Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
There were six buildings besides the cathedral upon the tor. The largest was a two-level dormitory with attached stables that were often empty, but now smelled of manure from the knights’ horses. The second-largest building was an ivy-laden cottage where the abbess lived. Directly behind it was the dining commons, and then two more cottages. One for the gargoyles, who didn’t eat or drink but did enjoy sleep, and one for the Diviners.
The last building was a tiny stone cottage that sat far on the south side of the tor, where the wind was loudest. No one ever went there. The cottage had no windows, just an ancient iron door. A sad excuse for architecture, and utterly abandoned for it.
My walk through the grounds was quiet. I wound my way past the stables, the dormitory. All the windows were dark. Either the knighthood were somber for their king’s ill portents or they were abed. But then I rounded the abbess’s cottage, coming into view of the dining commons-
I blinked. The common windows were bright. And a knight, armed to the teeth, was stationed at its door, looking straight at me as I came from the darkness.
“Oi!”
I skidded to a standstill.
The knight, bearing a sword on her belt and a lethal-looking axe in her left hand, marched toward me, squinting against her torch. “Who’s that?”
My voice was a croak. “Six.”
“Who?”
“Six.”
The knight kept coming, aglow in the yellow torchlight. She had ornate bronze and gold and silver rings in her dark, cropped hair. A sharp nose. Lines between her brows and around her narrowed gaze that made me certain she was older than I was. Her green eyes had charcoal drawn around them; they widened as she looked me over. “Bloody pith, Diviner.” She lowered her torch. “You look like a ghost in that-that-“
I followed her gaze down to my Divining robes. The white silk, still wet, left no part of my body to the imagination. “I’m on my way to my room,” I said, clipped.
“At this hour?”
“I’ve been dreaming. Or have you forgotten the Divination?”
The knight stared. Not in the awestruck way strangers who came to Aisling often did, but more meticulous. “I haven’t forgotten. But everyone has gone to bed. Your Diviners and abbess included.”
“The gargoyle let me rest in the cathedral.”
She perked a brow. “You need rest after dreaming?”
“I doubt a simple soldier would understand the complexities of Divining.”
The knight’s brow rose. For a splintered second, I felt shamed, talking down to her like that. But then my good sense kicked in. She was, after all, a knight, serving a king whom the Omens clearly did not favor. No remorse was due. “I am thirsty,” I said.
“Well.” She tapped her boot over dirt. “It would be this simple soldier’s honor to walk you back to your dwelling.”
I nodded at the building behind her. “The kitchen is just inside. I’ll get water here.”
“I’ll bring you some.”
“Thoughtful.” I pivoted around her. “But unnecessary.”
“Wait, Diviner.” She reached for my arm. “Wait-“
I wrenched open the door to the dining commons.
Bent over, boots unlaced, another knight sat upon a long wooden table. He wasn’t wearing armor. Or chain mail. Or a tunic. He wasn’t wearing anything at all above the haphazard lacings that kept up his trousers.
He turned at the sound of the door, dark eyes skittering to a halt over me. Firelight caught along the three gold bands in his right ear.
The knight from the road.
He was smoking something, a small, smoldering twig that smelled sharp, like nettles. Just like when we’d locked gazes earlier, me on the wall, him upon his horse-
There was no warmth in his eyes.
Then he spoke. Not in curt hollers like he had from the road, but lower. And I thought maybe that’s where all the warmth of him lived. In the fervid, coal-stoked depths of his voice. “What’s this, Maude?”
The knight behind me-Maude, apparently-shifted. I’d stopped mid-stride over the threshold, leaving her half jammed in the doorway. “I found her stumbling in the dark.” She said the next words slowly. Pointedly. “She came to get a drink of water.”
“Hey,” another voice called.
I jumped. I hadn’t noticed the second figure in the room, near the fire, looking at me with rounded cheeks. “That’s my Diviner.”
King Benedict Castor.
He nodded at me in greeting, proffering a bright, boyish smile. Gone was the trembling king-this one, despite the abysmal portents his dream had yielded, looked entirely at ease. “Quite an experience, Divination,” he said. There was a large flagon in his hands he didn’t quite manage to hide behind his back. “Thanks for that.”
“You’re… welcome.” Maybe he was drunk. No sober man in his circumstances would smile so stupidly. I turned my attention to Maude. “I wasn’t stumbling in the dark. I was walking the grounds. Because I live here.
You are the guests.”
The half-naked knight slid off the table. I kept my gaze stubbornly aimed at his face and nothing below it. Not the lean muscles etched into his abdomen, not the sharp V they made over his hips, not the line of dark hair that trailed from his navel into his waistband-
“Must be something special.” Smoke bloomed from the part in his lips. “Being a Diviner.”
He didn’t sound like he thought it was special.
“It’s a privilege to Divine. To be Divined for, too. You might know that, had you bothered to attend the ceremony.”
“You noticed me go, did you?”
“Difficult not to, what with the show you made.”
Maude cleared her throat. The knight turned, the two sharing a look I could not read. I saw it, then. The thing I’d missed with him turned only half toward me on the table. The reason his shirt was off.
A dark, vicious cluster of bruises, decorating the right side of his body. Damaged, mottled skin over what surely was at least one broken rib.
“What happened?” I blurted.
He looked down at his side. Peered at me through another plume of smoke. “None of your business.”
King Castor forced out a laugh. “Is there anything I can get for you, Diviner? That water, perhaps?” He bustled through the commons, placing the flagon he’d kept hidden behind his back on the table near a ratty old notebook, and I heard the glugs and sloshes of its contents.
A familiar smell touched the air.
I sniffed like a dog. I knew that damn smell. It filled the room-rising from the flagon. Not wine as I presumed, nor sharp like the knight’s smoke, but sweeter. More putrid. Like rotting flowers.