All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 401 - Chapter 410

Point of View: Kieran“Three times, Rhen. Our daughter healed herself three times, and I am hearing about it from a scrape that is not there.”I did not shout. I almost wished I had. Shouting would have been easier than the quiet that filled our kitchen afterward, thick as smoke. Rhen stood by the table with her arms wrapped around herself, and she would not look at me.It was late morning. Briar was asleep in the next room, her small chest rising and falling, humming a tune in her sleep that I could never quite place. Earlier I had walked the fence line behind our house because my daughter had said a man stood there. I found no man. I found one set of boot prints pressed into the soft dirt, and on the top of the middle post, balanced like a tiny crown, a grey pebble.I had laid the pebble on the table between us. Neither of us had touched it since.“When was the first time?” I asked.“Two months ago.” Her voice was barely there. “A bee sting on her hand. It swelled, and then it did n

Point of View: Kieran“A guardian’s child is either a treasure or a threat, depending on who is counting.”Odric said it with a smile, lifting his cup as if he were toasting the weather. My wife’s spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. Around the long table in the meeting hall, the border delegation kept eating, and the fire kept crackling, and nobody seemed to notice that the air had just turned to glass.Elara had arrived that afternoon with three delegates from the border packs, tired and dusty from the road. She was the one who smoothed every rough edge in a room. Three years of treaty work had made her walk like a diplomat and think like a general. Now she sat two seats from me, her face perfectly calm, and I saw her fingers tighten on the stem of her cup.“That is an interesting way to put it,” Elara said lightly.“It is only honest.” Odric was broad and grey bearded, the sort of man who spoke slowly so you would think he was gentle. “My elders ask me the same question every season

Point of View: Kieran“She is not sleeping in that room tonight. Not one more night until we know who has been near her window.”Rhen said it standing in the doorway of Briar’s bedroom, her arms crossed, her jaw tight. She had come straight from the stables with Odric’s letter burning a hole in her sleeve, and she had told me everything in six short sentences. I had not said a word. I did not trust myself to.Now the morning sun cut across the small room, over the wooden animals and the little blue quilt and the round window that looked out toward the fence. Dorian stood beside the bed with one hand resting flat against the wall, his eyes half closed. Sable hovered behind him like a shadow with a sword.“I feel it,” Dorian said quietly. “Very faint. Like a hand pressed on the other side of a door.”“Do not do that,” Sable said sharply. “Do not go looking for it.”“I am not looking. It is just there.”“Dorian.”He opened his eyes and gave her a tired, crooked smile. “I know, love. Thre

Point of View: Kieran“We are not running,” I told my wife, and I watched her face crumble, because running was exactly what she wanted to do.It was the morning after the note. We stood in the bedroom with the shutters half closed, and Rhen was packing a travel bag with quick, stiff movements. A wool blanket. A loaf of bread. Briar’s wooden wolf. She did not look at me while she did it.“Rhen, put the bag down.”“We can go to the coast. My mother’s cousin had a cottage there. No one would know us.”“Someone already knows us. Someone knows our daughter’s name.”“Then we go farther!” She spun around, and her eyes were wild. “We go where no letters can reach us, where no ash can find a windowsill. I will do anything, Kieran, anything to keep her from standing where I stood!”“Your mother ran,” I said quietly. “And something still found you.”The bag fell from her hands.I did not say it to hurt her. I said it because it was true, and because every kind lie I could have told her would ha

Point of View: Kieran“The carving is old, Kieran. Older than Briar. Older than the fight on the ridge. And it is still warm to the touch.”The scout said it in a rush, before he had even climbed down from his horse. Bram, from the eastern border patrol, was a young man with mud on his cheek and fear in his eyes. He had ridden all night. We met him at the edge of the camp as the sun came up grey and thin over the roofs, four of us hollow with tiredness, still smelling of the ridge.Rhen had hardly said a word since we came back. She had run straight to Briar’s bed, checked her sleeping face, checked it again, and only then let herself breathe. Briar had woken to find her mother beside her, exactly as promised, and had wrapped both arms around her neck. I had watched from the door and felt my heart do something painful and beautiful.Now Rhen stood next to me in the morning cold, arms folded, listening.“Slow down,” I said. “Where did you find this carving?”“North and east of the old