The Knight and the Moth

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR TAKE OFF MY ARMOR

We put the Faithful Forester’s chime in Benji’s room with the other stone objects and shuttered Petula Hall. Not even the knighthood, dispatched to the village two miles away, was allowed in. And not just because their fellow knight Maude Bauer was bruised and broken and unconscious.

It was to spare them the sight of their king.

Benji was… I didn’t know what to call it. His grief that Maude, whom I expected he held as both mother and sister, was so injured, put a misery in him no ale or wine or idleweed could ease.

“No,” he said, spilling his wine when Rory tried to drag him from her bedside for a proper sleep. “I want to stay.”

It was two days after the ceremony in the sacred glen. Maude lay on a finely woven quilt atop her bed, covered in bandages. The birke had fallen on her, shattering the bones on the left side of her abdomen and putting a swollen knot along her temple. Her ribs, her shoulder, her arm and fingers—all broken. The village physician came and went, setting her bones, but she’d said it was the bump to Maude’s head that concerned her most. That Maude might never wake.

That did not stop us from sitting at her bedside, waiting for her to do so.

“Come on, Castor.” Rory reached for Benji’s arm. “I’ll take you to your room. Sleep off some of that wine—”

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 ru

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.”

He stepped around Rory, placing himself between us. “But please understand. Our work is not yet done. Every Omen that dies, every stone object I claim, I grow closer to reclaiming the kingdom from its dreams and portents and false stories. But if I succeed in taking up the mantle, if the Omens are vanquished—if Aisling falls—I must give people something to believe in in their stead. All that power has to go somewhere.”

He took my hand, then turned to Maude, then Rory. “Do you all promise to be there with me, that I might bear it?”

“Of course, Benji,” Maude said. “We’re with you.”

Rory nodded, his gaze flickering to me.

“My business has ever been with the Omens,” I murmured. “Next, it will be with the Heartsore Weaver. And after—” My voice hardened. “With the moth. When I face the abbess again, it will be in armor, not gossamer.” I reached out. Took Benji’s hand. “With King Benedict Castor the Third at my side.”

He smiled. Boyish, brave. “Then let’s get you knighted.”

The gargoyle and I stood outside Petula Hall’s library door at sunset. Maude had chosen it for the knighting, because that was where the best western light shone, and she said she liked the feel of it on her cheek. The rest of the knights were not there, and I was glad for it. I didn’t want a display. It was only me, the gargoyle, Maude, Benji, Rory, and the blacksmith, Victor, who’d brought me my finished suit of armor that morning.

It was so… beautiful. I didn’t even remember the names of all the pieces, but the gargoyle, who had not shirked his duty as squire, had chattered in my ear about them as he dressed me. When the chainmail, then armor, was fastened, I felt like a great stone edifice. Sturdy and impenetrable, but with a beating, swelling heart within.

“You know, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle said, just before we joined the others in the library. “It would be all right if you did not want to become a knight.”

I turned. “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know why I say the things I do.” I’d given him my hammer and chisel to hold. He weighed them in his palms, his brows lowering in contemplation. “Only, you did not ask to become a Diviner, yet you swore all your worth to Aisling. It would be a sad story, were you to do that again.” His stone eyes rose to my face. “But if you wanted to—I would not blame you. It is easier, swearing ourselves to someone else’s cause than to sit with who we are without one.”

With that he stepped forward, humming to himself, and pushed open the library doors.

Benji and Maude and Rory stood by the west windows of the library, lit by a sunset sky. Maude was not wearing armor on account of her bandages, but Rory and Benji had do

They watched me as I came into the library, offering the moment the stillness it was due. Rory’s gaze warmed my face, and I met it, wishing with a sudden intensity that he knew I was looking back at him.

That my shroud was not there, between us.

When I stood before them, next to the gargoyle, light fell upon our faces in a way it never had in the spring upon Aisling’s chancel. The king drew an arming sword from his belt. Cleared his throat. “I am Benedict Castor the Third.” His voice was quiet at first, but then I smiled at him, and he spoke louder, projecting over the library like we were in a vast hall filled with witnesses. “It is my honor, for deeds done in bravery, in shrewdness, and in generosity of heart, to bestow the title of knight upon—”

“Sybil,” I said. “My name is Sybil Delling.”

Benji’s gaze widened, and Maude’s smile lit the room. Rory watched me with soft eyes, and the gargoyle began to clap, then sob. “Bravo, Bartholomew. Bravo.”

The king took a moment to speak. “Very well. Sybil Delling—do you accept the accolade of knighthood?”

“Yes.”

“Bend a knee.”

I did.