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Knights, Gargoyles and More: A Q&A with Rachel Gillig

By Isabelle McConville, Rachel Gillig / June 3, 2025 at 2:35 pm

The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig weaves romance, magic and folklore into an intoxicating fairytale — the first in her brand-new duology. Read on for an exclusive Q&A with Rachel on writing knightly virtues, the power of names, creating her characters, and what her fans can expect from her next book.

Hardcover $25.00 ~~$30.00~~

The Knight and the Moth (B&N Exclusive Edition)

By Rachel Gillig

Hardcover $25.00 ~~$30.00~~

From NYT bestselling author Rachel Gillig comes the next big romantasy sensation, a gothic, mist-cloaked tale of a young prophetess who is forced on an impossible quest with the one infuriating knight whose future is beyond her sight. Perfect for fans of Jennifer L. Armentrout and Leigh Bardugo.

IM: Can you please set up the story of your new novel for us?

RG: The Knight and the Moth begins on a tor, which is a big hill, and there’s a cathedral upon it. It’s like my other stories in that it starts off atmospherically — I always like to begin with the sense of place. It’s a story about diviners who dream in this cathedral, and their dreams are portents. The King and his knighthood come to the cathedral, and all sorts of things happen after that.

IM: Where did this book really start for you?

“I wanted to explore what knights are, and what they aren’t.”

RG: There are many iterations of old tales, stories and folklore that are made into songs, and there’s one called “The Outlandish Knight.” It’s inferred that the knight is fae, and he comes and seduces women, steals them away and drowns them. The seventh woman he takes drowns him instead. While I didn’t want to do a direct retelling of it, I wanted to explore what knights are, and what they aren’t. A lot of my inklings of ideas come from folklore, particularly folk ballads that use pieces of folklore. The earliest visual I imagined for the book was the cathedral upon the hill.

IM: The main character, Sybil, was such an incredible character. When we first meet her, she’s used to drawing the short straw and sacrificing herself in place of her fellow diviners to drown and dream. How did you really conjure up her character and find her voice?

RG: I think I always knew that Sybil was going to be someone who really wanted to do her best. She and the other diviners are in this environment where they don’t have identities, no names, no sense of personal style; Sybil’s just a number like everyone else, which also points at organized religion today, which thrives with the stripping of one’s identity. In that environment, the way for Sybil to still feel like she was her own person was that she cared more than everyone. She basically wanted to be a straight A student. That worked very well with the literal and the figurative removing of the veil from her eyes when she realizes that doing your best doesn’t always serve you. I think a lot of people would likely be able to relate to this even without the religious themes in it, even just with doing well in sports or scholarly pursuits. Sybil is getting verbal affirmations from the Abbess, so she’s always seeking that validation, and she’s burning out. She’s always been taught that that’s how to matter in the world and how to be good. She has to discover her own sense of self.

IM: Sybil, like her fellow diviners, wears a shroud that covers her eyes from the world and from herself — for reasons that we won’t spoil. Can you talk a little bit about that shroud and how you used it in the book?

RG: Beyond the literal point of it, I use it in comparison to a moth’s cocoon. It’s the last thing that they have to shed. It’s to keep her from seeing herself, and it’s to keep her from seeing the world clearly. It’s the wool over her eyes because she only ever sees things through Aisling’s theology. It also keeps other people from seeing her too, because it’s in the cathedral system’s best interest for her to not look human, and to be a symbol rather than a person.

IM: I was so interested in the dynamic specifically between Sybil and the other diviners, because I also read The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica. It’s about these girls in a post-apocalyptic society who live completely closed off from the outside world in a religious convent. I started to think about that book because the diviners in The Knight and the Moth have such great relationships and they truly do love each other. In The Unworthy, they start to go a little crazy and they hate each other because they’re pitted against one another by this horrifying mother figure. What made you want to show readers that the diviners are so tight knit?

“I wanted to touch on the unique experience of womanhood and sisterhood . . . it was just them against the world.”

RG: I toyed with the idea of them being in competition with each other, but Sybil’s desire for family, for love and ultimately her desire to break away from who she is and leave the cathedral when they go missing had to be rooted in her love for them. It was a unique challenge to write six distinct personalities when they don’t have names, or eyes, or any features that you can pinpoint. While they’re all very different women, I did try to make it seem like they could live together peacefully, and I wanted Sybil to think ‘oh, that’s what the outside world will be like when we all leave the cathedral.’ I wanted to touch on the unique experience of womanhood and sisterhood with the six diviners. I really liked writing about them loving each other, because it felt, especially at the beginning, like it was just them against the world.

