Lahat ng Kabanata ng Rejected Luna: Royal blood : Kabanata 51 - Kabanata 60

Emily's POVMaren was not like a traitor – at least what I know of traitors.Traitors in the stories always had a tell. A nervous twitch, a scent soured by fear and guilt, eyes that darted toward the exits looking for an escape. Maren possessed none of these.That was what I had been thinking of when I had been standing on the end of the wall of the strategy room and had seen Liam carrying her in. She was just like she always had been, silent and composed, her grey hair pulled back and her hands clenched across her. By her aspect she was a woman who, in a life of decades of invisibility chosen, was already quite well practiced.She noticed me before noticing Rollins.She caught a glimpse of something on her face. Not fear exactly. More calculation — a swift, quick assessment of what my presence in this room meant to her position.Next, she caught sight of Rollins and the reckoning was suspended.He stood at the end of the table with his arms folded, forbiddingly motionless. Since she

Emily's POVThe council meeting ran until the torches burned low.The atmosphere of the war room was stuffy, and the odor of it tainted with the metallic aroma of tension and the acrid smell of guttering tallow. The room had been hours a battleground of words, egos, and desperate tactics. I had seen the faces of the elder members of the pack turn pale under the flickering light as the truth of the ultimatum of Claus dawned on them. The burden of seventeen days was a tangible thing, falling on all shoulders, suffocating all breathing.By the time the last elder had left the war room, and the last patrol rotation had been reassigned, and the last decision on the eastern fortifications taken, the keep was deep in its night stillness. The wind outside had blown up to a continued moan against the stone walls. Somewhere in the distance a door was banging on its hinges.Rollins shut the door of the war room after the last man out. The heavy oak thudded home, the iron bolt sliding into place

Rollins's POVIt was the fourth hour and I had been awake.Not from nightmares. Not from the war-room weight of fourteen days and eastern borders and a pale horse that was already halfway back to wherever Claus was counting them down. I had woken from the specific, quiet alertness that came when something was wrong in my pack and my instincts knew it before my mind caught up.I had reached out to Emily in the dark and discovered the place beside me vacant and chilly.I had tracked her through the bond — steady, focused, purposeful — moving through the keep toward the eastern yard. Moving, I realized after a moment, with the deliberate unhurried pace of someone who had chosen their hour carefully.I had rushed out dressed and trailed.I heard Marcus's voice before I reached the doorway.What you touched was not part of your lineage.I had stopped.I am not a man who eavesdrops. It is not a virtue I have ever been patient to in others, and I am less patient of it in myself. Something in

Emily's POVRollins shut the door of the chamber and leaned his back against it.I was standing at the window. The courtyard below was not yet quieted down. The pack was moving with the concentrated, strictly disciplined energy of individuals who had been shaken and were turning the shake into action. Additional guards on the wall. The patrol captain being given new orders. Liam arranging the inner gate rotation with the silent efficiency of a man who had been waiting to do it, and who had a plan in mind.Good. Let them work. Let the keep move.I was not moving.I had stood at this window since we returned from the southern gate. I knew that I had been standing longer than was convenient, and I could not appear to get off.The First Power recognizes its maker."Emily."Rollins's voice. Quiet. From the door."I know," I said. Before he could say whatever, he was going to say."You don't know what I was going to-""You were going to tell me to breathe," I said. "Or to get away from the

Emily's POVPerrin was his name.Twenty-two years old. One of the newer warriors in the rotation of Aldric, who joined Ironclaw four years earlier, was a boy, who had fallen apart in his family pack in one of the outer settlements. Mia had once mentioned to me, quite by chance, and that sort of thing doesn't appear at the time, but when it occurs, it all comes together.He was alive.The thing I hung on through the three hours of which it was also true that Mia was engaged in her healing-quarters and the rest of the keep was busy with its own maiming. Three of us found dead over our ground. Others four of us wounded. Perrin worst of the four, which was the sentence I continually turned over, as there was no good version of it.Alive. He was alive.I sat on the stone bench before the door of the healing quarters and I did not move and I did not go in because Mia did not need me in the healing quarters and I could not have stood there unstirred at the moment in a closed room. The chill