All Chapters of A Luna for the Lycan King: Chapter 151 - Chapter 160

AllissaThey convened the war council before midday because I would not wait, and I walked into it knowing the room wanted blood and had already chosen whose.The chamber held every banner of the alliance and every ruler still under our roof, arrayed down the long table in the order the steward’s seating charts had agonized over for a celebration. Now the same chairs held a tribunal. I had not slept, and it showed; grief sat on me like a second skin and I had stopped trying to hide it. I had fed Mira at first light with my hands shaking and my body going through the oldest motions it knew while my mind ran north along an empty sky, and then I had put on the queen the way other women put on armor, because my daughter needed the queen functional and the mother had already spent the night on the floor.The search had not paused to wait for us. Through the chamber’s high windows the sky still carried fliers, harpies and fairy seekers running their grids, and runners came to the doors on th

AllissaWe planned the hunt in the family war room with only the people we would trust over a cliff edge.North was all we had. North, a boy’s pointing arm, and a pull he described like a rope tied behind his ribs, and every soul at that table had privately done the same brutal math. We needed him … Thorin was the one person who could find Lyra.“A small party,” Darren said. “Fast, quiet, who can move without being seen. Whatever took her cut its own trail out of the sky. It will see an army coming a week away. It will expect an army. It will not see six. I will be part of the group, as well as my queen.” “Majesty, the kingdom cannot risk both crowns on one road. The twins need their mother. Surely—”“I buried that argument in a war,” I said. “If anyone wishes to dig it up, fetch a shovel and start with your own grave.”Anton took the coordination of the kingdoms, the search grids, the river watches, the thousand eyes that would keep sweeping the map behind us. Asta and Toga claimed

AllissaWe learned the shape of our only compass on the first day north, and it was a crueler instrument than any of us had imagined.Thorin could feel direction the way I feel which way is down. Asked to point, he pointed, instantly, from any height, through cloud, in the dark, his arm swinging to the same bearing every time like iron finding a lodestone. Distance came vaguer. “Far,” he would say, frustrated, hunting for words a bond does not come with. “Not close-far. Mountain-far. It’s like ... like smelling a color. I know it’s there. I can’t count it.”And then there was the third thing, the one nobody had thought to brace for.He could feel HER.Not words, not pictures. Her feelings reached him down that rope behind his ribs the way a storm reaches you before the rain, and so it happened that on the first afternoon, somewhere over the pine country, the boy belted against my husband’s chest suddenly barked out a laugh.“She’s angry,” he reported, twisting around, his silver eyes

AllissaOn the fourth day, Squall turned us off the bearing for the first time since we left home, and Thorin came half out of his skin about it.“That’s the wrong way.” The boy twisted in front of Darren, his arm snapping back to north even as Squall banked west. “She’s that way. We have to go that way. Squall, you’re going the WRONG WAY—”“I know where she is, little prince.” Squall’s voice came back over the wind, gentle. “We are going to get help finding the rest of the way. Trust me. One afternoon.”“We don’t have afternoons.”“We have exactly as many as it takes to do this right,” Darren said, one arm locked around the boy, and Thorin subsided against him, unconvinced, obedient only because the king had said it.We had been climbing into colder and stranger country for days, and I had stopped being able to tell whether we were gaining. We had a bearing from a ten-year-old and a scrap of yellow blanket and a clock none of us could see ticking, and somewhere over the third night,

AllissaThe dragon eye woke before dawn, and its light changed everything.I was not asleep when it happened. None of us truly slept at the pools, but I had drifted into the grey nothing that passes for rest when rest is impossible, my head on Darren’s chest, his heartbeat under my ear. What pulled me out of it was the light.It came from the Rememberer’s pool, where the crystal sat in its niche in the rock. All night it had been dark, the dull red-black of a coal gone cold. Now it burned. A deep, bloody glow had kindled in its heart and was pulsing, throwing red shadows across the steam and the sleeping dragons.“The eye,” Squall said, already on his feet, his voice gone strange. “Someone is speaking into the eye.”“What is it?” Darren was up, pulling me with him, every line of him a blade half-drawn.“It is how knowledge travels to this place.” Squall watched the pulsing crystal the way you watch a snake. “A message set into one wakes the other. My brother uses it to reach the Remem