All Chapters of Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

HaydeeI found Ginni an hour later at the edge of the sanctuary, standing apart from everyone, her mother's white thread already looped loose around her fingers though she had not tied it on, and I knew before I reached her that I was in a race I might lose."Ginni." I came to her slow, the way you come to a spooked animal. "Look at me. I know what you found in that room. I know your mother is alive, and I know what that is doing to you, and I am not here to argue you out of loving her. I could not if I tried. But hear one thing from me before she says anything else."She would not look at me. Her eyes stayed on the yard, on the mending survivors, on the woman with the warm face who had come out of a fifteen-year grave to smile at her."You have a place with me," I said. "A real one. Not because you are useful, not because you serve me well, though you do. Because I chose you. You are one of the few people in the whole north I le

HaydeeThey read the petition aloud in my own court, because a charge against a queen must be spoken where the queen can hear it, and I stood on my dais and listened to a piece of paper try to unmake me.It did not say I was a bad ruler. I could have fought that. It did not say I had killed the widow or shaken the bonds too far. It said something worse, something I had not braced for, because no one in my whole life had ever been cruel to me in quite this direction.It said I had never been born.The claim, in the cold words the clerk read out, was this. That Haydee Moongale was not the daughter of Carmen Moongale at all. That there was no true child, no true birth, no Moongale heir. That the woman on the throne was a thing grown in the dark from stolen Moonborn blood, a made creature wearing a dead line's face, an impostor with no more right to the crown than any other clever forgery.That I was not a person who had been

HaydeeNo one in that windowless room moved.I did not move. I stood in front of a woman twenty years locked away and waited for her to unmake the one certainty I had left, which was that I knew nothing about the truth of my own birth.Evanthe told it the way she seemed to do everything, plainly, without weight, as though reading names off a list, and the flatness of her voice was the most frightening thing about the story, because a person only speaks that calmly about a horror they have lived beside for a very long time."The night you were born," she said, "was the night they came to kill you. Ursula knew Carmen was near her time. She had waited years for the Moonborn line to produce one more heir, so that she could end it in the cradle and keep the last true Moongale blood for her workings. Her agents were inside the walls when your first cry went up. You had perhaps an hour before they reached the room.""There was an

HaydeeShe did not die. That was the first mercy of a night with very few.The blade had gone in low and sure, but Nerra was a mother turned assassin, not a trained one, and grief makes the hand shake at the last inch even when it means to be steady.We had Evanthe on the floor with Cole's hands pressed to the wound and Hunter shouting the tower awake for a healer, and the old queen breathed, shallow and stubborn, clinging to the life she had spent twenty years in a cell protecting mine with. She would live. The healer said it near dawn, gray with exhaustion, and I let out a breath I had been holding since the stairwell.And then I turned and saw Lucien, and understood the night was not over. It had only turned into something else.Lucien Roux sat on the cold stone floor of his mother's prison with his shoulders against the wall and his knees drawn up like a boy, and he was not elegant, and he was not cold, an

HaydeeIsolde did not wait to win her challenge before she started ruling as though she had.She did it through the tribunal, the same body already sitting at Bloodpine to weigh whether I existed, and she did it with the cold legal craft she had clearly learned at the same table as her brother.While my own legitimacy hung unproven, Isolde argued, the High Luna's authority to hold prisoners was itself in question, and no contested queen could be trusted as jailer to a woman with a stake in the very succession crisis before them.And Tara-Lee, she said, had a stake."She bore the Moonborn-blood child," Isolde told the tribunal, unhurried. "Whatever else is true, Selene came out of Tara-Lee Rainhart's body. In a crisis about Moongale blood and Moongale legitimacy, the woman who carried a Moonborn child has standing, and standing cannot be kept in a cell by a queen who may herself be a fraud. Release her into Bloodpine's prot