IM: Another aspect that really stood out to me is that there is so much power in a name. We see it in many different ways; first, Sybil is known as Six to everyone around her, and she holds onto this knowledge of her name as her last bit of humanity, the last shred of her forgotten life before the cathedral. Also, the King insists on being called Benji rather than his proper title, even though Sybil doesn’t know him very well.

RG: Benji was my hardest character to write. He’s earnest, he’s young, and in a lot of ways, he’s a lot like Sybil. She’s older than him, but they both have this naivete, and they’re both looking up to external figures. For Sybil, it’s the omens, it’s the Abbess, her other diviners. Benji is looking to Maude and Rory, and he doesn’t want to be known as the son of a heretic, so he doesn’t want to be known as Benedict Castor. Roderick goes by Rory, and Benji just wants to be like the other people around him. There’s the danger in that he doesn’t actually know himself. I want reading Benji to feel like you don’t know him and you’re a little nervous to see what he does. He and Sybil are both at a crossroads; neither of them really knows themselves, and then they start to diverge in how they choose to see the world and how they choose to handle the idea of power.

IM: Another aspect about the names in the book that I thought was so clever, was that Sybil calls Rory Myndacious, cutting through cutting through all familiarity, and it really peeves him. Can you talk a bit about that and the importance of names to you in this book?

“To tell a story is to tell a lie.”

RG: I think it all ultimately comes down to my tagline, which is “To tell a story is to tell a lie.” No one wants to be vulnerable and share their given name, because they want their name to actually have meaning. For the dynamic between Sybil and Rory, her refusing to call him by his name is to withhold from knowing him. I talk about knightly virtues to the point where when they finally do use their names, it feels almost like a vow of fealty in a way that some of the other knightly virtues can’t even touch on. All of them, even the gargoyle, utilize names in the kingdom as a form of manipulation or like a suit of armor. Maude has such a chip on her shoulder because the women in her family were these hunters and upholders of the knighthood that she herself doesn’t necessarily believe in anymore.

IM: How did you come to that tagline? Did it come first and shape the story for you?

RG: It came pretty early, and I think it’s because I had begun the book in a ceremony, where the Abbess is lording over the knighthood as they come, and giving them a history of the cathedral. I wanted it to be very clear that history is cherry picked by those who benefit from it, like the history of Traum as the Abbess tells it. No one blinks an eye about these women having to drown over and over again because to the kingdom, that’s how it’s always been. When history starts to unravel, different stories come forward.

IM: Can you tell me about creating the gargoyle? I just love him so much.

RG: I think I really thrive in writing these secondary characters who are inhuman, and they’re not confined by anything. In the Shepherd King duology, that lack of confinement meant morally gray. In The Knight and the Moth, for the gargoyle, it means that he just gets to be as absurd as he wants to be. He doesn’t say idioms or phrases correctly, and even that ties into “To tell a story is to tell a lie.” He’s convinced that everyone else is really stupid and that he’s correct because he sees the world as absurd. He sees it as this massive contradiction, and he doesn’t care. He was so fun to create. I knew I wanted to lean into some levity, because there’s a lot of darkness in the story itself.

IM: Is there anything you can tell us about the next book?

RG: I finished the first draft, and I am currently in developmental edits with it. I will say that we go on almost like a parallel journey through the Hamlets. In the first one, they go through all the Hamlets as a kind of ceremony, and in the sequel, they go in for a bit of a different reason. There’s a lot of adventure, there are similar layers of action, of possible duplicity of romance. For those who have read my previous duology, I introduced a secondary romance into Twisted Crowns, but there is no secondary romance in this duology. There is so much more to explore with these characters.

IM: Who are you reading now?

RG: I just read Alix E. Harrow’s new book, The Everlasting. I think knights are a big theme for 2025 and I’m so here for it, because I’m also reading Tasha Suri’s The Isle in the Silver Sea, which is a very knightly book. Also, just to step out of my genre, I have just read I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman.

IM: Thank you so much for being here.

RG: Thank you for having me.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.