บททั้งหมดของ Rejected By My Mate, Reborn As The Luna Sovereign: บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 20

I found Lily in the gardens after lunch, sitting with embroidery she clearly wasn't paying attention to, which meant she had time to talk and no good excuse not to. "I need you to tell me something honestly," I said, dropping onto the bench beside her without preamble. She looked up from the embroidery with the specific expression she made when she was calculating how much honesty she could get away with not giving me. "That depends on what the something is." "Who was I. Before." She set the embroidery down. "Iris." "I mean it. Not the version you've been giving me since I woke up, the careful one where everything is fine and I was wonderful and everyone loves me. The real version." I looked at her directly. "A steward called me soft yesterday like it was the strangest thing he'd seen in years, and I need to understand what he meant by that." Lily was quiet for a moment, turning a piece of thread between her fingers in a way that reminded me of Ren picking at his sleeve when he w

The envoy from the Greymoor pack arrived at midmorning with three attendants, a very long title that one of his own people read aloud on his behalf, and the specific energy of a man who had already decided how this meeting was going to go before he walked through the doors. I recognized the type immediately, the kind of person who researches their opponent just enough to feel confident and not quite enough to be accurate, and who then builds an entire strategy on that confidence without leaving himself room to adjust when things go differently than planned. He bowed, correctly and precisely the right depth, which told me he'd done some research at least. "Luna Iris," he said. "Greymoor is grateful for the audience." "Greymoor is welcome," I said, and left it at that, because I'd learned from the petitioner's court that saying less at the start of something gave you considerably more room to move later. His name was Aldric, and he was here about timber rights along the shared borde

I waited until after breakfast to go to Ren, and I went alone, which took some doing because Zayen had developed a habit of appearing whenever I moved with purpose through the palace corridors, like he had a separate sense for it that nobody had mentioned to me. I told him I needed an hour and he looked at me for a second with the expression he used when he was deciding whether to push back, then let me go, which I appreciated more than I said out loud. Ren answered his door quickly, already dressed, with the alert look of someone who'd been awake for a while and had been waiting for something without knowing exactly what shape it was going to take when it arrived. "Can I come in," I said. "Of course." He stepped back, and I came in and sat on the chair by his worktable, the one I'd sat in before when he'd wrapped my wrist, and he stayed standing for a moment before something in my face apparently told him that standing wasn't going to make this easier, so he sat too. "I need to a

The archive approach had a ceiling on it, and we'd found it, so I decided to try the approach that involved actual human beings who had actually been present for the thing we were trying to understand, which felt obvious in retrospect and probably should have been the first move. "We're going to the veterans' quarter," I told Ren and Zayen at breakfast. Zayen looked up from his plate. "As Luna, or as three people who happen to be walking through the lower village." "As three people who happen to be walking through the lower village." "You know that's not going to work." "I know no such thing. I can be subtle." Ren, to his credit, said nothing, just looked at his tea with the expression of a man choosing his battles wisely. We went in plain clothes, which was Zayen's term for clothing that didn't announce rank in the first three seconds, and I wore my hair down and left the Luna insignia in my chambers, and for the walk through the lower village I genuinely thought it was working

We moved to the private courtyard because the archive felt too enclosed after what we'd found, and also because I needed cold air and open sky above me while I thought through the implications of a single handwritten sentence, which were considerable and getting more considerable the longer I sat with them. Ren had the note in his ledger now, copied twice in his careful handwriting and the original folded back exactly as we'd found it and replaced in the binding in case removing it caused any problems we hadn't anticipated, which was the kind of methodical thinking I was very grateful one of us was capable of when I was busy being too unsettled to be practical. "If the seal is failing," I said, once we'd been outside long enough that the cold had cleared my head a little, "then this isn't something that happened three years ago and stopped happening. It's happening now, which means whatever the elders have been managing for three years isn't a historical cover-up, it's an active one.