All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 641 - Chapter 650

Point of View: Rhen (Female Lead)“Marisol wrote must, Briar. You promised that nobody would turn a witness into a keeper. Was that promise made of paper, like everything else in the Concord? Tell me now, before I believe you.”I am Rhen, and I watched my own daughter fight her own house for a boy she had known eleven days.Tobin stood dripping in the boathouse doorway. The rolled paper shook in his fist. Perrin did not take it. He only stared at it as if it were a snake.“I am sorry,” said Tobin. “I only carry what I am given.”“Then give it to Briar,” said Perrin. “She is the Chair. She can read me my own sentence.”Briar took the paper. Her thumb found the seal and broke it. She read in silence, and I watched her lips go thin.“Well?” I said.“Mama, wait.”“I am not waiting. A boy says he has been summoned, and my daughter reads the summons like a recipe.” I heard my own voice climbing. “He gave his terms this morning. He stood at that table and said, if I say stop, you stop. And n

Point of View: Rhen (Female Lead)“You knew, Dorian. You looked at that M like a man who had been waiting thirteen years to be caught. Do not lie to me. I have raised too many liars.”I am Rhen, and I found out that the hardest person to confront is the one you love like a son.We made camp that night under an oak on the north road. The sky was a deep clear blue, and the first stars were coming out, thin and sharp as pins. Kieran had lit a fire. Sable was boiling oats. Odalys had gone to the stream to wash her hands, which she did every evening, and which never worked.Dorian sat apart. He had not eaten. He had not spoken since the ferry. He sat on a fallen log at the edge of the firelight, turning one of his crooked hands over and over, as though he were reading it.I went and sat next to him. My knee protested, and I told it to be quiet.“Go away, Rhen,” he said.“I will not.”“I am not fit company.”“Nobody is fit company at this hour. That is why God made fire.” I leaned back agai

Point of View: Rhen (Female Lead)“You taught them the words, and you never taught them why. So do not stand there in your good shawl and tell me I owe this stone my life.”I am Rhen, and I was told off by a seventeen year old girl, and the worst part is that she was right.Her name was Neve. She sat on the cottage step with her chin on her knees, and I sat beside her, which took some time, because of the knee. The wind had dropped. The sea made a long slow sound beyond the hollow, like a giant turning over in sleep. In front of us the Reach stone glowed faintly in the dusk.“Say it again,” I said. “Slowly. From the start.”“I have heard it for two years.” Neve plucked at a thread on her sleeve. “It began the week old Jorun died. He was the Tending keeper before Ysolt took over. I was in bed, and I heard a hum. Like a bee in a jar. Very faint. I thought it was in my head.”“And then?”“It got louder. Not every night. But on the nights when we did the rite badly.”I stared at her. “Bad

Point of View: Rhen (Female Lead)“Mrs. Rhen, I did not come here to win. I came because I cannot sleep, and the numbers will not let me, and I wanted somebody honest to look at them.”I am Rhen, and I sat across a kitchen table from the woman I had decided to hate, and I could not do it.Marisol arrived at dusk on the sixteenth day, alone, on foot, with a leather case strapped to her back and a gray coat that was soaked to the knees. She had walked the last six miles because her horse had thrown a shoe. She did not complain. She only knocked on Ysolt’s door, asked politely for a bowl of anything hot, and sat down by the fire with her hands wrapped around a mug as if they belonged to someone else.Briar and the others were out at the stone with Ysolt. Kieran had gone to find Odalys. Which left me, an old woman with a bad knee, alone in a warm kitchen with a visitor I had been watching all week.“You wrote to me,” I said. “You said you were not the gray coat.”“I was not.”“And you wan

Point of View: Rhen (Female Lead)“Do not put your hand on it, Perrin. I mean it. You said witness only, and I will not watch you become a keeper because a stone is lonely.”I am Rhen, and I stood in a cold hollow at midnight and tried to stop a boy from doing the bravest thing I have ever seen.The hum had begun at dusk. At first it was only a trembling in the soles of my feet. By ten o’clock it was a low steady note, like a great cello being played very far away. Nobody in Hollow Reach slept. The old women sat in their doorways with shawls pulled over their heads. The few young ones stood in a ragged line along the grass with their arms folded and their faces white.Ysolt had come out in her nightgown. Briar stood on one side of the stone, Dorian and Mirren on the other, with Mirren’s cracked arm in a sling. Marisol watched from the shadow of the wall with her ledger clutched to her chest. Neve had planted herself at Perrin’s elbow like a guard dog.And Perrin stood three steps from