Todos los capítulos de Bound by the Cursed Moon: Capítulo 481 - Capítulo 490

Point of View: Rhen“Wren, I heard them thanking me in the hall,” my daughter whispered. “Twelve strangers thanked me for changing their lives. So why did it sound exactly like a goodbye?”I stopped on the bottom stair with my hand flat against the wall.It was past midnight. I had woken to a cold place in the bed where Briar should have been curled against my side, and I had gone through the house barefoot with my heart in my throat. The kitchen door stood half open. A candle burned down to a stub inside, and in its light I saw Wren’s pages spread across the table in neat rows, and my ten year old in her nightgown, gripping Wren’s sleeve.I should have walked in. Instead I stayed in the dark of the hall, because a mother learns that some things a child will only say when she believes nobody is listening. I hated that I knew that. I hated more that I used it.“Sit,” Wren said gently. “You are freezing. Your hands are like ice.”“They are always like ice now.” Briar climbed onto the be

Point of View: Rhen“Do not call me that,” Briar said to the young rider, and her voice came out sharper than she meant. “My name is Briar. It is only Briar. Please stop bowing every time I turn my head.”He went red to the ears. “Forgive me, Keeper. I only meant to show respect.”“I am not a keeper of anything. I am ten.”He mumbled something and dropped back. I let out a breath I had been holding for a mile. We had been riding three hours under a flat white sky, sixty horses strung out along a road that had not seen this much traffic in a hundred years. Everyone kept looking at my daughter. Some looked hopeful and some looked scared, and all of them looked like they wanted something.“You handled that well,” I said, riding close on her left.“I hate it.”“I know.”“They want me to be someone I am not. Why does everyone need a name for what I am?”“Because people are afraid of what they cannot name. It makes the unknown feel smaller.”“That is not fair to me.”“No,” I said. “It is no

Point of View: Rhen“Get her inside, Kieran, now!” I heard myself scream over the wind, though my voice sounded like it came from the bottom of a well. “Her lips are blue, she is not breathing right, get her inside!”I remember the storm coming out of nowhere. One moment the camp was quiet. The next, thunder broke over the ridge so hard it rattled the pots. Rain fell like thrown gravel. Briar had been laughing at something Sable said, and then her knees folded, and she dropped into my arms like a dropped bundle of sticks.Now she lay on damp blankets in a broken shepherd’s hut, and Kieran’s arms were still around her, and I was pressing her cold hands between mine as if I could warm her by wanting it.“Briar. Sweetheart. Look at me.”Her eyes fluttered open. “Mom?”“I am here.”“It is so loud.”“It is only thunder, my love.”“No.” Her breath hitched. “It is not thunder. It is the bell.”Through the broken doorway I saw the sky tear open in one long pale seam, and the moon came out. It

Point of View: Rhen“Read it again,” Briar said, sitting cross legged on the cold floor of the hut with her back against a saddle. “Slowly this time. I want to hear the names as if they were people, not lines.”I sat in the corner by the stove with a bowl of broth going cold in my hands. I had come in ten minutes earlier to bring it, and no one had sent me out. Briar had glanced up, seen me, and gone back to Wren without a word. That was her permission. I had never treasured a silence so much.Wren’s hands trembled on the page. She sat across from Briar in the lantern light, gray around the eyes, bent over her own careful handwriting, and I saw all at once how old she looked. I had been so angry at her all day. It had felt like holding a hot stone. But she had gone to a girl of ten and offered every page she had, and most of the heat had gone out of me.“Lysa, age nine, taken in the autumn of the year 312,” Wren read. “Bram, age eleven, spring, 348. And the third, whose name has been

Point of View: Rhen“Read it aloud, Wren,” Odalys whispered, laying the sealed page on the flat rock between them. “You are the only one here I trust to say it without changing a word.”I lay flat on my stomach in the wet grass at the edge of the stone shelf, hidden behind a boulder, holding my breath. Beside me, so close her shoulder pressed mine, lay my daughter.I had woken in the night to find her blankets empty for the second time in a week. I had found her slipping up the hill in her boots and cloak, and I did not call out. I followed. I told myself I was only making sure she was safe. But I knew, in the honest place, that some part of me wanted to hear whatever she had been hiding. When I lowered myself beside her in the grass, she looked at me with wide eyes and no surprise at all. “Odalys looked at me across the fire,” she whispered. “I think it was an invitation.”“Then we will accept it together,” I whispered back. “And you will not go anywhere alone again.”She nodded and