The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(58)

“Shouldn’t it?”

“Of course.” Each word held an edge. “I think children are particularly vulnerable in Traum.”

I considered biting his thumb. “You’re talking about Aisling again. About Diviners.”

“Merely noting that the abbess always plucks foundlings.” His finger dropped from my bottom lip. “And always girls, to do her bidding.”

“Maybe foundlings are less likely to question that which is taught to them in kindness,” I murmured. “And the abbess was kind to me. She took care of me. Told me that I was special. That dreaming was divine. As to why she chooses girls—I learned it’s about pain. How girls bear it best. Which rather contradicts what I just said about her being kind, doesn’t it?”

A horrible fissure began in me, disrupting everything I’d believed in. “She starved me for affection, for praise, then gave me just enough to whet my palate. I’d have done anything she asked of me. But if she’s the sixth Omen, the moth, she never cared for me, did she? I was but a piece of parchment to scrawl her false story upon. A cog in her machine.” I bit the inside of my cheek. Turned to the wall. “I feel so stupid for my part in it.”

Rory’s voice rooted in me like a fisherman’s hook. “You’re not stupid.”

Brow knit, he examined my shroud. Not with irritation like he often did, but like he had finally been afforded a glimpse through it. “Her care came with conditions. You bent yourself to fit them, and now… now you see yourself as this terrible burden. Like you’re nothing if you’re not the best, the most useful version of yourself.”

I did not like that. Being so thoroughly charted. “Thereabouts.”

He must have known that I wanted to peel my skin off and scrub it under water, because he withdrew his scrutiny. Retreated to the cabinets. “It’s not true, you know,” he said. “You don’t have to be good, or useful, for someone to care about you.”

I watched his back, running my tongue over the wax-covered split in my bottom lip, the texture grainy, sweet from the beeswax—and salty where his thumb had been.

When Rory faced me once more, he held a needle and a spool of gray thread.

“I’m going to tailor that dress to your body,” he said. “Trim the excess fabric. Spread wax on it. When it hardens, it should form a delicate exoskeleton with measurements accurate enough for Maude’s blacksmith to make you a custom suit of armor.” His smile did not touch his eyes. “Your Diviner dress will be ruined. Is that acceptable?”

“Try not to enjoy it too much.”

He rounded my body and gripped gossamer like it was the scruff of an animal, wadding excess fabric in his fist until it pulled closely against my throat, breasts, diaphragm.

I drew in a stiff breath.

“You all right?”

“Fine.”

Rory sewed me into my old, ratty dress. When he was done along my back, he moved to my left side. “Hold out your arm.”

I did, and he gripped my forearm. Large as his hand was, it didn’t fit around my bicep. He made the smallest hum of appreciation, then set to sewing my sleeve until it wore me like a second skin, then did the same for my right sleeve.

“You sew well.”

“Do I?” In and out went the needle, the thread whispering after it. Rory’s brow knit in concentration, and I took the moment to study him. His dark lashes. His cheekbones. The ruined charcoal around his eyes.

“I’ve seen knights from the Chiming Wood wear charcoal like that. Maude does it, too.” I nodded at the three gold bands in his right ear. “Those make you look like you’re from Coulson Faire.”

He kept sewing, running the tip of his tongue over his bottom lip in concentration. “I’m not from any one place.”

“Where did you live the longest? Castle Luricht?”

His eyes shot to my face. “Benji’s loose-lipped.”

“His grandfather’s story required credence. You were it.”

“What joy is mine.” He sighed. “It’s true. I lived for a time at Castle Luricht under the Artful Brigand. I also lived in Petula Hall with Maude. But the longest I was ever at one place was likely here in the Seacht. Pupil House II, to be exact.”

“Because you’re a foundling.” I peered down at him. “You might have said earlier.”

“Not my fault you were delusional enough to mistake me for nobility.”

“How then were you knighted? I thought—”

“That one needs to be born within one of the hamlet’s noble families to be knighted? You’d be correct.” Rory stepped back to the cabinets and retrieved a large pair of shears. “There are, however, exceptions.”

My sleeves—which had been tented—were now pulled tightly against my arms. Rory ran his hand down my left arm—down the new seam he’d sewn—and brought the shears to the excess fabric. “Keep still.”

I dreaded it would feel like a mutilation, him destroying my Diviner’s dress. But the sound—shears, cutting though gossamer—was strangely satisfying. I shut my eyes and listened to it, imagining myself an insect, the first piece of its cocoon coming away.

The room smelled aromatic now, the beeswax fully melted upon the hearth. When he was done trimming my dress, Rory snagged a loose cloth, and maneuvered the pot of melted wax from the hearth onto the countertop. “I’ll need to work fast before it hardens,” he said, pouring the wax into a pitcher. He dipped his finger in to test it. “It’ll be warm at first.”