Semua Bab Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy: Bab 111 - Bab 120

HaydeeLucien had the answer by morning, and I hated all of it.The black in our marks was Moonborn work, fed by Moonborn blood, and there was only one loose source of it in the whole north.Selene's.The old blood, drawn in the days when my daughter was still a weapon, the blood I thought had all been accounted for. Lucien traced the working to a single stolen vial, and I remembered, cold to my bones, the thing I had seen in a Bloodpine hall and told no one, Tara-Lee kneeling to Isolde with her hand curled secretly around something in her sleeve."They kept a measure of Selene's blood," Lucien said grimly. "And they have used it to poison the bond the child made. This is Tara-Lee's hand and Isolde's design, and it is not a random cruelty. It is an argument."Because that was the terrible cleverness of it, and Isolde was nothing if not clever.She could not beat me on the field yet. So she would beat me on th

HaydeeBloodpine had a law for everything, and every law had been written by men who wanted to keep a thing they already held.I learned it the morning the challenge was called, on the cold challenge grounds at the heart of the split pack, while a herald read the terms of how a sister would try to take her brother's command. Isolde had thrown the challenge down herself, in open hall, by every right of blood she had.And now, when the day came to answer for it, Bloodpine law did the thing it had been built to do.It would not let her fight."A woman may not duel for Alpha command," the herald read, flat, as though the words were weather. "Save that she be first recognised as Luna-regent by the standing Alpha, which recognition has not been given. The challenger, being unrecognised, may not take the grounds in her own body. She must name a champion to stand for her, and the challenge is decided between the champion and the A

HaydeeI understood what Isolde had built the moment the fight began, and it was worse than a doubled strength.The co-Luna bond between her and Tara-Lee was not a true thing, not a bond of love like the one a child had sparked on my palm. It was a made thing, a marriage of pure ambition, sworn cold in a dark room by two women who did not even like each other.But it did not need love to work.It needed only to be a channel, and it was a very good channel.Through it, everything Tara-Lee had flowed into Isolde, and Tara-Lee had one thing no one else in the north had. She had Selene's blood, the old stolen measure she had palmed and hidden and hoarded, and the traces of Moonborn power still living in it.The bond let Isolde draw on it. It fed her.Every time she moved I saw the silver-wrong sheen of stolen Moonborn strength under her skin, my daughter's blood turned into a weapon and poured into an enemy's arm

HaydeeUrsula did not raise her voice once. That was the terrible part. She declared a war the way another woman might offer you tea.She hung in her veil of moonlight above the arena, above the corpse of the follower she had killed without effort, and spoke to the gathered packs, hundreds of frightened wolves who had come to watch a challenge and were now watching a goddess-shaped thing offer to end their fear. And she did not lie.That was what made it unbearable. She did not need to."Look at what her freedom has bought you," Ursula said, gentle, reasonable, turning her veiled face over the crowd like a mother explaining a hard truth. "I will not lie to you about your queen. I will only name what you have all seen. Since Haydee Moongale took her crown and unmade the old bonds, has the north been safe?"She let the silence answer."A widow, freed by the queen's own mercy, murdered with the queen's own mark carved

HaydeeWe went to the dead city in the worst-matched company the north has ever assembled.I rode at the front with Hunter in Nightfall black and deep gold on one side and Cole on the other, two men who loved me and had learned not to fight over me, which is not the same as being easy side by side. Lucien came behind, still gray from his wound, carried in a litter he despised.My mother rode with Selene. And Tara-Lee came in chains in the middle of us all, our bought and untrusted guide, flanked by guards who watched her the way you watch a snake you have been assured is milked.Nobody spoke much. There was too much history in that column for talk.Then the waste opened, and the first Moonborn city rose out of it, and everyone stopped.I had expected rubble. It was not rubble.It was the most beautiful dead thing I have ever seen, a whole city of pale stone towers still standing under the moon, cracked and ro