62 pages 2 hours read

The Knight and the Moth

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2025

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Summary and Study Guide

Overview

The Knight and the Moth is a 2025 gothic romantasy book by #1 New York Times best-selling author Rachel Gillig. Her first series, the Shepherd King duology, features her debut novel, One Dark Window, and its sequel, Two Twisted Crowns, and focuses on themes related to power, history, and truth. The Knight and the Moth is the first book in the Stonewater Kingdom series and follows the story of Six, one of six prophetesses known as Diviners, as she explores the truth of the religious system that governs her kingdom while falling in love with a knight who challenges her deep-seated beliefs and constructed identity. In the novel, Gillig explores themes including The Powers of Fate and Free Will, The Influence of Faith, and The High Cost of Power.


This guide refers to the 2025 Orbit Kindle e-book edition. 


Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, death, child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, substance use, and sexual content.


Plot Summary


The protagonist, Six, is a prophetess, or Diviner, in Aisling Cathedral of the Stonewater Kingdom, located in the land of Traum. The kingdom is made up of five hamlets: Coulson Faire, the Seacht, the Fervent Peaks, the Chiming Wood, and the Cliffs of Bellidine. She is one of six Diviners, foundling girls taken to the cathedral to live under the abbess’s care, named only with a number, and forced to wear gossamer shrouds over their eyes. Six knows that her true name is Sybil Delling, a name she plans to use when her 10-year tenure at Aisling Cathedral is over. 


The Diviners’ divination ritual involves drowning in the magic spring at the heart of Aisling Cathedral—the spring’s water gives them dreams of the Omens, the five gods of Traum, and their sacred stone objects: the Artful Brigand and his coin, the Harried Scribe and his inkwell, the Ardent Oarsman and his oar, the Faithful Forester and her chime, and the Heartsore Weaver and her loom stone. There is a sixth omen, the Moth, but little is known about it. After drowning and dreaming, the Diviners interpret the Omens’ signs to determine people’s fortunes before waking, a process called divination.


Six joins her five fellow Diviners on the cathedral wall to watch the arrival of the new king, Benedict Castor the Third, who is only 17 years old. His knights call up to the Diviners, asking for good portents or a kiss, and one knight’s horse eats an apple that Six was eating and one of the Diviners threw over the wall. 


Six must dream for the king, and she dons her Diviner robe and enters the spring as they all watch. The abbess tells the story of the cathedral, which was built centuries ago around the spring after a foundling child drank from its waters and discovered divination and the Omens. The abbess pushes Six under the water and drowns her.


In her dream, Six sees five bad portents for the king. After she wakes, a rude knight, who introduces himself as Rodrick “Rory” Myndacious, argues with Six about divination, which he has contempt for. Six deems him a heretic. The king, whom the knights call Benji, has a flagon of stolen spring water—Six identifies it by its distinct scent. 


The next morning, Six wants to leave the cathedral for the first time. She decides to blackmail Rory about the stolen spring water to force him to escort them. Rory agrees, and he, Benji, and a group of knights escort the Diviners to Coulson Faire, the supposed location of the Artful Brigand and his coin. Benji proposes a game, challenging Rory to withstand three assaults without falling over. If he loses, he will have his future divined at Aisling. 


Rory agrees but insists that the Diviners attack him. One kicks him in his bruised ribs, but he stands. Four kisses him, but he stands. Finally, Six picks him up and throws him on the ground, landing atop him. Rory insults her flirtatiously, and Six tells him that she’ll see him at his divination.


Later, Six undergoes the divination process for Rory, assisted by the cathedral’s bat-like gargoyle, but when she dreams, she doesn’t see the five stone objects; she sees a moth instead. When she wakes, Rory and the other knights are leaving. She watches them go and hopes that her life will return to normal.


The next morning, Four is missing, and the morning after that, Two is gone. Six confronts the abbess, but that night, Three disappears. Six sneaks out to tell Benji about the missing Diviners, and the bat-like gargoyle accompanies her. When she returns home, One is asleep, and Five is gone.


The abbess locks Six and One in the cottage, and they try to force themselves to stay awake. One takes off her shroud and is horrified by what she sees, but Six doesn’t look. They fall asleep, and Six wakes up alone. 


When night falls, Rory breaks into the cabin using a magic coin that Six recognizes from her visions as the Artful Brigand’s coin. He promises to help her search for the missing Diviners, and he, Six, and the bat-like gargoyle leave for another hamlet, the Seacht.


In the Seacht, Rory, Six, and the gargoyle meet up with Benji and an older female knight named Maude Bauer. They find a man with stone eyes in a room full of books and scrolls, and Six realizes that he’s the Harried Scribe. Benji challenges the Scribe at his craft, which is knowledge. The Scribe tells Benji that he will ask the group three questions. They must answer one correctly and then ask him a question that he cannot answer in order to win his stone inkwell. 


