This started out as a five-star-read, then lost most of its steam in the second third, and managed to deliver a predictable and utterly stupid ending that felt like its only purpose was to open this up for a trilogy, rather than leave it a standalone. Which is a bummer, because I would have loved this as a standalone.
THE KNIGHT AND THE MOTH
by Rachel Gillig
Published: Orbit, 2025
Ebook: 401 pages
Series: The Stonewater Kingdom #1
My rating: 6.5/10
Opening line: You know this story, Bartholomew, though you do not remember it. I’ll tell it to you as best I can and promise to be honest in my talebearing.
A gothic, mist-cloaked tale of a prophetess who is forced beyond the safety of her cloister on an impossible quest to defeat the gods with the one knight whose future is beyond her sight.
Sybil Delling has spent nine years dreaming of having no dreams at all. Like the other foundling girls who traded a decade of service for a home in the great cathedral, Sybil is a Diviner. In her dreams she receives visions from six unearthly figures known as Omens. From them, she can predict terrible things before they occur, and lords and common folk alike travel across the kingdom of Traum’s windswept moors to learn their futures by her dreams.
Just as she and her sister Diviners near the end of their service, a mysterious knight arrives at the cathedral. Rude, heretical, and devilishly handsome, the knight Rodrick has no respect for Sybil’s visions. But when Sybil’s fellow Diviners begin to vanish one by one, she has no choice but to seek his help in finding them. For the world outside the cathedral’s cloister is wrought with peril. Only the gods have the answers she is seeking, and as much as she’d rather avoid Rodrick’s dark eyes and sharp tongue, only a heretic can defeat a god.
It doesn’t happen often that the very first lines of a novel make me fall in love, but Rachel Gillig managed just that. The opening chapters of The Knight and the Moth were so filled with atmosphere and chilling secrets, with the friendship between six nameless girls whose job is to drown for the people of the kingdom to receive their omens from the gods. The setting, the descriptions, and the character of Six (Sybil, as we later learn), were all immediately enchanting and intriguing. I wanted to learn everything about this world that felt so vibrant and rich, so full of history. The talking gargoyle helped, too.
And for a while, the book delivered just what I hoped for. When the new king – not much more than a boy himself – arrives with his knights to listen to the omens for his upcoming reign, we are introduced not only to the Diviners’ work, but also to a small cast of side characters that each offered something new and exciting for me to discover. Althought it is quite obvious from the start the the “foulest knight in all the kingdom” will end up as a romantic interest, that didn’t keep me from grinning like a fool one bit.
Sybil and her fellow Diviners drown in the magical spring of Aisling Cathedral and thus enter a dream of sorts that reveals to them the omens – good or bad – from the five gods the kingdom believes in. Sybil is proud of her work, although she hates the drowning and dreaming, and always thrives for perfection, believing herself and her sisters important mouthpieces for the gods. It is only when her fellow Diviners start disappearing, one by one, without a trace, that she decides to leave duty behind and look for them herself. She joins the king and his knights, the batwing gargoyle tags along as well (I love that guy!), and off they go.
The middle part of the novel turns into a sort of road trip through the (tiny?) kingdom which consists of only five hamlets, each dedicated to one of the five gods. But Sybil soon learns that the king is touring not only to introduce himself to each hamlet and go through the proper rites, but for a different, much more magical reason. She learns that everything she has believed in is a lie. Still, she wants to find her Diviners, and maybe she even wants to help the king on his quest. So along their not quite so merry way they go.
This whole let’s go a-questing part was not bad, per se, but due to its structure and lack of surprises, it turned the middle of the book into a bit of a slog. There were fun things happening, don’t get me wrong. There are battles and some pretty scenery, our heroes need to be clever to outwit some bad guys, and there is the growing romantic tension between our two lead characters. All of that was nice, but it lacked that certain something that the beginning of the book had. Having the quest planned out in advance and then just following the plan without so much as a hitch just felt predictable. During those chapters, I mostly hung on for the romance.
Then, in the final third of the book, something was foreshadowed that not only didn’t fit at all with the tone set in the beginning of the book, but also made the characters look really stupid or badly written. Either everyone is an idiot for never questioning certain things, or that one character who suddenly acts completely out of character was terribly written to begin with. My theory is that the publishers loved the book, but wanted it to be a trilogy, which is why the plot needed a last minute villain against whom our protagonists can fight in the next book.
This would have been a perfectly fine standalone. Sure, the middle is a bit slumpy and could have used a twist here or an unexpected surprise there, but the story arc is finished by the end, and in a mostly satisfying way, too. This is why the book dropped from five stars to merely three for me on Goodreads. That’s how disappointed I was, that’s how much I felt like the author and/or publisher just want me to buy more books, not because there’s a story that needs to be told in several volumes, but because you can just slap on a new villain at the end to forcefully drag it out.
That said, I don’t know if I will read the second book. For now, I am still sighing in delight at the thought of the beginning of this book – it was so good! – and I’m angry at the ending. I’ll probably wait for some early reviews and then go for a library copy, if by the time the sequel comes out, I still care about what happens to the knight and the moth.
MY RATING: 6.5/10 – Good (some parts)
