Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
The man kept screaming. “Guards!
Help!”
Hands fell to the hilts of swords.
I spat blood onto cobblestones. “Take my hand, gargoyle.”
And then we were running.
Again.
We crawled over the men, a mess of groaning limbs. “Didn’t that feel so delightfully ignoble?” the gargoyle howled, grinning madly as we scurried like rats down the alley.
We passed brick and wood and stone, taking so many turns I felt upside down. I thought we’d gotten away, but one wrong turn begot another, and then the gargoyle and I were faced with a looming wood edifice-a dead end.
“Quick! Fly us out of here.”
He looked at me like I’d spat in his eye. “And be mistaken yet again for a bird?”
The guards were upon us. When they caught us against a wall, they slowed to a halt. Kept their hands fast upon their hilts.
“Those men were going to hurt a pair of girls,” I said, the urge to confess akin to throwing up spring water. “We were defending them.”
“Did a bit more than that,” one of the two guards said. “They’ll need a physician. You’re both from Aisling?”
I puffed up my chest. “I’m a Diviner.”
“Number Six?”
“Who’s asking?”
The guards looked at each other. “There’s a warrant out for your arrest.”
The gargoyle snorted. “For what? Stealing breakfast and a tablecloth and-“
I put my hand over his mouth. “Surely you have better things to do than hound us for a bit of petty crime.”
“Excuse me, I am a thief as well as an assailant,” the gargoyle said, breaking free of my clutches and sticking up his nose. “Nothing petty about that.”
“Unfortunately this warrant comes from on high.” The guards turned, heads close together, quietly conferring.
“I wonder what they are talking about,” the gargoyle mused.
I touched my bottom lip, bleeding again from when that pig had shoved me against the wall. I was muttering indignities to myself when the taller of the two guards split off, going back down the alley. The other turned to the gargoyle and me. By her tight shoulders, she didn’t seem pleased. Were she a Diviner, I’d have guessed she’d just pulled the short straw.
She didn’t take her hand off her sword. “Follow me.”
We were delivered to a walled compound, where a strange cracking noise echoed behind a vast wooden door. Bug-eyed, its sentry watched the gargoyle and me approach, and with one word from our escort guard, he opened the door.
We came upon a gravel yard, sectioned by two crossing ropes, a pair of knights standing in each quadrant. They each bore a whip-the source of the cracking noise I’d heard-and were practicing wielding the long, serpentine weapons. Those not occupied in the training watched from the sidelines, drilling or goading their fellow knights.
Until they weren’t watching anything but me.
I recognized a few. Hamelin, the one I’d almost taken to the grass, was cracking his whip in the nearest quadrants. When he saw me, he coughed, choking on his own surprise.
Then, as if by silent order, they all looked away, their focus back on their work and decidedly away from me and my stone companion. As to the likely reason why-
He stood in shadow on the sideline. Leather clad, new charcoal drawn around his eyes, he was looking at me through an uncharacteristic crack in his derision, as if something he did not fully believe in had suddenly appeared right in front of him.
Rodrick Myndacious.
The guard brought the gargoyle and me before him. “These the ones you’ve been looking for?”
I glared from behind my shroud. “On high is a bit overstated, isn’t it?”
A smile ghosted across Rory’s lips. “Where were they?” he asked the guard.
“Brawling on the east side.”
Rory’s smile vanished, his dark eyes skittering to a halt over on my face. My freshly bleeding bottom lip. He stared a moment, then another. Ever so slowly, his gaze rose to the guard at my side. “Which lowly picket of the Seacht struck her?”
She put her hands in the air. “She was like that when we found her. Her and the gargoyle roughed up some-“
“Vile men,” I interrupted.
“Whoever they were,” the guard said, “Jordy went to fetch them a physician.”
Rory didn’t answer. His gaze was still on my bottom lip. “Anywhere else?”
I suddenly didn’t know. His eyes were so dark. “I’m fine.”
“I, too, am unharmed.” The gargoyle patted his stone chest. “Right as raindrops.”
So close.
Rory’s gaze didn’t leave my face. He reached into his pocket, extracted three gold coins, then handed them to the guard. “Much obliged.”
She took the money, giving me a wide berth, then quit the compound.
“Well,” the gargoyle said, yawning as he watched her go. “I’m due for a good sleep. Where can I station myself so as not to hear the revelry of these”-he waved his hand at the knights and their whips-“riotous clods?”
Rory looked halfway to laughing, halfway to questioning his own sanity. “I can’t tell if it will make you cry to tell you to sleep in the stables.”
“Why would that make me cry?”
“I… truly don’t know.”
“Not very shrewd, this one,” the gargoyle muttered. He crossed his arms. “Aren’t you going to offer me a blanket?”
“You get cold?”