Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
A moth.
It fluttered to my face, so close its wings stirred my lashes, then withdrew, fluttering back down the tunnel from whence it had come.
“Wait for Rory,” I told the gargoyle, and stole after it.
The tunnel drew close around me, swallowing me down its throat, and I made myself small to fit, keeping my gaze ever on the moth.
There were more, I realized. Dozens of moths on the walls of the tunnel, their pale, fluttering wings beckoning me. I was on my hands and knees now, the tunnel so constrictive I thought it might strangle me. But the moths kept fluttering, and I kept following, and suddenly I was spat out into a new cavern.
I expected more darkness. And there was. But there was also the night sky. An opening in the cliff, roots and moonlight pouring in. I was in an oblong chamber, with walls of crude rock. Hundreds of weavings hung like tapestries around me. And from the weavings-
Little white sacks hung. Cocoons. Beneath them was a stone bench, stationed against the wall, and upon it-
A woman.
A naked woman, who lay supine and still, a shroud over her eyes.
The world went still. “One?”
I stumbled forward. Banged my knees upon the stone bench.
“One.”
Mottled skin. Gray lips. Hands folded over her breasts, One lay upon the bench, her short brown hair fanning around her like a burned-out halo. When I touched her neck, searching for a pulse that was not there, her skin was as cold as stone.
She looked like she was resting, but it wasn’t rest. Whatever dream One walked in now brooked no awakening. She was lost, adrift, gone. No, it wasn’t rest.
It was sleep, eternal.
A cry ripped up my throat.
“Shhh,” came a woman’s low, craggy voice. “Not all have woken.”
I reeled.
Out of shadow, slow and rigid, a figure came, her steps an ominous clack, clack against the cave floor. “It’s been a long time since anyone’s tripped my little snare,” she said. “Or made it out of my pit.”
She didn’t wear a cloak like she had when she’d come to my room last night. It was the same face I’d seen.
But it wasn’t a woman.
She looked like one of Aisling Cathedral’s gargoyles-hewn entirely of limestone. She had wings, tucked against jagged shoulder blades. A head like a goat, with gnarled four-digit paws for hands and hooves for feet. And her eyes, wide and pallid…
Were just like the other Omens’. Just like my batlike gargoyle’s.
Just like mine.
“You-” My armor clattered as I rose to my feet, standing in front of One. “You’re the Heartsore Weaver?”
“Weaver, I was. Heartsore, I am eternally.” The Omen came forward, looking at neither me nor One. She was peering upon her wall. Staring through stone eyes at the white silken cocoons attached to the thread. “You must be quiet. My moths are still sleeping,” she rasped. “Frail little things, they are.”
She began to hum. Tuneless, cacophonous.
I watched her, skin crawling. I did not want her to know how well she terrified me. “Where is your loom stone, Omen?”
“No loom. No loom stone.” She nodded at the tapestry upon the wall. “Once, I wove the finest garments in Traum. Silk robes, I made. But that was a long time ago.”
She kept staring at her tapestry, and I followed her eyes. The cocoons had attached themselves to one particular weaving, as if the sprites favored it. It was fashioned in a beautiful braid that ran along the wall. Not woolen, but fine. Thin, sheer, and pale.
Gossamer.
Diviner shrouds.
I let out a wretched sound.
“Hush,” the Heartsore Weaver rasped, looking down at One. “They come to me every ten years, Aisling’s Diviners, brought by gargoyles. Naked but for their shrouds, and always, always, dead. Still, they smell of spring water.” Her throat hitched. “Taste of it, too, I imagine.”
I drew my hammer and chisel, blocking One with my body. “If you touch her, I’ll-“
“I said be quiet.” The Omen showed her teeth, rows of cracked limestone. “I do not touch the Diviners. I lay them down here in my caves, my own little underworld, where the sea air has its way with them. It is the best burial I can offer.”
She looked over my shoulder at One’s lifeless body. “She was your friend?”
Tears burned my eyes, the cracks in my heart growing irreparably deeper. “Yes.”
“Is that why you have come? To see with your own eyes the fate of Diviners like yourself?” The Weaver’s eyes fell to my hammer and chisel. “Or have you been sent from your master upon the tor?”
I sprang forward, leveling the tip of my chisel against her stone throat. “I have no master, Omen. I come on my own volition to challenge you at your craft and claim your magic loom stone.” A single strike, and I could split her like I had a thousand stones before. “To take magic, power, myself, back from false gods like you.”
The Heartsore Weaver did not withdraw her throat from my chisel’s tip. “But I’m not a god,” she whispered. “Once, I was not so different from you.”
She blinked up at me with wide stone eyes. “Strange, that you have no memory before Aisling, yet you still knew to claw yourself free from that horrible tor. How wonderful, how wretched, it must have been, stepping out into the world. Learning the story you’d been told was a lie.”
“Do not pretend you did not benefit from that lie, Weaver. Is not the gold wasting in your pit from Aisling’s coffers? Did Diviners not drown, that you might earn it? Do folk not look for your signs in every bit of thread?” I was a rabid dog, my words snapping barks. “If I am wonderful and wretched for learning the truth of the Omens, your hands are marked by the blood of my metamorphosis.”
The Heartsore Weaver pressed her neck against my chisel, iron scraping against limestone. “Then you need not challenge me to my craft, daughter of Aisling. You have already beaten me by it.” She held out an empty stone paw, as if to show me she had nothing to lose-or give. “Who better than a lost Diviner to learn, then conquer, love and heartbreak?”
Moonlight crept through the fissure in the ceiling, casting the Omen and me in an eerie silver glow. “Where is your loom stone?” I asked again, my voice dangerously soft.
“That, I fear, is a long story.”
“I have time.”
She grinned then, shadows cutting across her inhuman face. “More than you realize.”
The Heartsore Weaver took a step back from my chisel’s tip. “You know by now there is magic in the world. The stone upon the tor, its water-the spring you drank from, drowned in-is the mother of that magic. From it, five objects were hewn. A coin, an inkwell, an oar, a chime.” She sighed. “And a loom stone.”
I waited.
“What you do not know, perhaps, is we whom you call Omens had no sway over that magic when the objects were made. I did not chose my loom stone’s power, and neither did she who carved it for me, yet, strangely, it suited me. Magic is like a god in that way. All-knowing, and most effective when not fully understood.”