All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 361 - Chapter 370

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"He should have been here an hour ago," I said, though no one had asked, and Wren did not bother pretending she had not heard the fear underneath it.I had stood at the boundary stones since before the sky started turning that pale, uncertain color that comes before real morning, watching the tree line the way I used to watch it as a girl, waiting for something I could not yet name to finally arrive. The grass was still wet from the night, soaking through the hem of my cloak, and I did not move to fix it. Behind me, Dorian kept the fire low, feeding it just enough to keep the chill off without sending smoke high enough to be seen from the ridge, and Sable kept close to him, her shoulder brushing his every time she leaned to add another branch. None of us said out loud what all of us were thinking, that a month of council votes could end badly enough that Kieran might never ride north at all, that the letter I had sent might have arrived too late, or worse

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"Get behind me," Dorian told Sable, though I already knew, even before she answered, that she was not going to listen, and something stubborn in me understood exactly why, the same stubbornness that had carried me through the quarry and every closed binding since.The ridge above us stayed silent after that second birdcall, too silent, the kind of quiet that presses against the ears rather than fills them, the kind that makes every small sound, a boot shifting on gravel, a horse blowing air through its nose, feel dangerously loud. I stood beside Kieran, my senses stretched toward the tree line, reading the same wrongness in the air that I could see settling over the rest of them, a stillness that felt deliberate rather than empty."I do not see anyone," Kieran said, low, his hand already resting on the hilt at his belt."You will not," Wren said. "Not until Corvin wants you to. He learned patience from Vane before he ever broke away from him, whatever els

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"There is something I have not told you," Wren said, and every face around the fire turned toward her at once, the defector's warning still hanging heavy in the air between us like smoke that refused to clear, "and I believe tonight is the last night I have the luxury of keeping it to myself."I narrowed my eyes slightly, reading something in her tone before she had said another word, the careful, deliberate way she chose to sit rather than stand, as though she wanted to be steady for whatever came next."Say it," I told her."My bloodline was not only built to watch the guardians," she said. "That is the part of the old records everyone still living has always been told, and it is true, as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough." She paused, choosing her next words with more care than I had heard her use for anything in weeks, her hands still for once instead of busy with the fire. "If the guardians ever failed, if a guardian was ever corrupted or

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"Break the circle from the east, now, before that man on the ground stops being able to be saved at all," Kieran shouted to Farris, already moving, and I felt my own body answer the same instinct, running on nothing but fear and the certainty that standing still tonight was its own kind of failure, one I refused to let myself commit while there was still breath left in my lungs to fight with.Smoke from the outer torches drifted low across the clearing, catching the moonless dark in strange, shifting shapes that made it hard to tell friend from stranger until they were nearly close enough to touch. I kept my eyes fixed on Dorian's shoulder just ahead of me, using it the way sailors were said to use a distant star, a single fixed point in a night that refused to hold still around me.A masked figure lunged from my right, and I turned inside the blow rather than away from it, the way Kieran had drilled into me over the winter, letting the man's own momentum

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"You are not taking him anywhere, and I do not particularly care how many voices you can layer into one sentence while you threaten us," Sable said, and I felt my own resolve harden right alongside hers, the two of us falling into the same protective rhythm we had built without ever discussing it out loud, one on each side of the man we both refused to let this thing touch, close enough that our shoulders nearly brushed.The creature tilted its head at her, that same curious, almost clinical interest, as though she were a puzzle it had not expected to encounter this far into the evening, an interruption to whatever pattern it had assumed the night would follow."You cannot stop what is already beneath your feet," it said. "The fissures do not close simply because you refuse to be afraid of them.""Maybe not," Sable said. "But I have spent every day since the quarry refusing to let fear decide anything important for me, and I am not starting tonight.""Wre