Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
“One gargoyle per Diviner.”
“Did you see anything? Anyone suspicious?”
“Besides you? No.”
His eyes narrowed. “Who broke the mirror?”
“I did.”
“Why are your arms bruised?”
“I’ve been pinching myself. To stay awake.”
Rory’s voice went rough. “And the blood?” His hand came up slowly-a phantom through my hair, pushing it away from my swollen left temple. “This?”
“Gargoyle.”
“Right.” He exhaled and got off the mattress, fiddling with something in his pocket. Rory muttered to himself a whole thirty seconds before he said, swift and sure, “Get your things.”
“I don’t have anything.”
That, of all I’d said, seemed to shock him the most. Rory’s eyes went wide, mouth twisting, like I’d served him a plate of hot manure and called it a feast. “You don’t have anything
?”
I gestured at my dirty dress. “Just my clothes.”
He was muttering to himself again. “Tell me at least you have something for your feet.”
“Like what?”
“Like what-like shoes, you twit. Boots. Slippers. Clogs fashioned by your stupid chisel. Anything.”
My hammer and chisel.
I snapped my fingers in my face. “There are some things, actually. They’re kept outside.” I moved to step off the bed.
Rory lurched forward, bracing my hips.
“What are you-“
“Don’t kick me. I’m trying to help you.” He nodded at the floor, moonlight kissing over thousands of shards of glass. “Unless you’d rather rip your feet to tatters.”
I nodded my consent tersely, and his hands tightened around me. “I’m heavy,” I said before he lifted me. It wasn’t an apology.
“No one’s as strong as you, is that it, Diviner?”
“Put you on your back at Coulson Faire easy enough, didn’t I?”
That got a smile out of him. A moment later I was in the air, slung over his shoulder like a dead deer. I swore and he chuckled, glass crunching beneath his boots as he moved through the room. “Threw you on that bed easy enough, too,” he murmured.
The cottage door was no longer guarded by a gargoyle. Rory slammed against it once, twice, thrice-to no avail.
I donned my cloak, gloating from the shadows.
“Fucking Aisling.” He put a hand to his bruised side. “All right-new plan. Shut your eyes.”
Not. A. Chance. “What for?”
“I’m going to use a tool, which, as previously stated, is none of your business.”
“What kind of tool? I’m revoltingly curious.”
He bit the inside of his cheek, glanced at the door, then reached into his pocket. “We are going to disappear for about three seconds, and in that time we’ll be able to pass through the door. Curiosity sated?”
Not by half. “How-“
Rory snatched my hand. Threw something from his pocket into the air. “Move.”
There was a whirring sound, something small and circular passing over my head and through the door, then Rory and I were moving after it. I winced, bracing to collide with the wood, but my body-my body was nothing
-and I didn’t feel a thing as I passed through the door, out of the cottage, into the night.
Rory caught whatever he’d thrown and stowed it back in his pocket, the two of us corporeal once more. He let go of my hand like it had scorched him.
“That was-that was-” I coughed. “What the hell was that?”
“None of your business,” he repeated.
Two minutes later, we stood in the meager shadow of the toolshed. Rory eyed it skeptically. “You keep your shoes in here?”
“Shoes?” I measured the shed door and reared back to face it. “We’re getting my hammer and chisel.”
“Your-no. We’re getting your shoes, Diviner. You can’t go trudging through the kingdom like a bloody sprite, barefoot and-“
“I don’t own shoes.” I didn’t own the hammer and chisel either, but that was none of his business. “Just stand back.”
I threw myself against the shed door. There was a blunt thud, hot pain ripping up my shoulder.
The door stayed shut.
Rory’s thumb was on his bottom lip, tracing a smile.
“Shut up.” I picked up a stone from the path. Smashed it down on the door’s iron lock. Nothing.
“Move aside.” Rory took my place at the shed, then crashed his shoulder into the door. A resonant bang echoed down the hill.
The shed remained closed.
“What the honest fuck are these doors made of?”