, and for every hour we tried to stay awake, One’s shoulders sank farther. “I can’t remember my childhood.” She rested her head on my shoulder. “Everything before Aisling is so… dark.”
She sank deeper into the mattress. “Don’t forget me if I disappear, Six.”
“If you disappear,” I said fiercely, “I will come find you. And then we will find the others together, no matter the signs, no matter the portents. I promise.”
One held out her arms and I nestled into them. We lay on our mattress, staring up at the ceiling. “Talk to me.” One’s breath grew heavy. “Tell me a story.”
“We’ll see all the hamlets. Study their customs, their crafts, even their sprites. I’ve heard rumors of sprites as big as trees-as big as mountains.” My eyelids grew burdensome. I forced them open and pinched myself until my arm was covered in bruises. “It’s a wild world out there, One. Strange and magnificent, and we’re going to see it. Everything will be so… entirely… beautiful…”
When I opened my eyes, it was morning.
I knew by the quiet, by the cold-by the balance of the mattress beneath me-that One was gone. The cottage was empty now, hollowed out. Outside, the wind wailed a sorrowful tune.
My tears did not come. They were trapped somewhere within me, festering beneath a heavy surface I could not shift.
When the serpentine gargoyle came to deliver more bread, I rushed to the cottage door. The gargoyle dropped the bread, caught me by the waist, and hauled me back up the stairs.
I kicked, bruising my shins on stone. The gargoyle threw me down onto my bedroom floor so hard I saw stars. Shadows danced in my periphery and the cottage grew hazy, then winked out entirely.
I woke to a twilight sky.
There was a small pool of blood, cold, beneath my head where my temple had met the floor. When I pulled myself to a rickety stance and saw myself in the cracked looking glass, my cheek-my silver hair-was painted red on the left side.
My visage fragmented in the broken mirror. For a moment it looked like there were still five other women in the room with me.
But it was merely a trick of the glass.
I held my breath. Lifted my hand to my shroud, ready to do what One had done. To finally see myself.
And froze.