All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 501 - Chapter 510

Point of View: Kieran“Kieran, do not tell Briar what you are about to see. She already thinks I am made of glass. If she watches me fail on the first road, she will send us all home.”Dorian said it low, with his hand pressed flat against a moss covered marker at the fork in the road. The morning was gray and damp. Our horses stamped behind us, and somewhere in the trees a bird kept repeating one tired note.“I will not lie to my daughter,” I said.“I am not asking you to lie. I am asking you to watch first and judge after.”I nodded. He closed his eyes.The marker was an ordinary Order stone, waist high, carved with the tree and three wavy lines. Old bindings like this one ran along every road in the valley. Dorian could open them with a touch. I had seen him do it a hundred times. The moss pulled back from the carving, and the air around us tightened and hummed.The air smelled of wet bark and old smoke. Frost still clung to the roadside ferns, and each one bent under its own tiny

Point of View: Kieran“Kieran, I am awake, and I am not going back to bed. Come outside. Marta is sitting alone at the board, and I think she is about to tell me something she has kept for years.”Rhen whispered it against my ear in the dark of the borrowed room. The candle had burned down to a thumb of wax. Outside, the wind moved over the thatch like a hand smoothing a blanket.I sat up. “You are not sleeping again.”“I closed my eyes. Then I heard the board.”“The board is wood.”“The board is breathing, Kieran.” She was already pulling on her boots. “Not really. But I keep hearing the notches being cut. Thousands of them, one every dusk, from mothers who did not know why.”I put on my coat and followed her out.The night was sharp and clear. Stars hung low over the hill. At the back of the last house sat Marta Fenn on an overturned bucket, wrapped in a gray blanket, a small clay lamp glowing at her feet. She did not look up when we came.“I thought it would be you,” she said to Rh

Point of View: Kieran“Nobody touch it. Not until I have checked every mark against Wren’s catalog. I do not care how warm it is. I do not care if it starts singing. We do this properly.”Briar knelt beside the stone with a leather case open on the grass. Inside lay the catalog Wren had pressed into her hands, eleven pages, one for each of the oldest guardian marks. She laid them out in a neat row, weighted down with pebbles, her breath fogging in the cold.I stood behind her with Rhen. We both kept our hands clasped behind our backs. It was harder than walking through fire.The wind was high and thin up here, and it smelled of snow that had not fallen yet. Far below, the roofs of Tarn Hollow were small dark seeds in a fold of the hills. I thought of how many dusks that little village had climbed toward us, one lonely person at a time.“Twelve marks,” Briar said. “Twelve. Let me count again.” She traced the carved lines with a finger, not quite touching. “Three at the top. Four in a r

Point of View: Kieran“Choose me, Briar. Not Sable. Me. I put my hands on the first seal at the water when nobody else dared. Let me be the second hand today.”Rhen said it at dusk, her voice low and steady, and I felt my heart squeeze. We stood in a ring of six around the stone, in the last red light. Marta and Joran waited far back at their ten paces. The wind had dropped, and the whole hill felt like a held breath.Briar looked at her mother for a long moment. I watched her jaw work.Before that, in the long golden afternoon, Dorian had drawn me aside on the slope below the stone. He had a cup of cold tea in his hands that he had not touched.“Kieran, I need a promise from you.”“If I can give it.”“If tonight goes wrong, hold Rhen back. She will want to run in. She must not.” He raised his eyes. “If she breaks the ring, the seal breaks, and it will take Briar as well as me.”“You are asking me to hold my wife back from our daughter.”“I am asking you to hold her back from making i

Point of View: Kieran“Write it down exactly as it happened, Briar. Every single detail. Do not make it kinder, and do not make it smaller. Wren will know if you soften it.”I said it gently, kneeling beside my daughter on a flat rock in the pale gray dawn. She had not slept. Neither had I. The camp behind us was quiet, the fire burned down to a red eye, and Dorian slept wrapped in two blankets with Sable curled at his back.Briar’s hand shook as she uncapped her pen. Her burned palm was wrapped in a clean strip of linen. She did not seem to notice the pain.“I have been lining it all up,” she said. “Every piece. So I can see it clearly.”She had laid out her evidence on the rock like cards on a table. I looked at them one by one.The catalog, eleven pages, none of them matching. The bark rubbing, twelve marks in a slow curve. Corvin’s letter, folded in thirds. Wren’s yellow map, with the thirteenth circle drawn in brown. And in the middle, a scrap of paper on which Briar had written