The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(75)

He surprised me with the gift of silence. And it was a gift, because I didn’t want to say out loud that it would have been as arbitrary as everything else that happened at Aisling Cathedral, teaching a girl intended to drown how to swim.

Perhaps he already understood that, and the silence was for both of us to put that ugly truth somewhere private.

All Rory did, in his usual half-hearted way, was shrug. “That’s no trouble.”





I expected the hot springs to smell of rotting flowers. They didn’t. They smelled of earth. Hidden in the shadow of the mountains, steam rising off them like tired old ghosts, sat a cluster of pools.

Rory led me to the largest. I was about to ask him if he’d come here many times before when he reached down, gripped the hem of his tunic.

Yanked it over his head.

My gaze followed where muscles cusped his spine, then moved to the two small dimples just above the rim of his pants. I hadn’t seen him bare like that since his first night at Aisling. Back when I thought him the foulest knight in all of Traum.

And maybe he still was, because Rory was currently flinging off his boots and reaching for the leather clasp around his pants. Tugging it—

“What the hell are you doing?”

He peered over his shoulder. Whatever he saw on my face, the panic, the heat, made him smile. “Feel free to avert your virtuous eyes.”

His pants hit the ground.

Water splashed, steam billowed, and then all I could see of Rory was his head, his neck, the lines of his clavicle, peeking out of the hot spring.

He stretched his arms over his head and let out a moan that made me bite down. “Good for what ails you.”

He fixed me in his gaze. Twirled his hands and bowed exaggeratedly. “Wouldst the lady join me?”

“Why are you so annoying?”

“Why are you afraid to get in? I am standing in the deepest point—no swimming required.” His eyes flittered over my nightshirt. “If it’s about protecting my innocence, you’re too late. You were practically naked in that wet Divining robe the night we met.”

“How mortifying for you.”

He slapped a hand over his eyes and turned around, proffering me privacy and another view of his sculpted back. “Never said that.”

I thought of bold Four. How, if she were here, she’d already be naked, and the other Diviners would inevitably follow, Two grumbling, Three and Five half-timid, half-excited, and One sighing as she held her arm out to me. “Come on,” she’d say. “Someone has to mind them.”

Loneliness touched everything. And the aching beauty of the peaks, the pools, the incomparable night sky, made it so much worse.

I put a hand to my heart—to the five invisible cracks that lived there—and began to unbutton my shirt. It fell to the ground, pooling around my bare feet. Next off were my undergarments, and then I was exhaling shakily, crossing my arms over my breasts, thighs pressing together—naked under the silver moon.

Rory kept his back to me, shoulders tightening.

The pool was warm, as if it had its own feverish heart, working faster than mine. I waded into the ripples until I wore the water like a new dress. “You can turn around now.”

He waited a breath. When Rory faced me, the derision I’d come to know him by was absent, the lines of his brow smoothed, eyelids almost heavy. “You’re nervous.”

I flicked water in his face and rolled my shoulders and damn it, he was right. The water was good for what ailed me, a balm over aching muscles. I rubbed my neck—let my head fall back.

“Where are you sore?” Rory lifted an accusatory finger out of the water. “Don’t bother denying it. How’s the wrist?”

I could toss the Artful Brigand’s coin with both hands, but never perfectly with my left. So I’d spent the last three days using my right, resulting in an ache in the joint that never seemed to quiet. “It’s fine.”

He gave me a champion sneer, and I laughed. “It aches. A little.”

“Not half as much as that confession, I’ll wager.” He drifted closer, closer, until he was an arm’s length away. “May I?”

Everything was languid. Slow. As if night itself had dipped its long finger in the pool and stirred the water backward. I held out my arm and Rory took my wrist with such startling care I exhaled sharply. His gaze rose. And it was impossible to tell with eyes already so dark, but his pupils seemed to widen over me.

Then his fingers were moving, pressing, intricate and purposeful over the soreness of my wrist. I let out a heavy noise and Rory nodded, like he understood the language of pain and reprieve. “Is this all right?”

Just a whisper. “Yes.”

Lines drew between his eyes. Rory took to my muscles with honed precision, firm fingers, insistent but never prodding, like it was important to him—a craft to do well. Just like when he’d measured me for armor, I studied him. Ran my gaze down his face, neck, chest.

I wondered if his ribs were still bruised. “What about you?” I reached out. Drew a finger up his side. “Are you still in pain?”

He shivered. “Near you? Always.”

“Your ribs, you idiot. From getting caught stealing Aisling’s spring water.”

“Hmmm—that. It still aches. A little.”

I frowned, thinking of him in pain. Of him, thieving as a boy. We’d both been foundling children, both taken under the wings of Omens—the abbess, and the Artful Brigand. But where the abbess had put me in gossamer and made me exceptional, Rory had endured the opposite. And it seemed so impossible he should have come to know Benji’s grandfather, met Maude, become a knight—and that I had purposely chosen the short straw that day. Lingered along the Aisling wall. Looked down, seen him.