Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
“I can’t reach the chime. You’re going to have to-“
I was already airborne. I collided with the birke a few hands below the chime, grasping the creature’s mottled flesh, the effect so grotesque my stomach rolled.
The gargoyle clapped, and Rory swore from below. When my stomach was not in my throat, I clung tighter to the birke, swung my legs around it, and began to climb.
Flesh and stone were nothing alike. Still I managed, pretending I was back at Aisling, climbing its wall. I could hear the wet sounds of the creature’s many moving eyes. Feel the vile prickle of skin beneath my hands.
Below, the crash of swords and the horrible sounds of sloughing flesh echoed, but I did not look down. All I held in my gaze was stone, the Faithful Forester’s chime closer, closer. But just as my finger closed around it, a low, horrible groan sounded. The birke trembled.
Rory began to shout.
When I looked down, a spring of blood was flowing from the birke. A fatal wound. The knighthood stepped back, but Maude remained, striking again and again with her axe, like she had something to prove, someone to save.
The birke swayed. Rory kept shouting for her to stop. To retreat.
“Maude!”
She didn’t heed him. Maude kept on swinging, and the birke kept on taking her blows and I-I lost my grip.
My fingers wrapped around the Faithful Forester’s chime-and I fell, plummeting though air and smoke. Stone arms caught me, the gargoyle chuckling with glee. “All in a squire’s duties.” Then we were soaring, wind scraping against my cheeks as we shot out of the trees and into the night.
When I looked back at the sacred glen, the idleweed was burning low, illuminating the conquered sprites, who lay like fallen timber upon the earth. The last of them, the great behemoth birke, fell-the monster slain. But if the creature was a monster, it was because it was made that way. And maybe the birke knew that. 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.
The Knight and the Moth
TAKE OFF MY ARMOR
We put the Faithful Forester’s chime in Benji’s room with the other stone objects and shuttered Petula Hall. Not even the knighthood, dispatched to the village two miles away, was allowed in. And not just because their fellow knight Maude Bauer was bruised and broken and unconscious.
It was to spare them the sight of their king.
Benji was… I didn’t know what to call it. His grief that Maude, whom I expected he held as both mother and sister, was so injured, put a misery in him no ale or wine or idleweed could ease.
“No,” he said, spilling his wine when Rory tried to drag him from her bedside for a proper sleep. “I want to stay.”
It was two days after the ceremony in the sacred glen. Maude lay on a finely woven quilt atop her bed, covered in bandages. The birke had fallen on her, shattering the bones on the left side of her abdomen and putting a swollen knot along her temple. Her ribs, her shoulder, her arm and fingers-all broken. The village physician came and went, setting her bones, but she’d said it was the bump to Maude’s head that concerned her most. That Maude might never wake.
That did not stop us from sitting at her bedside, waiting for her to do so.
“Come on, Castor.” Rory reached for Benji’s arm. “I’ll take you to your room. Sleep off some of that wine-“
Benji pulled away. “Fucking hell, Rory, leave me alone. No one believes this white knight charade.”
Rory flinched.
I flew to my feet, but it was the gargoyle who spoke. “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.”
Benji leaned his back against the bed. Put his hands over his face. “I’m sorry, Rory.”
Rory was looking at Maude’s unmoving form, his dark eyes glassy. “It’s fine.”
Hours later, in the quiet of the hall, I was thinking of Maude. Of the Diviners. Of sleep that brooked no awakening.
Next to me, the gargoyle was looking out the window at the Chiming Wood. “The whole world is a wood, Bartholomew, and everyone in it is fashioned of birch bark. Frail as paper.”
He began to cry, and I did, too. “Oh, gargoyle.”
I used to think his sadness, his heavy emotion, such a futile thing. An irreconcilable flaw. But as I kept to Maude’s room, watching Benji drink and Rory go silent and feeling my own tongue struggle to put to words the defeat I felt, I began to think I’d been telling myself the wrong story about my peculiar batlike gargoyle.
Sadness, like birch bark, had all the appearance of frailty. And yet…
The tree prevailed.
A day later, I was running down the stairs, bare feet slapping against stone. When I found the gargoyle, polishing armor in the great hall, I was breathless. “She’s awake.”
Maude was sitting up in bed, drinking water, pale and shaky and covered in bandages, but awake. I stepped into the room, and she looked at me with those kind green eyes, and I learned that, for all my heartbreak over death-over false stories and lying gods and lifeless Diviners-my heart could break for happiness, too. “Hey, Maude.”
“Heard you two snagged that chime,” she said, winking at the gargoyle. “That’s four Omens down-two more to go.” Her voice grew solemn. “I know things have not been anything like you thought they’d be when you left Aisling, Diviner. But I hope you know how special you are to us. We wouldn’t have gotten this far without you.”
“Oh.” I scrubbed a hand over my cheek. “Thank you. I’m very glad you’re not, um, you know-“
“Dead as a doorhanger?” the gargoyle offered.
Maude turned to Benji, who stood near the window. “We should do something to commemorate her. She’s been fearless.”
Benji’s skin was brighter. His eyes less glassy. Maude’s awakening had brought him back to himself. “Whatever sounds good to you, Maude.”
“I was thinking a knighthood. We’ll have a proper ceremony. Today.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Don’t knights swear to the Omens in their vows?”
“We can skip that part.” Maude beamed. “You don’t have to do it, of course. But just in case you’ve grown tired of Aisling’s creed and everything that’s come with it, you might like to say ours for a while.”
My armor may dent, my sword may break, but I will never diminish.
I knew what she was doing. Offering me a permanent place, now that the Diviners were gone. Telling me that I need not remain adrift-that I had a home with them if I wanted one.
Tears prickled behind my eyes. “I’m not noble born.”
“Exceptions can be made,” Rory and Maude said at the same time, sharing a smile, then sending it my way.
Benji’s gaze shifted between Rory and me. He was quiet. Then-“Six has proven helpful as a Diviner. I wouldn’t want to change her title. The influence she wields, the way the nobles look at me when I’m with her-“
“Don’t be a prat,” Rory said. “This isn’t about you.”
“Of course it’s not.” Benji’s cheeks reddened, his voice hardening. “I’m the king, and it’s never about me. I’m not respected like a craftsman or a knight or a Diviner. My first public act is to go into the hamlets and be utterly humiliated by the nobility in the names of the Omens. I know that I’m young, and that my grandfather was a heretic, but the treatment of sovereigns goes far beyond that. It’s as if my position has only ever existed to be a foil to Aisling. I am made a prostrate fool to prove how much weaker a king is to a god.”
The silence in the room was heavy.