The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(32)
I crashed into him, knocking both of us onto the floor. Glass sang and scattered. “Who are you?”
I thought I heard the faintest notes of a laugh. He reared, fast and sudden, and then it was me who was falling, catapulted backward by the momentum of his body, my spine slamming onto one of the mattresses.
He was on top of me in a second, pinning my wrists above my head. Dark eyes roved my face, his mouth turning in a distinct, familiar sneer. “Well, if it isn’t my least favorite Diviner.”
Rory.
CHAPTER NINE
TIME TO GO, DIVINER
The air between us tangled for one—two—breaths, then my voice was carving through the room. “You.”
Rory wasn’t wearing armor, just a black tunic and leathers. I could feel the drum of his heart, how it kicked up. His gaze went hard over my shroud, then harder still as it roamed over my bruised arms—the bloodied side of my face.
I wrenched my wrists from his grasp. “Where are they?”
“Who?”
“Don’t play games. You are here, appearing out of nothingness, and they are gone.” I was shaking. “Tell me where you’ve taken them.”
“Who?”
“The Diviners, you brute.”
He was still bowed over me, hands braced on either side of my head, knees pressing just outside my hips. Looking up into his face felt unmistakably similar to other things that might occur upon a mattress in a darkened room.
He seemed to think it, too, because the corners of his mouth lifted. “You’re welcome to search me for them.”
I kneed him in the groin.
A chorus of curses volleyed through the room. Rory rolled off me onto the mattress, groaning into the crook of his arm.
I sat up and watched him writhe. “This isn’t a joke, Myndacious.”
“Do I look like I’m fucking laughing? Just—” He pressed a hand over his eyes. “Pith, I’m going to puke. Be quiet a second.”
I would have purred at a spectacle like this a week ago. But the humiliation of Rodrick Myndacious did little to me now. He coughed, regained himself, and looked at me with such vicious displeasure I felt it on the back of my tongue. “So,” he said. “I’m meant to have stolen five women, have I? Despite the fact that I’ve been in the Seacht, ten miles away?”
“Yet here you are, appearing like a specter in my room—the very place they vanished.”
“And wholly regretting it, I assure you.” He shook his head. “Benji, the prat. I’m here because the bleeding-heart king got a falcon from Castle Luricht. Apparently, a Diviner had come, demanding an audience.” His brows rose faintly. “And that she knocked around a few drunks on the doorstep before slipping into the night.”
“That was the gargoyle.”
“Whatever. You made a fuss, and now I am here in the king’s stead.”
“So, you are an errand boy.”
His smirk was written in vitriol.
“What about the appearing act?” I pressed, nodding at the barred window. “How did you get in here?”
“None of your business.”
It was not lost on me that this knight was embedded with secrets. Even if he hadn’t been caught stealing water from Aisling’s spring, there was something about his revilement of the Omens, his violation of knightly standards, that made me certain he—along with King Castor and Maude—was beyond trust. It was loud in my mind.
But so was my promise to One.
If you disappear, I will come find you. And then we will find the others together, no matter the signs, no matter the portents.
And I would fall off the earth, if that’s what it took, to keep that promise. Even if I had to ingratiate myself with the foulest knight in all of Traum. For the Diviners, I would bear it.
I leaned closer. “Perhaps you have a bleeding heart, too, Rodrick Myndacious. Perhaps you would help me leave this place.”
He made a face, as if sickened I’d appealed to his humanity. “That is why you went to Castle Luricht? To tell the king the Diviners were disappearing?”
I nodded.
“What does the abbess say about it?”
“That they ran away.”
“Did they disappear one by one or all at once?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“I’m revoltingly curious.”
I exhaled through flared nostrils. “One by one, and always while we slept in this room.”
“Has anyone been dispatched to search for them?”
“One gargoyle per Diviner.”
“Did you see anything? Anyone suspicious?”
“Besides you? No.”
His eyes narrowed. “Who broke the mirror?”
“I did.”
“Why are your arms bruised?”
“I’ve been pinching myself. To stay awake.”
Rory’s voice went rough. “And the blood?” His hand came up slowly—a phantom through my hair, pushing it away from my swollen left temple. “This?”
“Gargoyle.”
“Right.” He exhaled and got off the mattress, fiddling with something in his pocket. Rory muttered to himself a whole thirty seconds before he said, swift and sure, “Get your things.”