All Chapters of The Phoenix Wolf's Awakening : Chapter 111 - Chapter 119

Mona's POVI found Selena in the herb garden three weeks after Althea came home, and I almost turned around before she saw me.She was kneeling in the dirt with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, pulling weeds by hand instead of using magic, and I recognized that particular kind of quiet. It was the way our mother — Elena, the woman who wasn't my mother by blood but was still the only mother either of us had known — used to weed when she was thinking about something too big to speak aloud. Selena had inherited that from her. The trick of doing small work while your mind carried heavy things. I stood at the garden gate for a long moment, watching her, my hands cold inside my sleeves. She hadn't spoken to me since the night at the gates. Not really. She had passed me in corridors and answered when directly asked, but she had not spoken to me the way sisters speak — the easy shorthand we had spent years building. Every meal, she sat two seats down. Every meeting, she looked at my chin inst

Mona's POVThe messenger who carried the Council's terms to Vesna came back with a single question, and it wrecked me for the rest of the day.He was one of Derek's youngest riders, a boy named Jem with freckles across his nose and a horse that was too big for him. He had ridden four days to the mountains and four days back, and when he stood in front of me in the corridor, still smelling of pine and cold sweat, he pulled a folded page from inside his coat with hands that were shaking a little. "She read it twice, my Queen," he said. "Then she asked me to write down her answer." He passed me the page. It was not a signed acceptance. It was not a refusal. It was one line, in a handwriting careful enough that I could tell she had practiced it before letting him copy it: If the leash lets me plant tomatoes, I accept. I sat down on the corridor bench and I laughed, and then I did not stop laughing, and then somewhere in the middle the laughter turned into something else. Jem stood watchin

Mona's POVDerek told me he was stepping down in a chicken coop, and I laughed so hard I sat down on an overturned bucket.He had gone to fetch eggs for the kitchen — a thing he had started doing on ordinary mornings after we came home from our long trip, because he said the small chores were the ones that kept a man human. I had followed him because I liked watching him do small things. He set his basket down. He looked at the fussing hens. He said, without turning around, "I want Cassian to have the pack, Mona. Before the year is out." Just like that. In a chicken coop. With straw stuck to his boot. I opened my mouth to say something serious and instead I laughed, because it was so like him — the biggest decisions of his life delivered in the smallest possible rooms. He turned around with an egg in each hand and a look on his face that was half offended and half relieved. "You're laughing at me." "I'm laughing at the coop, Derek." I stood up. I crossed the straw to him. I took the e

Mona's POVI did not get the morning I was waiting for.Leon slipped in his sleep sometime near the false dawn — that grey hour when the birds have not yet decided whether to sing. Sophie found him first. She came to the porch where I had fallen asleep against his chair, and she touched my shoulder very gently, and when I opened my eyes she said only, "He's gone, Mona." I did not scream. I did not shatter. I stood up on legs that did not feel like mine and I went into the small room where he lay, and he looked the way he had looked at fourteen when I would wake him for a hunt — mouth slightly open, one hand loose on the blanket, as if in a moment he would groan and turn over. But the moment did not come. And the thing he had been going to tell me about our mother's death, the sentence he had promised for morning, was gone with him. I sat on the edge of his bed and I held his cool hand and I said, out loud, into the quiet room, "You cheated, brother." And I did not know if I meant it a

Mona's POVVesna's rider stood in my kitchen at midnight, and the letter he carried was written on the back of a child's drawing.That was the first thing I noticed when he pulled it from his coat. A crayon picture of a house with a red roof, and underneath the roof, on the reverse of the paper, Vesna's careful handwriting. She had used what she had. The rider was young — not one of her old fighters, one of the Bloodrose settlement's new generation — and he was so exhausted from the ride that I had Kael sit him down with a bowl of soup before I even opened the paper. The kitchen was quiet. The night cook had put another log on the fire out of respect for the strange hour. I read Vesna's letter twice. It was short. Mona. A man came to my door yesterday. He knew my mother's real name and three sentences she used to say to me at bedtime. Only my mother knew those. He offered me back what he called my birthright. He said your family had stolen it. He said he would come back in one month f