The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(76)

I was losing my faith in everything. But the two of us meeting… it felt almost divine.

“What was it like?” I asked. “Killing the Artful Brigand?”

“Years in the making—and over in a moment.” His fingers moved up to my forearm. Again he asked. “May I?”

He waited at the gate of every place he touched until I granted him entry. And as Rory soothed the muscles he’d help make sore, I wondered if I should tell him I did not always think him so unknightly. That his unwavering belief in me during our training had not gone unnoticed—that I had not detected an ounce of Maude’s skepticism in him, as if he already knew the outcome of my fight with the Oarsman. Not because of dreams or portents and not because it was a fantastical story he told himself—he simply believed I could win.

Errant knight Rodrick Myndacious, prideful, disdainful, godless, believed in me.

The charcoal around his eyes had been rubbed away, his black hair dropping trails of water down his clavicle, his chest. “How are your feet?” he asked. “Can’t be easy, wearing those fine boots day in, day out.”

“You touch my feet, you die.”

A wicked smile unraveled over his mouth. Rory snatched a hand under the water. I drew back, kicking to the surface, splashing him. He laughed. When I aimed another kick he caught my ankle, pulled—

I slipped.

I spread my arms, but the water was without pity, giving me nothing to cling to. I fell backward.

And suddenly it was not a hot spring I was falling into, but the spring at Aisling Cathedral. Pressed down by the abbess. Opening my mouth, taking putrid water into my lungs, waiting for pain, for dreams, for stone objects and the terrifying presence of the Omens—

A hand found the back of my neck.

I was thrust out of the water. “I’ve got you. Breathe, Diviner.”

I hauled in air. When I opened my eyes, I expected to see the rose window high in Aisling’s cloister. But all I saw was the moon, hovering in its dark heaven. The moon—and Rory.

“I didn’t think.” He pushed my hair out of my face, careful of my shroud, and kept his hand at the nape of my neck as my feet found the rocks at the bottom of the pool.

I coughed. “It’s fine—”

“It’s not lost on me how terrible I’ve been. Growing up under the Artful Brigand—” He said it in a gasping rush, like it was he who’d been underwater. “I’m discourteous and utterly poisoned by contempt. I know that.” His throat hitched. “And I don’t know how to behave around you. You make me so fucking nervous. But letting you fall underwater when all you ever did at Aisling was drown, I—”

“Myndacious.” I reached up. Put a hand over his mouth. “It was an accident.”

He nodded too fast and wouldn’t look at me.

My hand slid to his cheek. “Rory.”

Silver moonlight painted his hair, his nose, the lines of his brow, and when Rory glanced down, I saw a misery in his eyes. I’m sorry, he mouthed.

And just like that, another crack fissured in my heart.

“We should go back,” he said after a drawn silence. “You need your rest for tomorrow.”

“Not yet. Can you—” I didn’t want it to end like that, him riddled with guilt, me thinking of drowning. “My right shoulder,” I managed. “It’s a little sore.”

His focus drifted down my neck. Slowly, he reached for my shoulder.

I relaxed into his touch and let my head fall back. I looked up at the sky, the thousands of stars stitched upon a vast purple tapestry, reveling in the sensation of being held up in water and not pressed down.

“Your hair is pretty,” Rory murmured. “Like moonlight. And your skin is so soft. But beneath…” He kneaded my muscle. “If I were to bite down, I’d break my teeth on you.”

“If you were to bite down,” I said to the sky, “your bottom teeth would leave a crooked mark, unique as your fingerprint.”

Rory’s hand stilled. A flush rolled onto my face. “That’s what I thought when we first spoke at Aisling,” I muttered. “Outside the Diviners’ cottage. You smiled.”

He looked half amused, half something else. “And you were imagining what pattern my teeth might leave on your skin?”

“I was in the throes of the idleweed. Out of my senses.”

“Mm-hmm.” He resumed his ministrations. “Shall we see, then?”

I wondered if he could feel my pulse, drumming through the water. “Where would you bite me, knight?”

“Wherever you told me to, Diviner.”

My arms. My neck. My mouth, stomach, breasts. And maybe he knew, because his breath quickened, like he, too, was thinking of all the parts of me he might sink his teeth into.

I lifted my palm to his lips, just as thousands of palms had been lifted to mine during Divinations. Only now there was no viscous blood to swallow, just moonlight over a sheen of water. Rory held my gaze and slipped his teeth over the flesh below my thumb. Pressed down.

My lips parted. His bite was the same as his touch, exacting but gentle—a low, determined pressure. Then his teeth were gone. Rory shut his eyes. Sighed into my palm.

Replaced his teeth with his lips.

Rory kissed the place he’d bitten with arduous slowness. “I’d rather this left a mark instead,” he murmured into my skin.