Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
“Six?”
I turned. There were five chairs pulled near the hearth. In three of them, with large cups in their hands, sat Hamelin, Dedrick Lange, and Tory Bassett.
Benji was there, too. Not seated, but pacing, walking back and forth in front of the others. When he saw me, he stopped mid-stride. “It is you.” He eyes traced my pale nightshirt. “Thought you might be a ghost.”
I smiled.
“I was just thinking about you, Six,” he said. “Debating whether or not to see if you were awake-only I didn’t wish to wake Maude. She needs her rest.”
“You can call me Sybil, you know.” I came to stand next to him. “What did you want me for?”
“We’re having a little meeting about tomorrow’s ceremony, and what comes after.” The king patted the spine of an empty chair. “Please-join us.”
He seemed different to me. There was no wine in his hand, no liquid courage. He stood taller, spoke more clearly, as if with every hamlet we’d gone to, Benedict Castor had been fortified.
Then I looked from his face into Hamelin’s and the other two knights by the fire. They weren’t Benji’s usual company. I wondered what they knew-if they knew anything at all, or if this was just pretense. Him, making merry with his knights to keep them from learning he was doing far more in the hamlets than participating in ceremonies. “You didn’t want to ask Rory to join your meeting?”
Dedrick Lange snorted.
“I did ask him,” Benji said. “Not ten minutes ago, in fact. But he was on his way out the door and said he’d catch up with me later.” Even in the dim light, I could see the king’s smile strain. “He seemed… distracted.”
“Just as well,” Tory Bassett said between sips of wine. “Myndacious has no sway over the hamlets or the noble families.”
I frowned. “What’s your point?”
“The point,” Hamelin said, his tone pleasant, but not his gaze, “is that Myndacious has nothing to bring to the table. He isn’t highborn. He’s brash, uncharismatic, and entirely without political value. No real use, save brute intimidation. In a word-a bad knight.”
I slapped his wine out of his hand. It hit the floor, splashing upon Benji’s feet, painting them crimson. Hamelin laughed, but the king silenced him; his voice was harsher than I’d ever heard it. “Careful,” Benji warned. “To question a knight’s merit is to question the king. I may not be the scholar my grandfather was, but I’ve studied my knights and applied their value well enough.” His gaze narrowed over Hamelin. “Or should I reevaluate yours?”
Hamelin went silent, and Benji’s cheeks flushed. Whatever power he’d tasted, he clearly relished the flavor. He turned to me, spine straight. “Join us, Six. I’d like to discuss your position, once we are finished in the hamlets and returned to Castle Luricht-“
Then his gaze dropped to my hand and the note therein. Clouds formed in his eyes. “Or perhaps you, too, find yourself distracted.”
Were I still Six, the Diviner upon the tor, I would give him what he wanted at the price of my own pleasure. To let my shoulders sink beneath the burden of my yeses was the only way I understood my own merit.
But Six was gone.
“I’d love to discuss tomorrow’s ceremony with you, Benji,”
I said, shooting Hamelin a glower. “But right now, I’m meeting someone else. He’s brash and uncharismatic and entirely without political value. The best knight I know.”
I left, slamming the inn door behind me.
The air outside was tepid, the sky clear, and the path to the beach well marked by woven banners. I followed them, slipping between thrift flowers, basking in the pleasure of treading over dirt, then sand, with my bare feet.
The Sighing Sea was gentle, unassuming-a low, steady rush. I stopped twenty paces onto the beach, arrested by the sight of the water. It seemed the sky, ever patient, had waited the entire day for the sea to be calm enough to touch. And now that the weather had cleared, the night sky pressed itself over the water. I could not tell where the sea ended and the moon, the stars, began.
“Storm’s over,” a voice called from behind me. “It’s always pretty like this afterward.”
I turned. He stood in shadow, leaned up against the rock face.
Rory.
He looked lazy. But the nearer I drew, the more apparent the illusion. I could hear his quick inhales. See the pulse in his neck jump.
We hadn’t told anyone about what had passed between us at Petula Hall. We hadn’t spoken of it ourselves. But it was there between us. Every time we looked at each other, brushed hands, breathed the same air-it was there.
Rory’s fingers flexed. “Come here.”
I was on him. Shoving him against the wall of rocks and kissing him. He grasped the nape of my neck, anchoring our mouths together. “I like that you’re a bad knight,” I said, pressing my teeth into his bottom lip. “It’s what makes you a good one.”
Rory reached for my face-took off my shroud. When it fell away, I couldn’t bear the reverence that flickered through his eyes. It scared me, thrilled me so much that I wrestled him to the ground and we went at one another so roughly they must have heard us in the village; must have known it wasn’t just the sea, crashing and moaning, after the storm.
I wanted to throw him down so hard the earth cracked. I wanted to break something for needing him so badly. I wanted him to break me, too-for him to sink his teeth into my neck or breasts or thighs. After so long thinking there was sacrality in drowning, I worried nothing was divine unless it arrived on the beckoning hand of pain.
But then I thought of that first time at Petula Hall, when we’d gone slow. When we’d been witness, pupil, visitor, then craftsman, of each other’s pleasure. When the little deaths had come again and again and there had been no pain upon their wings.
Not everything had to hurt to be holy. Bad, to be good.
But damn me if I wanted it to sometimes.
In the morning, I woke in my room to a blushing dawn. Turned over in bed.
And saw that the gargoyle was gone.
“Sybil?” Maude sat up. “What’s wrong?”
“He’s missing.” I couldn’t catch my breath. It was like waking up in my Diviner cottage and finding that Four, Two, Three, Five, then One, had vanished. “My gargoyle. He was here when I got back from the beach last night, and now he’s”-I put a hand to my chest-“lost.”
Maude braced the frame of her bed to get up, but I was already throwing on a tunic, bursting from our room, out of the inn and into morning light.
And all while I looked for the gargoyle, through crofts, through sheep-speckled fields and hills of thrift flowers, climbing higher and higher, I was thinking on lost things. On death. On how I’d searched the hamlets, like I searched now, and hadn’t found a single one of my darling Diviners to put back into my arms. How fate was cruel, life frail, and how lonely it felt, in the vastness of Traum, that the only person I’d come close to finding was myself.
I sobbed like a child.
Then, at the tallest cliff, in a bed of flowers, I saw him. Looking out over the dawn, the sea-the edge of the world-hands folded delicately in his lap. Utterly content.
“Oh, you stupid, stupid gargoyle!” I ran to him. Threw my arms around his shoulders-bruised myself on his body for holding so tightly. “Why did you leave and not say anything?”
He blinked. “Are you crying, Bartholomew?”
“Of course I am, you dingbat.”
I didn’t know if he fully understood why I was upset, but he seemed pleased to be the one to comfort and not the one to cry, because his shoulders straightened and he began to hum. “I think,” he said when my breath had finally soothed, “that we were never meant to stay so long behind that stone wall, Bartholomew.” He rested his heavy head on mine. “Thank you for bringing me with you. I don’t think I would have been brave enough to leave the tor alone.”
I held his hand, and we looked out over the view. “Why did you come out here?”
“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.”
We watched the sun rise over the sea. I leaned against his shoulder. “Do you still think about Aisling, gargoyle?”