The group answers the Scribe’s questions correctly. They ask him what Six’s name is, and the Scribe doesn’t know. However, instead of handing over his inkwell, he attacks them. He makes Six bleed and drinks her blood off the floor, saying that he can smell Aisling’s water in it. Rory throws the coin at the Scribe, and he explodes. Rory tells Six that he killed the Artful Brigand and took the coin—he plans to kill all the Omens.


Benji tells Six that he plans to take up the mantle, which involves destroying the Omens to take their power and magic objects. The magic objects can transport people through space, which is how Rory broke into the cabin using the coin, and also have the power to destroy. Benji’s grandfather, King Benedict Castor the First, attempted to take up the mantle but was accused of heresy and stoned to death. He discovered that the Omens are not gods but mortals who drank from the spring in Aisling Cathedral and gain power from their magical stone objects. The mysterious sixth Omen, the Moth, is really the abbess. Benji wants Six to help him avoid claims of heresy because her status as a Diviner makes her close to holiness. Six agrees to help.


The group heads to the Fervent Peaks. On their way, they’re attacked by a mountain sprite, and Six saves Benji’s life. When they reach the Peaks, Rory and Six challenge the Oarsman at his craft. The Oarsman agrees to fight to the death, but he insists on fighting Six. Rory, Maude, and the gargoyle quickly train Six in combat. After training, Rory takes Six to the hot spring to relax, and they have a romantically charged moment. 


The next day, Six faces the Oarsman and kills him with her hammer and chisel. As he dies, the Oarsman tells her that the other Diviners are dead. Six falls into the water and, since she cannot swim, nearly drowns.


Six wakes in Maude’s house in the Chiming Wood. She confronts Benji after realizing that he suspected the Diviners were dead. King Benedict the First wrote in his notebook that he had never seen a Diviner after the end of their tenures. 


Six runs into the woods and screams before Rory finds her. She tells Rory that her real name is Sybil. Their attraction continues to develop as the group searches for the deceased Faithful Forester’s chime. When Benji participates in the hamlet’s ceremony, they ring a chime that Sybil recognizes as the Faithful Forester’s. Birke, tree sprites that eat people’s eyes, attack, and though Sybil manages to retrieve the chime, Maude is badly injured.


Maude recovers and suggests that Sybil become a knight, and Benji knights her. Afterward, Sybil goes to Rory’s room and removes her shroud for the first time. She and Rory have sex. She falls asleep, and when she wakes, she looks in the mirror for the first time. She sees that she has stone eyes like the Omens, and Rory tells her that she’s beautiful, even with stone eyes.


The group continues to the Cliffs of Bellidine to find the Heartsore Weaver. The gargoyle leads Sybil, Rory, Maude, and Benji to the Weaver’s lair in a subterranean cave. The gargoyle triggers a water trap, and Rory loses the Artful Brigand’s coin. He searches for it while Sybil follows the sound of the Weaver’s steps. She finds the Weaver with One’s corpse. 


The Weaver finally tells her the horrible truth: The Omens were human, and they drank from Aisling’s spring water to become immortal. Their magic items were hewn by a stonemason who became the cathedral’s abbess, a woman named Aisling. The Weaver was initially happy to live as a god, but she missed her human life, so she decided to stop drinking the water. Instead of dying, however, she turned entirely into stone. 


The abbess sought to control the Omens by starving them and giving them Diviners’ blood to drink every 10 years, as their blood contains some of the water. The Weaver wants to die and asks Sybil to kill her. Sybil uses her hammer and chisel to kill the Weaver. As she dies, she tells Sybil that she returned the loom stone to Aisling and that the first Diviner, the foundling child named Bartholomew, became the first gargoyle.


Rory and the gargoyle find Sybil. The gargoyle reveals his story: He was a foundling child who died, and the abbess fed him the spring’s water, which resurrected him. Five craftspeople came to the tor (rocky hill) near the spring and fought for control of the kingdom, and they all died. The abbess fed them spring water to revive them and turned them into the Omens. 


The abbess built the cathedral and forced Bartholomew to drown in the spring. She gave him dreams that she pretended were visions from the Omens. When Bartholomew stopped obeying, the abbess deprived him of spring water, thinking that he’d die. Instead, he turned into a stone gargoyle, and she forced him to find dying or dead foundling girls to become Diviners. Every 10 years, five Diviners were killed, and one was kept to be turned into a gargoyle, which was Sybil’s intended fate.


The group returns to Aisling Cathedral, and Sybil rips off the abbess’s shroud, revealing that her entire body has turned into stone. The abbess attacks Sybil, who kills her while Bartholomew, Rory, Maude, and Benji kill the abbess’s gargoyles and dismantle Aisling Cathedral. 


Benji stabs Rory and steals the coin. He demands that Sybil become his queen, or he’ll execute Rory and Bartholomew. He wants Sybil so that he can claim that she alone can see the future. Maude drags Rory and the gargoyle away as Sybil watches with grief. Benji tells her that she’s free, as she now knows everything, and that knowledge can make her a god.

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