All Chapters of The Red Luna: The Queen of the Flames: Chapter 51 - Chapter 54

ROWENAMy fingers closed around the hilt.The sword did not come free.I had not expected it to be easy. But I had not been prepared for what it did instead, which was to hold perfectly still beneath my grip and fill me with everything I was simultaneously, without order or mercy, the way a flood fills a room. †††††††††††††††††††††††††The dungeon first. The chain on my wrist and the smell of mildew and my father's face telling me I was no longer his daughter. The taste of blood in my mouth and the specific cold of the stone floor and the sound of Darius's laughter echoing after the door closed.The wagon. Shoulder to shoulder with women whose names I barely learned. Mannia gone in the night and the other women's silence and the long terrible days of not enough water and the slavers' jokes carrying back to us on the wind.The arena. The wolf coming at me across the sand and the chain in my hand and the bone I drove into its chest and the girl beneath who bled and

ROWENAI stepped out of the pool and I looked at him and I knew.Not hoped. Not thought I might be able to. Knew, the way you know things that live in the bone rather than the mind. The power that had filled me in the pool was not the same careful warmth I had worked with for months. It was the full thing, and the full thing could reach what the careful thing could not.I crossed to him."Rowena," he said."Stand still," I said.He stood still.My hands found his chest. The warmth rose immediately, more than I called for, more than I had ever produced, and this time when it reached the empty place where his wolf had been it did not stop.It went in.I felt it working the way I had felt Celdric's wound working, the broken thing recognizing the thing that could mend it and moving toward it. But this was not a wound. This was an absence, and filling an absence was different from closing a wound, slower, more like coaxing than mending, and I held my hands steady and I gave it everything I