Book Review: The Knight and the Moth

Title: The Knight and the Moth
Author: Rachel Gillig
Genre: Romantasy, Fantasy, Gothic Romance, Fiction

What It’s About:

Six was once an orphaned girl who became a diviner at Aisling Cathedral, where she has spent the last nine years dreaming of the Omens and what those symbols mean for the people who come asking for the divination. She joins her sister diviners, named One, Two, Three, Four and Five, on the wall and they watch as the new king, Benedict Castor the third, arrives with his knights in tow. She is the one who draws the short straw and must divine for the King, but she is the last to leave the wall and she watches as one last Knight who doesn’t look like he’s kind gives her a dark look. Six divines for the King by being drowned in Aisling’s spring water, where she sees the different omens—a coin, an inkwell, an oar, a chime and a loom stone—and all of them are not good for the king at all. She comes to later in the Cathedral, next to a Gargoyle who looks like a bath, and who calls everyone Bartholomew, feeling ill. The Gargoyle tells her that the king’s knights had broken in to get some of the spring water, so they were kicked out. She makes her way to the rooms that the diviners share, and comes across the King Benedict Castor the Third, as well as the knight that had given her dark looks as he had passed her on the way in to the Cathedral. She realizes that they had taken the spring water somehow, and that the knight is suffering from bruises that she believes he had rightfully gotten. Six throws up on his boots and runs away, but the knight chases after her and tells her that she hasn’t had fun or knows anything about what is going on in the rest of Traum, their kingdom. These words stick with Six as she returns to her rooms with the other five diviners, and they end up getting high on something one night, so Six suggests that they get out of the Cathedral to get to see the world a little bit before they are let go from service, as Diviners are freed after 10 years of service to Aisling Cathedral. The six of them make plans after their time is up, but she wants to have an adventure now, so Six gets the Knight, whose name is Roderick Myndacious, to agree to take the Diviners beyond the wall.

The group of knights meet up with Six and the diviners, coming through a hole in the wall, and taking the women out of their home to the nearest town—Coulson Faire. Along the way, Six decides to go into the woods with one of the other knights, to lay in the grass with him, but as they’re getting busy, he says something to her that causes her to lose interest in doing this, so instead, they walk to Coulson Faire where they meet up with their group. The six diviners have fun dancing and drinking, but at one point, Benedict challenges Myndacious in his craft, something that is tradition in the Stonewater Kingdom, and the person has to answer it or forefeit. Myndacious agrees, but Benedict tells him that he will be going against the Diviners, so three of the diviners including Six, stand against him. Myndacious tells them that they only have three chances to move him off balance, so all three try, but only Six is able to make him move thanks to her strength. Then, the Diviners return to Aisling Cathedral and to their duties. But things take a dark turn as one by one, the Diviners begin to disappear in the middle of the night, even with a locked door and Gargoyles surrounding the building for protection. So, once Five and Six are left, Six takes off to Coulson Faire with the bat-like Gargoyle in tow to try to speak with King Benedict Castor, only to be turned away because he is not there. She returns back to her room and finds out that Five is gone, and she is the last one left of the Diviners. She goes to the room at night with the plan on fighting off anyone who might come in, only for her to discover that Myndacious is able to get into the room without touching the lock. He gets her out and together along with the Bat-like Gargoyle, they make their way to the city of Scribes. There, they meet up with King Benedict and Maude, who take them to a location where they meet the Harried Scribe. The group challenges the Scribe, in his craft, though he’s certain that he will win, but they ask the Scribe a simple question—what is Six’s true name. He’s unable to answer, and so a battle begins, where Six is licked by the Scribe, before he is killed by the group. Six runs away from the group as soon as she can, and together with the Gargoyle the two of them traverse the city from Pupil House to Pupil House trying to find the remaining Diviners. Then, Six sees a couple of young girls being followed by a man who had nefarious intentions, so she takes him out, only for policemen to get involved. They capture her and bring her to Myndacious and the King.

Maude, Rory (Myndacious’s nickname), and Benedict explain to Six what they are doing, which is essentially taking up the mantle though that is something that the king is forbidden from doing. They want to get the omens to unite the kingdom under Benedict because those talisman hold too much power over them. Ultimately, Six agrees to help them in exchange for discovering what had happened to her Diviner friends, and getting them back. So Maude, Benedict, Rory, Six and the Gargoyle travel together from location to location taking out the Ardent Oarsman first. The only thing is that the Ardent Oarsman wants to fight Six, so Rory spends a couple of days training her to fight, though there isn’t much more that he can do. Somehow, despite the fact that Six falls off the platform during her battle with the Ardent Oarsman, she manages to take him out and they get his talisman, the Oar. Then they travel to Maude’s family home in the woods, in search of the Faithful Forester’s Chime as Maude had killed the Faithful Forester many years prior but they couldn’t find the Chime. While they’re in Maude’s family home, Six admits to Rory that her name is Sybil Delling and from there, their friendship grows into a romantic relationship with the two of them kissing, and eventually having sex. While King Benedict is getting on with the required ceremony in the Faithful Forester’s grove, the group of knights and villagers get attacked by Sprites in the shape of trees, and though they manage to beat back the sprites, Maude gets severely injured. Sybil does get the chime by climbing the limbs of one of those sprites while Rory covers her back and worries about her getting hurt.

