Filed to story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
Rory dropped his breastplate on the floor, his gauntlets-and the rest of his upper-body armor I did not know the name of-upon the floor. He wasn’t wearing chainmail, just a pale, padded shirt.
“So.” I tapped my foot. “You’re going to kill the Omens.”
“Happily.” Rory dragged a low footstool into the middle of the wide room. “Your pedestal.”
He retreated to the wall, losing himself at a long row of shelves-digging and fidgeting and flinging. “We start the armor today, then I’ll send the order to the blacksmith at Petula Hall. We’ll find chainmail you can wear in the meantime.”
“Where’s Petula Hall?”
“The Chiming Wood. It’s Maude’s house.”
“And where is your house, Myndacious?”
“Don’t have one.” There was more flinging, fidgeting. He pulled several glass jars from the cabinetry. They were filled with rough chunks of a cloudy, yellowish material. “Still fixed on
Myndacious, I see.”
“I like the way it rolls off the tongue.”
“I’ll bet.” The last thing he pulled from the cabinet was a cast iron pot the size of my head. He brought them to the hearth, an impressive juggling act, then upended the jars into the pot and set it over the grate. “What did Hamelin want?”
“To reminisce. Nothing breathtaking.”
Glass clinked. “Not a shining review.”
“I didn’t bed him, you know.”
The lines of Rory’s back went taut.
“What you said. The night we met. About me being sheltered and indistinct-bereft of fun.” I bit the inside of my cheek. “I took it to heart. So I arranged our excursion to Coulson Faire with every intention of getting naked with Hamelin in the grass and doing something adventurous. To prove you wrong.” Heat touched my cheeks. “I wanted to show you that I wasn’t too good for a knight-just too good for you.”
His hands had stilled. When he spoke, his voice was low. Tight. “What stopped you?”
“Turns out fucking someone just to spite you leaves a lot to be desired.”
Arms braced, Rory’s hands splayed on the counter. “I wanted to get under your skin,” he said quietly. “I saw you on the wall that first day at Aisling, all in white, looking down your nose at me, so patronizing and pious. I wanted-” He peered over his shoulder at me. “I don’t know. To sully you, maybe. To rip the shroud from your eyes so you’d know what I knew-that nothing is holy. That the Omens were a lie. That you were no better than me.”
He looked away. “But I regretted it. You should not have to bear, nor marshal, my derision. I was cruel. And whatever you did to spite me after-well. I deserved to hate it, watching you disappear into the trees with Hamelin.” He gave me his eyes over his shoulder once more. “I’m sorry I was such an ass.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.
The forge remained quiet but for the sounds of Rory at the hearth. Slowly, a sweet smell filled the space. Not saccharine or fetid but… inviting. “What are you heating?”
“Beeswax.”
“You’re making me armor. Out of wax.”
“It’s to measure you, you twit. I’m going to put it on your clothes.”
I looked down at my billowing Diviner dress. “I hate to break it to you, but this is hardly the shape of my body.”
“I’m acutely aware of that, thank you.” He hunched over the pot, muttering aspersions into the wax as it melted. “First things first.”
He dipped his thumb into the wax, came forward-planted himself in front of me. Even with me upon the footstool, he was taller. “I need to clean your mouth.”
“Because I said fucking
?”
He bit down on a smile, then nodded at my bottom lip, split by the Harried Scribe’s blow, then again from the tussle in the alley. “It’s for your wound. The cut on your lip.”
“Oh. Sure.”
He waited.
“Must I spell it out? I permit you.”
Rory rolled his eyes. Brought his wax-laden thumb to my mouth. “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.”
I reached out. Smudged blood he’d shed sparring from his own bottom lip and wiped it on my dress. “Have you considered that’s because I don’t like you at all?”
There it was again. The stain of a flush upon his olive cheeks. “Yeah. I’ve considered that.”
It stung a bit-the stroke of his thumb over my bottom lip. Rory kept his gaze to my mouth, pressing wax over my swollen, broken skin. “What were they doing?” he asked. “The men you brawled with?”
“Stalking girls.”
“And that made you angry?”
“Shouldn’t it?”
“Of course.” Each word held an edge. “I think children are particularly vulnerable in Traum.”
I considered biting his thumb. “You’re talking about Aisling again. About Diviners.”
“Merely noting that the abbess always plucks foundlings.” His finger dropped from my bottom lip. “And always girls, to do her bidding.”
“Maybe foundlings are less likely to question that which is taught to them in kindness,” I murmured. “And the abbess was kind to me. She took care of me. Told me that I was special. That dreaming was divine. As to why she chooses girls-I learned it’s about pain. How girls bear it best. Which rather contradicts what I just said about her being kind, doesn’t it?”
A horrible fissure began in me, disrupting everything I’d believed in. “She starved me for affection, for praise, then gave me just enough to whet my palate. I’d have done anything she asked of me. But if she’s the sixth Omen, the moth, she never cared for me, did she? I was but a piece of parchment to scrawl her false story upon. A cog in her machine.” I bit the inside of my cheek. Turned to the wall. “I feel so stupid for my part in it.”
Rory’s voice rooted in me like a fisherman’s hook. “You’re not stupid.”
Brow knit, he examined my shroud. Not with irritation like he often did, but like he had finally been afforded a glimpse through it. “Her care came with conditions. You bent yourself to fit them, and now… now you see yourself as this terrible burden. Like you’re nothing if you’re not the best, the most useful version of yourself.”
I did not like that. Being so thoroughly charted. “Thereabouts.”
He must have known that I wanted to peel my skin off and scrub it under water, because he withdrew his scrutiny. Retreated to the cabinets. “It’s not true, you know,” he said. “You don’t have to be good, or useful, for someone to care about you.”
I watched his back, running my tongue over the wax-covered split in my bottom lip, the texture grainy, sweet from the beeswax-and salty where his thumb had been.