All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

POV: Rhen"I need to go to the ruins," I said, before Kieran could finish crossing the training hollow toward me, "and I need you to not talk me out of it this time."He stopped a few feet away, reading something in my face that made the argument he had clearly been building die quietly in his throat. "What happened," he said instead. "You look like you have not slept.""My mother told me I was not the only one who ran from the Thornwolf valley the night I was born," I said. "She would not tell me who else left with her. She said the answer was standing in the ruins, carved into the same wall as my locket's crest, and that some truths are not hers to hand me secondhand.""That sounds exactly like the trap Vane's letter was describing," Kieran said carefully, though I could hear him fighting his own instinct to forbid me outright."I know how it sounds," I said. "I have thought about nothing else since she said it. But she also said the answer was carved into that wall, not waiting for

POV: Rhen"You knew," I said, before my mother had even fully opened the door, the word coming out of me sharper and colder than I had planned. "You knew this whole time and you let me believe I was alone in the world except for you."She went very still in the doorway, flour still dusting her hands from the morning bread, and for one long moment I watched every excuse she might have offered die quietly behind her eyes. "Come inside," she said instead. "This is not a conversation for the doorstep.""I do not want to come inside," I said, though my feet betrayed me and carried me over the threshold anyway, old habit stronger than my anger. "I want you to tell me why I met a woman in the ruins last night who says she is your sister. Your sister, Mother. As if that is a small detail to leave out of nineteen years."My mother sat down slowly at the kitchen table, the kind of slow that comes from a body bracing itself for pain it has been avoiding for a very long time. "Maren," she said, a

POV: Rhen"It is only me," Sable's voice called through the door, breathless and quick, and the relief that flooded my mother's face nearly buckled her knees where she stood. "I ran the whole way. Rhen, you need to see this.""See what," I asked, already crossing the room, my heart still hammering from the false alarm of the knock moments before.Sable held up a folded scrap of parchment, edges burned slightly at one corner as though it had been pulled from a fire before it could finish its work. "One of the border scouts found this near the skirmish site," she said. "It has your name on it, Rhen. Actual ink, your actual name, in a hand none of us recognize."My mother took it from Sable's hands before I could, unfolding it with fingers that had gone stiff and careful, and I watched her face change as she read whatever was written there, color draining slowly from her cheeks."Mother," I said. "What does it say."She did not answer right away, and when she finally looked up at me her

POV: Rhen"You are not even trying," Sable said, circling me slowly in the training hollow with her staff loose and ready in both hands, "and yet somehow you are still faster than you were a week ago. Explain that to me, because it is starting to feel deeply unfair.""I do not know how to explain something I do not understand myself," I said, dodging her next strike a half second before it would have caught my ribs, the movement coming from somewhere instinctive rather than trained. "It is like my body knows things my mind has not caught up to yet.""It is the bloodline," Sable said, lowering her staff slightly, some of the teasing draining out of her voice. "It has to be. I have trained beside you since we were children, Rhen. I know exactly how fast you were a month ago, and this is not that."I sat down hard on the grass, suddenly exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the sparring itself. "I do not know how to feel about any of this," I admitted. "A month ago I was a kenne

POV: Rhen"Something is wrong," Maren said the moment we stepped into the clearing around the hollow oak, her whole body going rigid before either Sable or I had time to register any threat ourselves. "This meeting was never as quiet as it should have been. We need to leave, right now, all of us.""We just got here," I said, but the words died in my throat as three figures stepped out from the tree line on the far side of the clearing, silver glinting cold and deliberate in the moonlight along the edges of their weapons."Rhen Thornwolf," the lead hunter said, his voice carrying the kind of practiced calm that terrified me far more than any shout could have. "Malachi Vane sends his regards, and his apologies that he could not collect you personally this time."Sable's staff was already up, positioned between me and the nearest hunter before I had even finished processing the threat, and Maren moved just as fast on my other side, something feral and ancient sliding into her posture tha