Filed to story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
“Well?” she said. “How do you feel?”
“I don’t know.” I looked down at myself. I was naked. “Strange.”
“You are. Sybil Delling is dead. What remains is strange. Special.” The abbess beckoned me forward. She tied the shroud around my eyes, then took my shoulders. Hugged me. “And new.”
She shoved me into the spring.
Water drew over me like the lid of a coffin. The abbess dipped her hand into the spring, grasped my throat and pressed. I cried out, bubbles filling the water. I clawed, thrashed-and was kept down. Pressed and pressed and pressed.
“Benji! Bring her here!”
I heard voices. Not low and steady like the abbess’s, but loud. Rough. Desperate. “Get her out of the fucking armor.”
“It’s bent-I can’t-“
“Pith, she’s blue.”
Someone was crying. Long, aching sobs. “Bartholomew?”
“Give me your axe, Maude.”
“The sprites are coming-“
“Give it to me!”
Pain, greater than I’d ever known, touched my face, my hands, my ribs. I felt something shift-and then an oppressive weight found my chest.
“Come on,” a man’s voice shouted. My mouth was pulled open by an unseen force, hot, torrid breaths filling me. “Breathe, Diviner.”
There were more sobs. “Bartholomew always wakes. Why doesn’t she wake?”
A woman’s voice sounded. “Rory.”
“No.” There was more pressure-a pounding sensation over my chest so violent the world quaked. “Wake up, sweetheart.
Wake. Up.”
And the pain, the pain I knew so well from drowning, from dreaming-
Was now the pain of awakening.
I opened my eyes under a new shroud.
Gossamer, fastened too loosely, lay over my eyes. When I peered through it, it was into a darkened room with high ceilings and a tall lancet window that held the night sky.
I wore a long linen tunic and lay in a bed with a pillow and sheets far finer than the ones I’d been afforded at the Diviner’s cottage. I tried to move-to take in the anatomy of the room. But every muscle hurt, and half my bones were arrested in pain. There was a throbbing agony near my temple, and another along my left hip.
But nothing was so painful as my stiff, bandaged neck.
“Hello?” My voice grated up my throat. “Gargoyle?”
No answer.
I sat up. There was red on my linen tunic, too, below my pubis. I’d bled my moon’s blood. I’d been lying there some time, then.
The world was hazy, my mind undulating. I remembered darkness-hands tying fabric around my bleeding neck, then traveling through gales of wind, held in the gargoyle’s stone arms. I was adrift, my body washed and bandaged and put in new clothes. Then, fitful sleep.
It was all so murky. The last clear thing I recalled…
I sat up.
The Ardent Oarsman. His magic oar, calling up waves. Water, crashing into me. Teeth, biting. Blood, pain.
She came barely a week ago, naked and still. I took her into my castle. Placed her upon my throne…
My body seized.
Dead. Your Diviners are all dead.
I leaned over and coughed up bile. Then I was out of my bed, feet slapping against the cold floor.
No fire was lit, the room a dark blotch behind my new shroud. I reached for the iron handle of my door, turned it, and was confronted by a long, twisting corridor with a wine-red carpet that ran down its center like a tongue.
It looked like Aisling. Its ceilings were tall, vaulted, crafted with carefully cut stone. But the cathedral was unadorned but for its ancient pews, its stained-glass windows, and this-wherever this was-
Was opulent in its ornaments.
There were looking glasses taller than me and twice as wide. Tapestries, paintings-landscapes and portraits that, even in the hazy dimness, were vivacious in color. Shelves upon shelves held tomes and glass casings filled with petrified insects, animal pelts-live plants with serpentine stems and black petals I didn’t know the name of.
Artistry, craftmanship, everywhere.
A low creak sounded somewhere ahead, and I limped toward it. When I reached the end of the corridor, I was greeted by three doors.
I don’t know what made me knock on the third door, or why, when no one answered, I opened it.
Hinges groaning, I was confronted by a wide room, lit by moonlight and the dying embers in a hearth. I stepped inside, throwing shadows hither and yon. The room was as the corridor-cluttered with artifacts. I saw a table, strewn with stacks of paper, some aged, some new. “Hello?”
No one answered.
I came to the desk, looking for a seal-some indicator of where I might be. The Harried Scribe’s stone inkwell was there. My stomach twisted. So was the Ardent Oarsman’s oar. I ignored both, my fingers scraping over parchment, stirring dust. There were leaflets, letters, and-
My breath stilled.
Benji’s grandfather’s notebook.
A more obedient version of me would have left it alone. It wasn’t mine to look at. But that version of me belonged to Aisling Cathedral, and I had fled that place, intruding upon the strange, perilous land of Traum.
What was one more trespass?
I opened it, the smells of aged leather and parchment filling my nose. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Something to challenge the horrible things the Ardent Oarsman had spewed before his death. Proof of Diviners past. Reassurance, in all of King Castor’s scholarly learnings, that daughters of Aisling had never been treated as anything but holy.