Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
The others called after me but did not catch me until I was already standing upon the lip of the basin, facing the Omen that waited.
There was a boat-small and wooden-a chain attached to its bow. The chain disappeared into water, then resurfaced upon the Ardent Oarsman’s platform. He reached down. Took it in his fist. Nodded at the boat.
Maude caught me before I could get in. “You need a weapon.” A weight slid into my hand. I didn’t have to look down to know it was her battle-axe. “I do have faith in you,” she said. “I think you would do anything for your Diviners. Even d-“
Her voice was drowned out by a new gust of wind. I looked up.
Against the rolling gray sky a dark shape appeared, getting closer and closer. A voice, singing out of tune.
The gargoyle was back.
He landed with a huff, sticking his nose up at Rory and Benji and Maude in particular. But when he reached me, all haughtiness vanished. He looked up with an open face. In his hands, resting in the beds of his palms-
My hammer and chisel.
“It is important for a squire to carry a knight’s weapons,” he said, the words so stoic I wondered if he’d practiced them on the flight back. “I will carry them for you, Bartholomew. I will shoulder any weight you give me.”
Oh, I thought, a great swelling in my chest.
To be a gargoyle. To be my gargoyle.
I set Maude’s axe down. Picked up the hammer and chisel. They bore no magic like the stone objects the Omens carried. But their weight was familiar, the feel of them in my palms assuring. With them, I felt strong.
The Ardent Oarsman pointed a gnarled hand at the boat.
“That’s your ride,” Benji said, coming up next to me. “No turning back now.”
“She’s not turning back.” Maude stood at my other side, rapping a knuckle over my breastplate. “I want this returned without a scratch.”
They both stepped aside, but not before Maude offered the gargoyle her hand in apology. He didn’t take it.
And then there was a deep voice in my ear. A steadfast presence at my back. “Nervous, Diviner?”
“No,” I said in a rush. Then, “Tell me-“
I swallowed.
“Tell you…” The warmth in Rory’s voice was dissonant against the sound of rain, pinging over our armor. He rounded my body, blocking my view of the Ardent Oarsman, and pulled Maude’s helmet from the crook in my arm. “What?”
“It’s stupid.”
“Then it should come easily to me.”
I bit down on a smile. “The Diviners asked for stories. When we were sick or tired or afraid. To calm us.”
“You want me to tell you a story?” He placed the helmet on my head, over my shroud. His voice, trapped within the iron, hummed in my ears. “Once, there was a foundling boy who didn’t believe in anything. He grew up, became a worldly knight, and still he struggled to believe. He bore hardly any hope, and a mountain of disdain. And that should have been the end.”
He took my hand, squeezed it, tightening my hold on my hammer. “But then he came to a cathedral upon a tor, and met a woman there. And all the tales he’d troubled himself with about cruelty, about unfairness and godlessness… he started to forget. He was afforded another chance, as if by magic, to believe in something. He’d never be a very good knight, but every time he looked at the woman, he had the distinct faith”-his eyes roved my face-“that things could be better than they’d been.”
I’d fallen through the seams of time into a place where there were no Omens or stone, no armor, no gossamer. There was just Rory, me-and a strange sacrality between us.
He lowered the visor of my helmet. “Can you still see?”
“Yes.”
“Good. If you fall in that water, I’m coming in after you.”
I stepped around him. Faced the basin, the Omen-but looked back to Rory. “It’s a good story, Myndacious. I liked it.”
He held me in his gaze like he needed to. “Do you want to know how it ends?”
“Does it end?”
He nodded. “It ends a handful of minutes from now. After you’ve won, and there is one less Omen in the world.” He grinned. “It ends when you kiss me.”
“You mean it ends after I’ve won, and there is one less Omen in the world-and I hit you as hard as I can.”
“With your mouth.”
I withdrew, tucking away my grin. When I faced the basin again, it was my spine, not my armor, holding me up.
I stepped into the boat.
The Oarsman was on his platform, watching. When I got into his boat he took the chain in both hands and began to yank. The water began to churn, the Omen pulling the boat, and me within it, toward his platform.
I wanted to look back. At the gargoyle and Benji and Maude. At Rory. I wanted to see the assuredness in their gazes. But all I saw, when the boat scraped against the side of the platform and the Ardent Oarsman offered me a gnarled hand-
Were cold stone eyes.
I ignored his hand, hauling myself up and moving to the opposite side of the platform, widening the space between us, ever wary of the water waiting just over the wooden lip.
The Oarsman surveyed me beneath his hood and smiled that toothy, jagged smile. He lifted his oar, pointed it at me like a threat, then swung it outward. His voice boomed over the water. “Any intervention on the Diviner’s behalf shall render the challenge lost and her life forfeit. No gargoyle, no king, no knight shall come to her aid.” His smile widened. “Agreed?”
I allowed myself a glance at the shore. The others were there, hands on their weapons, feet practically in the water, watching with such furious intensity they had the effect of an army awaiting the war call. And Rory-
His face was remade by hate. His black hair caught the wind, painting him wraithlike, a dark smudge in the storm. Maude came up next to him, and Benji as well, Rory and he holding out their stolen objects-the Harried Scribe’s inkwell, the Artful Brigand’s coin-like they were the severed heads of their enemies.
The Oarsman’s knuckles cracked as he strangled the neck of his oar. He pivoted-pointing that oar once more at me. “You little fool.” He made a low, horrible noise. “This will be the end of you.”
I kept my jaw hewn shut.
His stone eyes fell to my hammer. “What will you do? Crack my skull? Do you imagine the truth of your lost Diviners will fall like blood from my brow?” The platform groaned as he took a step forward. “They are to the wind, consumed by this starving world. You should not have come here.” He dipped the blade of his oar over the side of the platform. “But I’m very glad you have.”
The water around the basin erupted. Two waves rose, crashing down on me like cantering horses, dropping me to my knees. I gasped-braced myself. The wind picked up, a ripping force, and the rain hardened to hail.
I understood then the full magic within the Omen’s oar. When he dipped the handle into the water, the magic transported him. When he dipped the blade of the oar in, it became a staff of destruction, the water itself bending to his will. He stirred it, calling forth waves that crashed over the platform, splashing me, making me fall.
I tried to stand-was knocked down by another wave. The platform tilted and I rolled to the lip-the Oarsman suddenly on top of me. I rolled again, and his oar crashed just shy of where my head had been.
I heard voices on the wind. I was too busy trying to hold my hammer and chisel, too busy trying to hold myself from toppling over the edge of the platform, to heed them.