All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 631 - Chapter 640

Point of View: Rhen (Female Lead)“If that woman hid a stone from her son, Kieran, then I hid a whole mountain from our daughter. So why am I the one who cannot stop shaking? Why do I feel like the guilty one tonight?”I am Rhen, and I rode two days in a cart with a bad knee and a worse conscience.Dunmere rose out of the rain like a bruise on the lake. Gray roofs. Black nets hung out to dry. One long beach of shingle where the boats lay on their sides like sleeping animals. Across the water stood the Ashdown boathouse, small and crooked, with a single yellow lamp in its window. My daughter was inside that lamp. I could not look at anything else.Kieran climbed down first and held up his arms. “Come. Slowly. Mind the knee.”“My knee is fine.”“Your knee is the size of a cabbage, Rhen.”“Then it is a brave cabbage.” I let him lift me down anyway. The shingle crunched under my boots, and the wind smelled of fish and wet rope and old smoke.“You are not talking,” he said.“I am thinking.

Point of View: Rhen (Female Lead)“Perrin, I will not lift that plank. You will. But I will kneel beside you the whole time, and if your hands shake, I promise mine will shake louder than yours.”I am Rhen, and I have buried a great many things in my life, but I had never watched a young man dig up his own mother.It was the third day. Perrin had asked for us himself. “Witnesses,” he said at breakfast, standing in the Salt Heron’s doorway with salt drying on his sleeves. “People who are not paid by the Concord and not afraid of the Concord. Kieran and Rhen. Please.”I could have wept at the word please.Now the boathouse was crowded. Dorian leaned on the doorframe with his hands in his pockets. Sable held the lantern. Kieran stood close to the wall, because he knew his size and wished to take up less of the room. Briar knelt on the floor beside the cold stove, and Perrin knelt across from her, and between them, in the gray light from the window, lay a plain board no wider than my hand

Point of View: Rhen (Female Lead)“Rhen, I found something in the sewing box, and before I show Briar, I need you to promise you will not tell a single soul at the Concord. Not Marisol. Not anyone.”I am Rhen, and I have spent my whole life hating secrets, which is why I almost said yes.It was the fifth day. A thin rain was falling on the lake, and I was sitting alone in the Salt Heron’s back room, mending a sock I did not need to mend, when Sable slipped in and shut the door behind her. She had a green box under her arm. Her face was pale and hard.“That is Tamsin’s sewing box,” I said.“Perrin gave it to me this morning. He said, find a button, Sable, and that was all.” She set the box on the table. “I did not find a button.”She pressed a corner of the lining. A thin board lifted out, and underneath, in a nest of faded red felt, lay three things.A small brass key, no longer than my thumb.A tide table, folded into eighths, with tiny numbers inked in the margins.And a child’s dra

Point of View: Rhen (Female Lead)“Four hours? Three years? Do not look at your father. Look at me, Briar. How long have you been lying to me about how little you sleep?”I am Rhen, and I have never been so angry at someone I wanted to hold so badly.Briar stood on the quay in the thin dawn with her hair loose and her eyes ringed with shadows I should have noticed years ago. She did not flinch. She only looked at Dorian, and he looked back, and I saw that he was already sorry.“I told you in confidence,” she said.“You told me because you were afraid,” said Dorian. “I thought someone should know.”“Someone did know. You did.”“And that was not enough.”“Stop it, both of you,” I said. My voice came out harsh. “Briar. Answer me.”“Mama.” She walked toward me, and I saw the tiredness in the way she placed her feet, careful as a woman crossing ice. “Not here. Perrin is sitting right there.”“Perrin has the right to hear it,” said Perrin quietly. “It is about my fragment. It is about the w

Point of View: Rhen (Female Lead)“Briar, take my hand and do not let go. The water is already at my knees, and I am not afraid for me. I am afraid for you.”I am Rhen, and I have never been more frightened than on the night I held a rope in the dark and let my daughter go down into the water.The hatch lay open beside the cold stove like a mouth. Beneath it, the tide had already climbed the pilings, black and heaving, and the lantern light slid across it in long wet ribbons. The boathouse floor trembled. Every wave made the beams groan.“It is eight feet down,” said Dorian, lying flat on his stomach with his arm through the hatch. “There is a ledge on the north piling. Waist deep now. Chest deep in an hour.”“I will go,” said Perrin.“It is your mother’s,” said Briar. “So you must. But I am coming with you.”“Briar,” I said.“Mama, do not.”“I will not stop you.” I heard my voice rise, thin and cracked. “I will only tie the rope. Give me the rope. I will tie it around your waist myse