Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
“We’ve made an art of it.” I sat up straighter. Appraised her. “How old are you, Maude?”
“Forty-one.”
“How did you grow so close with the brute and the boy-king?” She wasn’t just older than Rory and Benji. She was more rooted. No derision, no drinking-less at war with herself. “Maybe I’ve only been around women, but you seem better natured than the two of them combined.”
“Don’t be mean.” Maude rubbed the flat of her thumb opposite the axe’s grain. “Benji’s plenty good-natured.”
I chuckled.
“Benji’s grandfather and my mother were knights together, our families close.” Her gaze went soft. “I was already in armor when the little shit was born. His parents passed, and his grandfather was too occupied hunting down information about the Omens to mind him, so we Bauers-that’s my name, by the way. Maude Bauer. We took Benji in.” Maude looked up the line of knights. “It was hard for him, being a Castor. Especially after his grandfather was killed. And Benji can be shy. It took him a while to get good with his sword. The other knights kicked him about. I put a stop to that.”
“So you’re like a mother to him?”
She snorted. “Don’t know a thing about being maternal. But I suppose there’s a pinch of tenderness under all this armor. I do love a stray.”
“Which brings us to Rory.”
“Rory.”
I thought Maude entirely beautiful in that moment, her green, charcoal-rimmed eyes catching sunlight, the lines around her mouth-the crow’s feet around her eyes-deepening as she spoke. “King Castor brought Rory, a scrawny boy of eleven, to Petula Hall when I was the exact age he is now. Twenty-six.” She looked into my shroud, into my eyes, swearing me to secrecy with a simple gaze. “He’d lost all faith in gods and men. Needed a purpose. So I made him my squire.”
I couldn’t imagine Rory as a boy, thin or small or vulnerable. He was none of those things, almost as if he’d taken pains to carve them from himself. “Why?” I asked. “Why help him, I mean?”
“Same reason you want to help your Diviners,” Maude said. “Because you care, and because you’re able to do something about it.”
I pondered that. “Was he a good squire?”
“The worst I’d ever seen.”
I smiled.
“He was raw and impatient and untrusting, and the other knights worked him hard because he wasn’t highborn and had no right being where he was.”
“Let me guess. You put a stop to that.”
“And enjoyed doing it. But Rory settled in time. Got stronger. Smarter. Meaner, too. Or maybe he just stopped thinking mistreatment was something he deserved.”
“Sounds like neither of them would be where they are without you.”
“They’d have found their way. They’re a good balance, those two. Benji wants to be resilient like Rory, and Rory wants to feel like the kingdom is worth changing the way Benji does.”
“Or maybe they both want to be just like you.”
Maude suddenly seemed battle worn. “The Bauer women have a stalwart reputation-a legacy of hunters. The Chiming Wood was once full of fearsome sprites, you know. My family slaughtered them. When I was knighted, I had massive boots to fill. Then Benedict Castor the First became my mentor. He directed my gaze to the kingdom’s greater issues-the corruption of the Omens and Aisling’s oppressive hand.” She tapped her axe. “I never understood what kind of knight I wanted to be until I struck down the Faithful Forester and discovered what a righteous kill was. Suddenly, I had a purpose, and it felt so good. But then Benedict took up the mantle, and the abbess called him a heretic, and the nobles in the hamlets echoed her.”
Maude shook her head. “We take vows as knights. To the kingdom, but also to our sovereign. I would have done anything for Benedict Castor, and he knew that. Which is why-“
She hauled in a breath. “Which is why he told me to deny him. That I could not go on, rooting out the Omens and their stone objects if anyone suspected I was complicit in his heresy. So when we knights brought him to stand before the abbess, and a Diviner proffered him five bad signs from the Omens, it was I who took him by the arm and dragged him into the courtyard. I, the first of his knights, to proclaim my withdrawal from his knighthood.”
Her green eyes found my face. “I, who threw the first stone.”
The gargoyle and I were entirely still. “That must have been horrible,” I murmured.
Maude nodded stiffly. “I made my own vow that day. That all Benedict Castor had learned, all he had taught me, would not go to waste. That I would bide my time, use my family name, my strength, to make another Castor the king. A king who would take up the mantle, and this time, succeed. That I would taste more righteous kills, and paint my blade with Omen blood. After all”-daylight danced over the edge of her axe-“that legacy of hunters shouldn’t go to waste, should it?”
I slept in the cart and dreamed of Aisling. Of my hammer, my chisel, working limestone. Of bells that kept ringing until I could not tell who was crying out-the cathedral, or the stones I’d split.
The cart jostled and I woke. I looked around for One-for Two and Three and Four and Five-but they were not there. The light was dimmer than before, the holloway road less deep, the trees more sparse-the landscape rocky and sprawling. I sat up. Took in the view. The king’s caravan was following the Tenor River, going upstream. Headed toward… “Oh.”
Looming far in the distance beneath heather-gray clouds that grew darker by the moment was a jagged mountain range. Stern and steep, its mountaintops clustered together, like claws on a gargantuan seven-fingered hand.
The Fervent Peaks.
I reached out, and the gargoyle’s stone palm was there.
“Could your friends be in that high, jagged place, Bartholomew?” he asked.
A terrible noise made me jump. A call, long and loud, starting as a resonant rumble and ending on the pitched notes of a shriek. It came from the north, and I looked out over the sprawling landscape. A nearby hill, grass and heather and rock-
Was moving.
The noise sounded again, so loud I slapped my hands over my ears. The horses cried out, and the hill raised itself onto four hooved feet.
No. No, it wasn’t a hill. It was a creature with the appearance of a hill, its back decorated by stone and bromegrass. It was only when it stood upon its legs that I realized it was like an enormous boar. It had granite tusks and wide orange eyes. Its mouth was full of dark mud, and that mouth was larger than the cart I rode in.
Not a hill at all. It was-
“Mountain sprite!”
The knights began to shout. Maude was already out of the cart, volleying over its lip, barking “Stay here” to the gargoyle and me as she ran up the line. “Spread out,” she shouted. “Ready your whips.”
The line of knights scattered, and the ground began to shake.
“I say, Bartholomew.” The gargoyle blinked his stone eyes. “What on earth are they doing?”
What indeed. Whips seemed an absurd weapon against such a behemoth foe. But then the knighthood regathered, a resolute line, riding at full canter toward the mountain sprite, cracking their whips.
The sound was like a storm. Sharp, volatile.
“They’re herding it away,” I murmured.
The sprite did not like the sound of the whips. It grew louder in its shrieks, holding its ground. I saw its wide, desperate eyes flash, and then the creature was lowering itself onto its great haunches.
And lunging.
Four knights fell from their horses, knocked asunder as the sprite broke their line. Whips cracked, but the creature kept lunging, kept roaring, snapping its wide, muddy mouth.
“It’s trying to eat them,” I said, hand to my throat.
“And look,” the gargoyle said pleasantly. “It’s coming our way.”