Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
The cathedral began to ripple. Light blurred away the details, pillars and windows and buttresses all caught in a strange, undulating glow. I walked through the pale nothingness, the world sluggish, but my heart upon a hummingbird beat.
The cathedral rippled in earnest. Dark spots, like stains upon fabric, perforated the wide white space. “I’ve tasted the blood of Benedict Castor the Third.” Once more, I said, “I’ve come to Divine.”
The cathedral rippled, rippled-
Then winked out entirely.
The floor beneath my feet gave way, and I fell through seams of light into darkness. My stomach lurched, hands and feet hollowed out as my body gave way to the sense of falling.
A flash of silver in the darkness. Then-
My knees hit first, then my hands, the substance beneath them cold and hard and unsteady. I swallowed a groan and teetered. Tipped, toppled, then rolled over myself like a pin over dough. There was a chorus of clinking, and when I stopped rolling, twisted and naked and already bruising, I braced myself and sat up.
Coins. I’d fallen upon a bed of coins. Hundreds, thousands of coins stacked in a dark room.
I scanned my surroundings. Looked up. There were purple banners in the room, long windows, and an illuminating blue sky. Still, I could see the ghost of Aisling’s buttresses, her vaulted ceilings-her cold stone innards.
They’d have dragged me out of the spring by now. Once rendered unconscious by the drowning, a Diviner was always pulled from the water and laid down to dream upon the chancel, set on her back with open arms, like an offering.
I could still hear what was happening outside my dream, but the sound was muddled. “Well?” the abbess’s faraway voice called.
I opened my mouth to answer-
Then saw it. A coin, different from the rest, suspended in air. One side was smooth stone, the other dark and rutted and rough.
“The Artful Brigand’s coin,” I called. “I can see it. The rough side is up.” I let out a breath. “A presage of bad fortune.”
If the abbess responded, I didn’t hear it. The floor beneath my feet vanished, coins raining into darkness and me with them.
I fell with an unceremonious oomph onto wool carpet. The coins were gone. I was in a new space-a dark corridor with high walls covered in paintings that, no matter how hard I squinted, I could not make out. They looked like bodies, naked like mine, contorted into all manner of shapes.
High above, nigh transparent, Aisling’s ceiling loomed.
My steps made no sound upon the carpet, but my heart was frantic. To drown in Aisling’s Cathedral’s magical spring, to dream of the Omens, was always like this. Painful. Eerie. No matter how many times I dreamed, I could not escape the keen sense of entrapment that settled over me, as if someone I could not see, a hooded figure, perhaps, was watching me-darkening the edges of my periphery.
My lower back, my underarms, the soles of my bare feet, dampened with sweat.
Then it wasn’t just sweat. Something wet leached onto my feet, cold as it burrowed between my toes.
I saw it then. An inkwell at the edge of the corridor, black ink spilling from it onto the carpet like a bleeding wound.
“The Harried Scribe’s inkwell,” I said, making my voice as loud as I could. “It’s overturned. Leaching black ink. A terrible sign.”
Whispers sounded above me. Then the ink, the carpet, the corridor were all falling away, and so was I. I plummeted through darkness, through nothingness, into wan gray light. A rush of air slapped me over the face. There were no coins, no carpet to catch me this time. Just jagged, unforgiving shale and mountainous stone. I put out my hands to catch myself-
And slammed onto a boulder, shattering my collarbone.
“Where are you now, Six?”
I gnashed and writhed and swallowed the overpowering urge to be sick, hot agony scraping over me.
“Six?” The abbess’s voice was an echo, but no less commanding.
I’d watched Four dream once. I’d been young and curious to know what I must look like while Divining, but seeing Four drown had unnerved me so acutely I’d nearly left. Then the abbess, who was so much stronger than I’d estimated, pulled Four out of the spring like she weighed no more than a broom and laid her down, supine, upon the chancel. I’d always imagined there was flailing-maybe even writhing-involved in the craft of Divination. To dream of the Omens was to fall into nightmares, and the pain I felt while unconscious was as real to me as the pain in my waking life.
But Four had just… lain there, looking peaceful. Only her voice, slipping from her parted lips, lent animation to her disquiet. She’d groaned-screamed. After, she’d told me that she’d landed on her back atop the Artful Brigand’s pile of coins and knocked the wind from herself. But all I’d heard was a gasp, and all I’d seen was a motionless girl in a wet silk robe, arms open in beckoning, lying upon the chancel.
And for some perverse reason, I liked that. Knowing I could hold so much pain without anyone being the wiser made me feel…
Strong.
Even if my broken collarbone fucking hurt.
With my good arm, I pushed myself to my knees. My breasts and stomach were covered with scrapes from the rocks. When I looked out it was upon a basin of water, surrounded by seven mountain peaks, each of them so sheer, so jagged, they looked like the storybook claws of an ancient craggy giant.
But it wasn’t them I was looking to. It was the water. The crystalline-blue water within the basin-and the large stone oar, suspended over it. “I’m in the mountains,” I said through clenched teeth. “The Ardent Oarsman’s oar does not touch the water-there is no current. Another bad sign for the king.”
There was a drop in my stomach-here we go again
-and then I was no longer standing upon rocks or looking out on water, but alone in a woodland. My broken collarbone-the cuts in my skin-were gone. I stood in a wood of pale birch trees, nary a soul in sight.
But I was not alone.
Warm light flittered through a canopy of yellow leaves. The birch trees bore no branches and swayed on a breeze like sallow arms, grasping for the thin visage of Aisling’s ceiling.
I listened.
There. A chime, hung in the tree before me. A stone chime that called several high, unsteady notes.
“The Faithful Forester’s chime rings discordantly,” I called. “An ill portent.”
I couldn’t hear the abbess’s voice. I imagined her gloating behind her shroud at King Castor. Four stone objects-four bad signs.
Only one left.
The chime stopped short.
The wood went silent. And the birch trees-the trees stood tightly bound, nearer than before, like a pack of wolves tightening ranks around a lost deer. This close, I could see their pale bark was not translucent or papery as a birch’s might be. No. This bark was mottled. Heavy. Like old flesh. And the knots in the trunks, gashes of darkness in all that pale, sloughing bark-
Were eyes. Hundreds of black lidless eyes, watching me.
The wood disappeared. When the world righted, I lay upon earth that was hard and cold and slimy. The air was dank and close, and I could hardly see my own nakedness-everything was painted by blackness.
“I’m in the dark,” I called.
I’m in the dark, my echo recited from far away.
I knew what came next. I had dreamed of all the places I had visited hundreds of times over-the room full of coins, the carpeted corridor, the mountains, the birch forest, and now this, the dank darkness. And I knew what stone objects awaited me and how to interpret them. I was good at reading the signs. Which was why it shamed me, after all this time, that I should be so loath to do it.
That I should still be afraid to dream.