All Chapters of Rejected Luna: Royal blood : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Before the third hour Marcus discovered me at the well.Not by accident. And he looked like a man who had reached some point in determining to come and had come to the end of deliberating on the matter. He made his way acutely quietly across the yard, as he always walked, and I kept an eye on him as he came, and it told me nothing because the first was in a certain action when he approached within ten paces of me, and I had learned it.On the other side of the well, he halted."I would like to speak to you," he said. "Without Rollins.""He is with Liam," I replied. You have some time.Something dawned on his face. Not relief. The outcry of a man who had petitioned for a thing and obtained it and was now obliged to employ it.He gazed awhile at the well. Then at me."The letter," said he.Please don't tell me about it."I know," he said. "I want to."I waited. The yard was moving around us, Ironclaw and Shadowcrest, and harkening to the business of the day that was going on; no one was

Emily's POVThe east held reeked of wet stone and old rushes.It always had. I had noticed it the first time I ever visited this place, months ago, on other business, and I noticed it now. Some things never changed, no matter what occurred in the air that they were in.Maren was sitting on the low bench against the far wall. Not huddled. Upright. She had long been held in custody, and the fear had long since settled down into something staler, and all that lay under it was a woman who had done a reckoning and who was about to bring forth its fruit.I could see her looking at me as I entered. She did not look away."Luna," she said."Maren."I took the stool across from her. The guard outside pulled the door shut, but not shut. I did not request him to seal it altogether. Whatever Maren told me tonight, I wanted something within earshot.Her hands were clasped in her lap. She looked at them once, then back at me."There is something I have not said," she told me."I know. Tell me."She

Emily's POVRollins was on the outer wall when I found him.He was not pacing. He stood the way he stood when the weight of command got too large for a closed room, facing the tree line with his shoulders set and the mate bond running steady and deep between us the way it always ran when he was carrying something he had not yet decided how to put into words. I knew the posture. I had long been reading it so that I did not need the bond to have its meaning, though the bond still told me. It always did.I came up beside him. I did not touch him yet. I stood close enough that our shoulders were nearly level and looked at the same tree line he was looking at.Down in the yard, it was silent below us. There was one torch on the eastern gate. Two guards were at the western passage, their breath visible in the cold. The sky above the tree line was as black as the second hour, with no moon; it was such darkness as made the keep seem to be smaller than it was and the world outside the wall seem

Emily's POVShe arrived before the second bell.And not in the dawn as the rider had calculated. Earlier, which made me know that the keeper network had driven the pace still harder than they were letting on about it or that Lira herself had driven it, which, given everything that Elder Marc had said of her, seemed at least the more likely explanation. I was in the outer yard when the gate guard called down, and I was at the gate before Liam had finished crossing the yard toward me.It was a small party. Four riders. A woman I did not know at the front, perhaps forty, with the particular bearing of someone who had spent years being careful and had learned to carry it without showing the weight of it. Learning how to carry it without making it appear that it had any weight. Behind her, two guards whose eyes moved across the yard with the practiced sweep of people who had been in charge of something dear, a very long time.And closing on them, Lira.She was not as big as my expectations

Emily's POVLira had been at Ironclaw four days when the current shifted.Not dramatically. Not the way it had shifted in the battle weeks when the hunters came through the western tree line, and all were changed in a moment. This was smaller. Some pressure at the farther edge of what I could feel, as if a hand pushing straight against the other side of a door. Deliberate. Testing.I felt it at the second hour of the morning.When it came, I was at the window. Not watching anything. The yard was dark below, the torches guttering in a low wind off the tree line, and the sentries moving in their rotations in that unhurried fashion of men three hours deep into a silent watch. Rollins was asleep behind me. He had the lengthy even beat, which he had acquired after hard days, and I had not wanted to wake him for something I could not yet name.So I stood at the window and felt it and waited to understand what it was.The current ran through the allied packs the way it always ran now, deep a