The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(10)

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.

Aisling’s spring water.

The shirtless knight glowered. “Diviner?”

My stomach rolled. Bile I thought had all been spent on the cathedral floor returned, and before I could pay the knight’s impudence back with my own, I put a hand to my stomach. Heaved forward.

And was sick on his boots.





I ran.

Maude, who was halfway through her alarmed cry of “What the fuck!” stumbled back. My shoulder collided with her pauldron, and then I was sprinting into the night. Through darkness and grass and onto a crude stone path, I made my way to the stone cottage where the Diviners lived.

I was nearly there when I heard him behind me.

“Diviner.”

I didn’t look back.

“Diviner.”

A rickety wood gate stood between me and the last twenty paces to my door. I caught myself on it, fumbling for the latch. It groaned, clicked open—

A hand came from behind me, pinning the gate shut. When I looked down, I realized why it had taken him so long to catch me.

He’d removed his boots. The ones I’d unceremoniously spat bile upon.

There was a reason we Diviners were kept out of sight after a dream. It was not worthy of our image, our station, that we should be seen as frail. That dreaming of gods was in any way diminishing. It was not known how sick Aisling’s spring water made us.

My entire body burned that I should be made vulnerable in front of this asshole.

I turned. The knight was right behind me. “Step back,” I snapped.

He was looking at my shroud, at me, like I was a venomous asp. Transfixed—and repulsed. This close, I could see the thing he was smoking was branch-like, thin and gnarled and no longer than my middle finger. He put his lips to it, withdrew his hand from the gate, and took three full steps back.

It was still too close. His bareness—

“You couldn’t have put on a shirt?”

His eyes roamed my body, then immediately withdrew. He threw his head back—shot smoke out of his mouth at the sky. “I could say the same to you.”

I looked down at my wet Divining robe, thin and clinging.

Lecher. “Why does the king have spring water in that flagon?”

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“I could smell it.”

“You sure you weren’t just smelling yourself? You reek of Aisling.” The knight was tall—but he did not wield it. Knees bent, he kept his weight pitched forward in a lazy slouch, like it was a labor standing at full height. “Have you been in the cathedral this entire time?”