The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)(93)

Benji pulled away. “Fucking hell, Rory, leave me alone. No one believes this white knight charade.”

Rory flinched.

I flew to my feet, but it was the gargoyle who spoke. “That is unkind and unworthy, Bartholomew.” He’d been quietly crying in the corner of the room, and now appeared the spirit of righteous anger. “If you value your friend when he fights your battles for you—when he is rogue and ruthless—you must value him when he is gentle, too. Otherwise you do not value him at all.”

Benji leaned his back against the bed. Put his hands over his face. “I’m sorry, Rory.”

Rory was looking at Maude’s unmoving form, his dark eyes glassy. “It’s fine.”

Hours later, in the quiet of the hall, I was thinking of Maude. Of the Diviners. Of sleep that brooked no awakening.

Next to me, the gargoyle was looking out the window at the Chiming Wood. “The whole world is a wood, Bartholomew, and everyone in it is fashioned of birch bark. Frail as paper.”

He began to cry, and I did, too. “Oh, gargoyle.”

I used to think his sadness, his heavy emotion, such a futile thing. An irreconcilable flaw. But as I kept to Maude’s room, watching Benji drink and Rory go silent and feeling my own tongue struggle to put to words the defeat I felt, I began to think I’d been telling myself the wrong story about my peculiar batlike gargoyle.

Sadness, like birch bark, had all the appearance of frailty. And yet…

The tree prevailed.





A day later, I was running down the stairs, bare feet slapping against stone. When I found the gargoyle, polishing armor in the great hall, I was breathless. “She’s awake.”

Maude was sitting up in bed, drinking water, pale and shaky and covered in bandages, but awake. I stepped into the room, and she looked at me with those kind green eyes, and I learned that, for all my heartbreak over death—over false stories and lying gods and lifeless Diviners—my heart could break for happiness, too. “Hey, Maude.”

“Heard you two snagged that chime,” she said, winking at the gargoyle. “That’s four Omens down—two more to go.” Her voice grew solemn. “I know things have not been anything like you thought they’d be when you left Aisling, Diviner. But I hope you know how special you are to us. We wouldn’t have gotten this far without you.”

“Oh.” I scrubbed a hand over my cheek. “Thank you. I’m very glad you’re not, um, you know—”

“Dead as a doorhanger?” the gargoyle offered.

Maude turned to Benji, who stood near the window. “We should do something to commemorate her. She’s been fearless.”

Benji’s skin was brighter. His eyes less glassy. Maude’s awakening had brought him back to himself. “Whatever sounds good to you, Maude.”

“I was thinking a knighthood. We’ll have a proper ceremony. Today.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Don’t knights swear to the Omens in their vows?”

“We can skip that part.” Maude beamed. “You don’t have to do it, of course. But just in case you’ve grown tired of Aisling’s creed and everything that’s come with it, you might like to say ours for a while.”

My armor may dent, my sword may break, but I will never diminish.

I knew what she was doing. Offering me a permanent place, now that the Diviners were gone. Telling me that I need not remain adrift—that I had a home with them if I wanted one.

Tears prickled behind my eyes. “I’m not noble born.”

“Exceptions can be made,” Rory and Maude said at the same time, sharing a smile, then sending it my way.

Benji’s gaze shifted between Rory and me. He was quiet. Then—“Six has proven helpful as a Diviner. I wouldn’t want to change her title. The influence she wields, the way the nobles look at me when I’m with her—”

“Don’t be a prat,” Rory said. “This isn’t about you.”

“Of course it’s not.” Benji’s cheeks reddened, his voice hardening. “I’m the king, and it’s never about me. I’m not respected like a craftsman or a knight or a Diviner. My first public act is to go into the hamlets and be utterly humiliated by the nobility in the names of the Omens. I know that I’m young, and that my grandfather was a heretic, but the treatment of sovereigns goes far beyond that. It’s as if my position has only ever existed to be a foil to Aisling. I am made a prostrate fool to prove how much weaker a king is to a god.”

The silence in the room was heavy.

Rory went to stand in front of Benji. When he slouched as he often did, Rory and the king stood exactly equal, eye to eye. “Perhaps that’s the system’s fatal flaw. If Aisling and the Omens have only ever painted a king as inconsequential, what does it say about them if a king is the one who brings them all down?”

Benji’s face twisted as he held back tears.

“Your grandfather would be proud of you, Benji.” Maude, despite her bandages, tried to sit up straighter. “We’re proud, too.”

I nodded in agreement, and the gargoyle leaned close to whisper in my ear. “If the boy wants to make me cry, he’ll need a sadder story than that.”

I shushed him, and the king’s gaze turned. Benji looked at me. Really looked at me. I couldn’t see the world behind his eyes, but I was certain it was vast, and that he was desperate to map it. “If you wish it, Six, of course I’ll knight you. Your loyalty is a treasure I would never deny.”