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CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
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2026-07-24 17:52:14
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CRESCENT OF DESTINY CHAPTER FORTY - SIX
Louis' POVThey had put Taren Khaleel in a plain room in the eastern wing, the kind used for holding rather than punishment, a table, two chairs, a window too high and too narrow to be useful for anything but light.He looked smaller than he had looked at court. Older, too, though I knew he was not an old man, only a man whose face had been built around confidence and had nowhere to go once the confidence was taken away from him.He looked up when we came in and something in his expression settled, as though he had been waiting for exactly this and was relieved, in some perverse way, that the waiting was finally over."Lady Khalifa," he said. "I wondered if you would come.""You asked for me.""I did." He gestured at the empty chair across from him. I did not sit. I stood behind her, close enough that my presence was a kind of wall at her back, and I watched Taren Khaleel's eyes flick to me and back to her with a flatness that told me he understood exactly what that positioning meant
CRESCENT OF DESTINY CHAPTER FORTY - FIVE
Khalifa's POVThe King received us within the hour, which Louis said afterward was itself a kind of answer, because a monarch who wanted to delay uncomfortable truths did not clear his evening for two riders who had come back from the eastern crossing covered in road dust.We stood in the small audience chamber, not the throne room, which Louis said meant this was still being treated as a private matter rather than a state one, at least for now. Rafi and Soren stood a little behind us with the two document cases. Safiya stood by the door, arms folded, watching the room the way she watched everything, for threats first and courtesy second.The King was older than I had expected from the portraits, or perhaps only more tired, grey at the temples in a way that made him look less like the idea of a king and more like a man who had been doing a very hard job for a very long time."Louis tells me you rode into an ambush on the eastern road," the King said, looking at me first, which surpris
CRESCENT OF DESTINY CHAPTER FORTY - FOUR
Louis' POVWe rested three hours in the garrison's officer quarters, which was not enough and was also all we could afford, and then we rode.The return journey was slower than the ride out. We had four soldiers instead of three, Rafi and Soren riding with us now, and Lady Amara's document case had become two document cases, both of them guarded so closely that Safiya had assigned a soldier to each with instructions that bordered on the absurd, sleep with a hand on it if you have to.By midday we had crossed back over the ridge and the flat land of the capital province had opened out ahead of us, green and ordinary and completely unaware of what was riding toward it.We stopped at a farmhouse an hour before the capital, the kind of stop Safiya insisted on before any approach to the palace, and I found myself, an hour into that stop, standing at the edge of the farmhouse's small orchard with Khalifa, both of us technically supposed to be resting and neither of us doing anything of the
CRESCENT OF DESTINY CHAPTER FORTY - THREE
Khalifa's POVWe did not sleep at the crossing.Safiya's soldiers secured the garrison building room by room and found no one else, only the abandoned desk and the chalk message and a storeroom that had held two men who had been waiting, one of them for twenty three years and one of them for eleven. By the time the search was finished the sky had gone the colour of ash at the edges, not yet dawn but no longer properly night.I sat on the garrison steps with the document case in my lap and did not open it again. I had read enough. The rest could wait for daylight and for people who were not running on two hours of sleep and the aftermath of an ambush.Louis came and sat beside me without asking whether the space was wanted."You should eat something," he said."I am not hungry.""You are always not hungry after something like that," he said. "And you always eat anyway, because Safiya makes you.""Is that an observation or a threat.""An observation," he said. "I have been paying attent
CRESCENT OF DESTINY CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Khalifa's POVHis name was Soren al-Basri and he had been in the correspondence office for fourteen years before his promotion to senior advisor, which meant he had overlapped with Rafi by seven years and had known about the letter from my mother for most of that time.He told us this in the store room while Safiya stood by the door and her soldiers took position in the corridor and I sat across from him on an overturned crate. Louis stood close behind my shoulder, closer than the room required, his arms folded and his cut arm still wrapped in his sleeve, and every so often I felt the warmth of him at my back like a hand that had not quite been placed there yet."Rafi kept the letter because he understood what it meant," Soren said. "When your mother wrote to her correspondent, she was not writing about personal matters. She had found something. Something in the records from before the war that implicated a family in the current court in atrocities that were never officially attribute
CRESCENT OF DESTINY CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
We left through the northern gate at the last of the daylight and hit the eastern road as full dark fell, and I rode with the letter folded inside my jacket and the specific focused silence of someone who has decided to stop thinking about the risk and start thinking about the destination.Safiya rode point with two of her soldiers she had selected by name from the garrison without explanation. Louis rode at my right shoulder in the position he had taken every time we moved through uncertain terrain, which I had stopped noticing consciously and started noticing only in moments like this when it was very dark and the road was unfamiliar and the fact of his presence at my right was so reliable it had become architectural.Lady Amara rode behind us with the third soldier and the small document case she had insisted on bringing, which contained the decoded correspondence and the Meridian archive letter and the copies she had made that morning of every relevant document because Lady Amara'
CRESCENT OF DESTINY CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The formal address lasted twenty minutes.The king spoke first about Faris, Nasir, about the conspiracy that had reached into the court's deepest corners and the evidence that had finally pulled it into the light. He was precise, measured and by the time he finished, the room was very, very quiet.
CRESCENT OF DESTINY CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Louis was not calm.He was performing calm well enough, but the muscle working in his jaw gave him away.His study was locked with all of us packed into it. Safiya stood at the window.Lady Amara by the door. Khalid leaning against the bookshelf with his arms folded. Louis had pulled everyone togeth
CRESCENT OF DESTINY CHAPTER TWO
"She's what?" I demanded, staring at Lady Amara. My knees ached from kneeling on the stone courtyard. "What does this mark mean?"Lady Amara looked at Prince Louis like she was asking permission to speak."Tell her," he said.She turned back to me. "The Mark of the Warrior Moon. It hasn't been seen
CRESCENT OF DESTINY CHAPTER ONE
The water pitcher hit the floor and shattered."You stupid girl!" my stepmother Salma screamed. "Look what you've done!"I stared at the broken clay pieces scattered around my feet. The water pooled on the stone floor, nowhere near the fancy tablecloth she was pointing at."I'm sorry, mistress," I
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