Once Maude has healed up enough, the group makes their way to the Heartsore Weaver, though they are attacked en route by other sprites that look like mounds. The knights manage to get them away, but one of the sprites focuses on Benedict, who has fallen down and gotten his leg trapped between stone. Sybil helps him get out, and the Gargoyle flies them away from danger, for which they are thanked by the Knighthood, Maude and Rory. They make their way to the location, and begin searching for the Heartsore weaver. Eventually, Benedict goes through the required ceremony and Rory and Sybil use the Aisling Cathedral’s spring water to entice the Heartsore Weaver. They find their way into her living space, where Sybil recognizes one of the Diviners. The Heartsore Weaver explains to them that the omens initially were people who fought over space, and things, so Aisling Cathedral’s Diviner came to them and turned them into gods essentially through the magic of the spring water—each one of them had been given an object that allows them to do different things, but they all forget who they were before. Each object has a way for them to be transported through space and time, but twisted or treated another way and it has negative consequences; however, the Weaver’s Loom was the only one that would give her back her memories of her past. Ultimately, the omens all lived without Aisling’s water, though they were told that would be the one thing that would keep them alive, and then every ten years, there would be a former orphan turned diviner that is delivered to them so that they can drink the blood and get their Aisling water that way. The Weaver tells Sybil that she would like to die, because she had stopped drinking the blood and water years ago, having preserved and left the diviners alone so that they could find the rest that was stolen from them, and that she had returned her loom back to Aisling’s Cathedral. Sybil grants her the wish, killing the Heartsore Weaver with a chisel through the chest. All of the different omens had become granite in one way or another, with some more than the other, which the Heartsore Weaver explains is the result of the spring water.

After this, Sybil, who by this point has become a knight in King Benedict’s knighthood, is ready to go back to Aisling to face the Abbess. She returns with her friends in tow, and the Abbess is ready for her. The Abbess tells her that she had known that Six had taken the Diviners for a night out on the town and knew that she had to move fast to end all of them. She also tells her the story of Bartholomew, the first orphan diviner that she had who was also a boy , and the lack of loyalty that he showed to her that made her decide to find female orphans as diviners. She reveals that all of the diviners that were her favorites or favored by her for their strength and ability became Gargoyles. Sybil barely fights her off, as the woman drowns her, but ultimately ends up managing to kill her. Then, the cathedral starts to come down as well, and the friends manage to escape with their lives, only for Benedict to threaten both Maude and Rory. Benedict tells Maude that he’s relied on her for too long and needs to not be seen as reliant on her, and as for Rory, he tells him that if Rory tries to take Sybil, whom Benedict wants to marry as his queen to give legitimacy to his reign since she is a diviner, he will be considered a traitor and that Benedict will tell everyone that Rory was behind the fall of the cathedral. Benedict takes Rory’s coin, which originally belonged to the Artful Brigand for whom Rory worked for many years as an orphan before he was taken in by Benedict’s grandfather and left in Maude’s care. Rory is forced to leave Sybil with Benedict, and runs off into the night, just as the rest of the knighthood shows up to find a destroyed cathedral.

My Thoughts:

For a book that seems to have many good reviews and a lot of positive recommendations, I found it quite frankly underwhelming and boring. I struggled to read through the book, though I loved the vocabulary and the language, but just there was nothing enticing about the storyline or the relationship between all of the characters. There are so many plotholes as well that didn’t make any sense whatsoever, like how did Sybil manage to defeat the Ardent Oarsman if she was under water and no one was able to get to her. Or what the hell happened with the Abbess and how did Sybil manage to come on top in that one? My heart absolutely broke for Bartholomew though because out of all of the things that happened in this book, his story was the saddest part of it. Furtherly, the book is classified as an enemies to lovers romance, but there is so little romance here and so little heat in that romance that it might as well have been siblings having a squabble and making up afterwards. As far as I am concerned, it wasn’t even enemies, but more like allies who got the wrong idea of each other at the beginning but didn’t hate each other, and over time learned that they were wrong so that is how Rory and Six ended up falling in love. But I also saw nothing about either character that made me fall in love with them or their relationship. As a result, I think that I’m just going to skip book two in this series as I’m not willing to spend the time mucking through whatever that book two will be.