Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
The corner of Rory’s mouth twitched.
“Six.”
His brows lifted. “Six.”
Oh. A fuzzy feeling was settling into me. The nausea in my stomach had uncoiled. Another puff of the idleweed and it was gone. Another, and the hollowness in my limbs was replaced by a warm, blanketing haze-
“That’s plenty.” Rory plucked the idleweed, which was just about gone, from my mouth. He dragged it over his bottom lip, took a final pull, and dropped it onto the path. “Six is a number, not a name.”
“We don’t deign to speak our real names.”
“Just like you don’t show your eyes?” His gaze flickered over my shroud. “Why is that, by the way? No one seems to know.”
I kept my lips sealed.
“So, it’s a secret.” He nodded. “And I suppose it’s also a secret why no one but high and holy Diviners are allowed to drink Aisling’s spring water.”
I thought of the flagon in King Castor’s hands. “It’s been attempted. Only a few years ago, a merchant from Coulson Faire was so desperate to see the Omens’ signs he rushed down the nave and drank from the spring like a pig from a trough. The gargoyles clocked him over the head and dragged him into the courtyard. He didn’t dream, of course, but he did vomit until he was sobbing. So, tell your king to go ahead and drink his stolen spring water. Just take care to mind your boots.”
Rory glowered, and I rolled my shoulders. “Only Diviners dream,” I said.
“But what is a Diviner, really? A foundling?” He looked me up and down. “The abbess strips you of name, face, clothes, distinction-cloisters you to the cathedral grounds, where you are destined to drink blood and drown and dream. You know of the Omens and signs and how to look down your nose at everyone, but nothing of what really goes on in the hamlets. Nothing of the real Traum that awaits you the moment your tenure is up-which, given your age, can’t be too long now.” He sucked his teeth and grinned at me in a way that was not at all friendly. “Careful, Number Six. Someone will accuse you of having too much fun up here on this god-awful hill.”
Heat choked up my neck. How dare he. “Hold your tongue or I’ll rip it out. I serve gods. You a serve a boy-king who has just garnered five ill portents. Only one of us is worthy of reproach.”
So abruptly I kicked up gravel, I turned on my heel and snapped open the gate to my cottage.
“Aren’t you going to apologize for my boots?” he called after me.
I turned to shout at him-throw gravel, maybe-but Rodrick Myndacious had already proffered me his back. Night carved shadows across broad muscles as he walked away. “It’s been a privilege, Diviner,” he threw over his shoulder.
I seethed all night and got no rest.
The Knight and the Moth
BLACKMAIL, FOR INSTANCE
Dawn came, and the wind drifting through the cottage window traveled on a mournful note. Breeze always caught along the tor-and Traum was a windy land at that. I wondered if all of the hamlets sounded wailful when the wind blew.
The cottage door slammed. Voices reached the bedroom landing, and the staircase began its usual chorus of creaky complaints. “I still think we should castrate him.”
I smiled.
One and Three and Four had not been on their mattresses when I’d come to bed last night. They’d been out all night and were now hauling themselves into the large bedroom that hosted all six of us Diviners, throwing their cloaks down-looking like droopy flour sacks in their wrinkled white dresses. Four’s nostrils were flaring, her hands spinning. “It’s no less than he deserves.”
I sat up. Stretched my arms over my head. “Who are we castrating?”
“Don’t ask,” Three groaned, plopping onto her mattress.
Four turned to me, drawing in an affected breath. “He’s married. Wentworth is married.”
“And Wentworth is…?”
“The knight who all but pleaded for my attention yesterday. Obviously, I snuck out to see him-“
“And dragged the pair of us.” One yawned, her short brown hair pointing in all four cardinal directions as she dropped onto the mattress next to me. “She’s mad because my knight told me her knight had a wife and two little Wentworth pups back at home.”
“Something the bastard conveniently failed to mention while his mouth was between my legs,” Four said, braiding her hair with furious fingers.
Two and Five sat up, rubbing sleep from their eyes. “The first man in history to lie about being married,” Two muttered, pulling back the blankets so Three could collapse next to her on their shared mattress.
“But he’s a knight!” Four’s cheeks went a deeper shade of scorn red. “My armor may dent, my sword may break, but I will never diminish. Isn’t that their creed?” She stalked to the opposite side of the room, where a small wooden table was fitted with a cracked looking glass, and sat on its lip. “They’re supposed to keep rules. You know, be good at love and faith and war and inane things like that.”
“Of course knights keep rules.” One rubbed her eyes. “The utmost being never mention wives. The next-“
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I offered.
Five chuckled, lay back down, and immediately began to snore.
Four peered at her reflection in the looking glass, pushing the corners of her downturned mouth up into an uncanny smile. “I hate that we have to sneak around for a little fun. It attracts the truly idiotic.” Her eyes found One in the mirror. “Was yours any good?”
One shrugged. “He mainly rattled on about his family’s factory in the Seacht. I had to kiss him to shut him up. The evening slightly improved after that.”
Only the gargoyles traveled into Traum to do the abbess’s bidding. We Diviners weren’t permitted visitors to our cottage, and we certainly weren’t permitted to leave the tor until our ten years of service were up.
Not all of us took those rules so acutely to heart.
If we wanted a bedmate, we could easily have one. Aisling Cathedral was never bereft of visitors, and the tor was vast. We could lay in the grass with someone. The bolder Diviners-not me, mind; namely Four and Three and sometimes One-even left the tor on occasion, sneaking down the holloway road to a nearby glen or Coulson Faire for a night of happy impiety. But just as we hid our eyes, our names, and the illness we felt after dreaming, it was important for us Diviners to hide our hearts from the strangers we bedded. To encourage the air of detached mysticism our profession required-oracles, seen and revered but never known.
Divine in public, human in private.
The first stranger I’d laid down with in the tor’s grass was young and green like me, and we built up far more sweat getting his jerkin off than during what happened after. The second was a woman, and she kissed me so well beneath my dress that I thought myself in love-but then she tried to take off my shroud after I told her I could not, and I lost all my ardor.
The third was over a year ago, one of King Augur’s knights, and he was all that a knight should be. I can’t remember his name, but he was rugged and respectful and knew exactly how to touch me. He laid me down on the grass and I kept still, waiting to feel the things Four talked about. Inhibition lost to desire. Tenderness, and the little death that followed.
They never came.
After, the knight withdrew, like he knew he had not done a task well. It made me feel so rotten to be a task to him, and a failed one at that, that I had stopped taking strangers to the grass. I told myself it was better sharpening the qualities that made me divine than those that made me human, even if, in a deep, ugly place, I worried I’d made that choice because I did not know how to be human. I was the most uncomplaining Diviner, ever good in the eyes of the abbess-Aisling Cathedral’s best daughter. But when it came to being worldly or vulnerable or even fun, I was an abysmal failure.
Something Rodrick Myndacious had so graciously pointed out the night prior.
“Speaking of knights and rife misconduct,” I said to the Diviners, “you won’t believe the absolute boar I met last-“
The door to the cottage banged open. Two gargoyles, the falcon and the wolf, trudged in, their heavy steps kicking up dust.
The abbess trailed behind them. She tutted, a brief hem and haw, like she already knew the merit of the conversation she’d interrupted and wanted to sponge it from the room. “Well.” She knit her gloved fingers in a basket. “Yesterday was rather eventful.”
We let out a collective sigh.
“Five bad portents.” One shook her head. “Poor King Castor.”