Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
“If only we had a tool that could help us, oh, I don’t know-move through walls?”
“Fine.” Rory reached into his pocket once more-
“I say, what on earth is the racket?”
The knife I didn’t know Rory carried was soaring. It hit the batlike gargoyle between his stone eyes, then dropped brusquely onto grass. The gargoyle remained cross-eyed a second, then slowly turned his gaze to me. “Did he just try to smite me, Bartholomew?”
Rory’s gaze jerked. “Bartholomew?
That’s your name?”
“Pith, you’re thick-no. He calls everyone Bartholomew.”
“What the hell for?” Rory pivoted back to the gargoyle. “What the hell for?”
“Don’t yell at him,” I snapped.
“Shall I break his neck?” the gargoyle asked me. “Or would you find that violence terribly ignoble?”
“I would.” I looked up at Rory. “But exceptions can be made.”
He glared down at me. “He’s joking, right?”
The gargoyle puffed out his chest. “It’s my duty to protect Bartholomew against those who would harm her.” He dusted his shoulder primly. “I have a remarkable talent for violence.”
“Those who would harm-are you serious?
I’m helping her escape.” Rory pointed an accusatory finger at Aisling. “You bruise her face and keep her prisoner and drown her. Which of us is the brute, gargoyle?”
That seemed to trouble him. His stone eyes roved over me. “What has happened to your face?” He blinked. “What do you mean, ‘helping her escape’?”
Rory lowered his eyelids at me. “And I’m the thick one.”
“Be nice.” I hunched to look the gargoyle in the eye. “I need my hammer and chisel. Where are your keys?”
“My burden is always upon me.” He unfolded his blunt, claw-tipped fingers, revealing the iron ring and the keys upon it. “Though it is far too late to be working stones, Bartholomew.”
“I’m not.” I led him to the shed door. “I’m leaving the tor.”
His eyes went wide, the rest of him perfectly still. For a moment he looked like a true gargoyle, a lifeless monster carved of stone-Aisling’s watchdog. But then he threw his head back and wept. “Why, Bartholomew? Why would you leave me?”
Rory looked like he wanted to catapult himself out of his own skin. “Please-shut him up. He’ll wake the dead.”
The gargoyle’s shoulders shook, his yowls near and far, echoing through the night. “I will have n-no one to talk to. N-no one to-to-“
“Diviner!” Rory snapped.
“I’m working on it.” I might have put a hand over the gargoyle’s mouth, but the poor thing was in such a state I feared he’d bite me. I patted his head instead, my smile too toothy to be convincing. “I care about you very much, and perhaps when I’ve found the other Diviners I will come back to visit-“
“Diviner.”
Rory’s voice was quiet now. I turned and found him looking out at something in the darkness.
There. Twenty paces away, watching us from the gloom. Three more gargoyles. The serpent, the bear, the falcon. Ahead of them, poised and still as if hewn from stone herself-
The abbess.
I straightened my back. “I’m sorry.” A tremor quickened through me. “I cannot finish my term here, abbess. I am leaving Aisling. Tonight.”
The breeze answered, stirring the abbess’s shroud. “It is not safe for you to go,” she said, beckoning with open arms. “Come with me back to the cathedral, my girl.”
“I cannot,” I said again. “I am leaving to find the Diviners.”
“No, Six.” The abbess’s words were soft, bereft of their echo outside of Aisling’s cavernous body. “Stay. I will take care of you.”
“Just as you took care of the others?”
A desolate frost touched the abbess’s voice. “But I did take care of them. I made them special. They tried to be worthy of it, but they remained so… human. But never you, Six. Stalwart, uncomplaining-you have ever been the perfect Diviner.” Her shroud rippled. “Until quite recently.”
I flinched.
She kept going. “The stories you tell of the things you and the other Diviners will do when you leave Aisling, the beautiful places you will go, are but the lurid imaginings of a fretful mind. You play at strength with your muscles and your martyrdom, but you wear such profound fear, my love. Because deep down, you know you are nothing outside these walls. You understand, better than the rest, that you will never be more useful, more powerful, more desired, than you are here, upon my tor. Stay with me.” It was impossible to see her eyes. But I was certain that her gaze had turned to Rory. “There are terrible things in the land of Traum. With and without armor.”
Rory spoke as the abbess had-softly. Only his voice was coated in venom. “It’s true. There are terrible things in Traum. I may even be one of them. But she has asked to go, and I am bid by a code to gratify that wish. Let us leave. If you do not-” He pulled something from his pocket. “Well. I’d probably enjoy that.”
He squared his stance, the line of his shoulders hardening. And I understood, even without armor, who he was in that moment. Not the brute, but the soldier.
The knight.
Only the idiot wore not a single weapon upon his belt.
The abbess closed her beckoning arms. “Kill him,” she said to the gargoyles, retreating back to the cathedral, a pale mark against darkness until the night swallowed her. “And bring her to the spring.”
The gargoyles stalked forward.
“Which one, Diviner?” Rory’s voice was deathly calm. He looked over his shoulder at me. “Which one marked up your face?”
My teeth pressed into my bottom lip.
“Tell me.”
“The serpentine one.”
The gargoyles lunged.
Rory’s visage wrinkled, then disappeared, something small sailing through the air. The gargoyles collided with one another in a vicious tangle, and Rory appeared five feet away. Caught whatever it was he’d thrown into the air-then sent it at the serpentine gargoyle’s head.
And the gargoyle… exploded.
Stone shattered, dust and chunks of limestone cannoning in every direction. My mouth fell open. Rory shot me a pointed look. “Hammer and chisel. Hurry.”