All Chapters of MINE BEFORE THE BLOOD MOON : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

The snow melted faster than Thea expected. By midday Moonhold didn’t look like a city that had survived a war, it looked like a city learning how to breathe again. Loud, messy, uncertain, but alive.Smoke rose from cookfires, not from burning towers. Voices echoed off stone, not commands, just people talking over each other. For ten years every sound in the North had led back to one voice. Now there were hundreds, and none of them matched.Thea and Kael didn’t go straight home. They walked the border first, slow, without speaking. No guards, no watchers, no one waiting for orders. Just wolves patching the gate with their own hands, children chasing each other between carts, old men arguing about grain prices and women arguing louder about whose turn it was to mend the nets.It’s weird, Kael said, not having anyone to report to. I keep waiting for someone to tell me what I’m doing wrong, Thea replied, and no one does. Not yet. Are you nervous, he asked. Terrified, she said. Good.

The second month began with rain. Not the clean kind that washes things. The heavy kind that sits on roofs and finds every crack. And Moonhold groaned under it like an old animal. By day three the streets were mud. By day five the granaries had water in the corners. By day seven people were tired of being wet and tired of being patient. And tiredness, Thea was learning, was where choices got dangerous. She spent most of it in the archives with Edris, not because there was work, but because the stone walls didn’t leak, and because when she wasn’t moving she didn’t have to answer questions. Kael came and went with his wolves, hauling sandbags, pulling children out of flooded alleys, coming back with his hair dripping and his temper short. He didn’t say much. He just sat near her until the rain slowed. Diana’s Fourth flickered constantly, not from power, from strain. She was letting too many people feel each other’s fear and it was making her sick. Astra told her to stop. Diana s

The month turned and Auren woke with hands that didn’t ache. That was the first thing he noticed. The second was that the room was quiet. The third was that he felt guilty for feeling relieved. He sat at his table for a long time. The wood was cold under his palms. The tools were laid out the way he left them. And for the first time in years he could pick up the chisel without bracing for pain. He didn’t carve that day. He just held the tools, turned them over, remembered what it felt like to make something without counting the cost in his joints. And when Thea came by she didn’t ask. She just saw the tools in his hands and nodded. Kael came later with bread, left it, didn’t stay. Because Auren’s house felt like a place that needed silence more than company. That night Auren called the Sovereign again. Not because he needed to. Because he wanted to see if the choice would still be there when he wasn’t desperate. And he was. Small. Sitting in the chair by the window. And Au

The knock came from Ironhollow. That was the name the voice gave. Tired. Older. A man who worked the forges and hadn’t slept right in years. The Sovereign opened the door. Small. Sitting in the chair. And the man didn’t kneel. He just stood in the doorway like he was afraid the room would disappear if he stepped in. “Do you want this?” the Sovereign asked. And the man said, “I don’t know. My town is breaking. My son won’t eat. The council took the last of our coal. I’m scared if I say yes I’m weak, and if I say no I’m cruel.” “Then don’t decide tonight,” the Sovereign said. “Sit.” And the man did. And the room got warm. And for the first time in months he slept without dreaming of fire. And in the morning he woke up in his own bed with a loaf of bread on the table that he hadn’t baked. And he didn’t tell anyone. Not yet. Above, Moonhold and Greywatch were already building together. Not with treaties. With carts. The road between them was still mud in places, but wolv

Spring came to the North like an apology. Slow. Muddy. Late. But it came. The snow pulled back in patches, leaving roofs sagging and roads that were more water than ground. And for the first time in months, people in Moonhold and Greywatch and Ironhollow stepped outside without counting how long they could last. No one declared the winter over. They just stopped wearing all their clothes at once. And that was enough. The thaw meant carts could move again. And that meant the first real trade between all three towns. Not tribute. Not aid. Trade. Messy and argued over and honest. Moonhold had wood and extra grain from what Astra had hoarded. Greywatch had salt and wool and people who knew how to fix frozen pipes. Ironhollow had coal and iron and hands that could make tools without asking permission. The first cart left Moonhold on the fifth day. Astra driving it herself with two wolves. It went to Greywatch first, dropped grain, picked up salt. Then pushed on to Ironhol