All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 661 - Chapter 670

Point of View: Kieran (Male Lead) “You will not write his name in that report, Marisol. Not Perrin’s, not Mirren’s, not the boy’s fever. If you must count a night of trouble, count it without making a child the number.” I am Kieran, and I was tightening a saddle strap in the stable yard of the Salt Heron when my wife marched across the cobbles like an army of one. It was morning, gray and thin. A cart horse blew steam from its nostrils. Hens scratched in the straw. On the mounting block by the water trough sat Marisol Venn, with her ledger open on her knees and a pencil behind her ear. She looked as though she had not slept. She looked, if I am honest, like Briar. “Good morning, Rhen,” she said. “It is not a good morning. You followed us into that cellar.” “I did.” “Why?” “Because I had seen the light from the lane, and I did not know whether anyone would survive it.” Marisol set down her pencil. “I have never been so frightened. I was on the stairs with a ledger in my arms lik

Point of View: Kieran (Male Lead)“Say it in front of everyone, Isolde. Say what you found in the Marrow rolls, and say whose handwriting is on those signatures, because I will not let Briar hear it from a rumor in a corridor.”I am Kieran, and I said it too sharply, to a woman I had known for twenty years, in a parlor that smelled of wet wool and fear.Isolde had ridden through the night. Her coat was stiff with dried mud. Two leather trunks stood by the door, strapped and scuffed, and a clerk I did not know sat on the lid of one, half asleep. She was a tall, spare woman with a long gray plait, and she stood at the head of the table like a person at the edge of a pit.“First,” she said, “I want to answer Briar’s question. The one she sent by rider this morning. Who told Maren Ashdown that the Chair was not sleeping.”Briar looked up from her tea. “You know?”“Everybody knows.” Isolde’s mouth twisted. “Briar, the carriers talk. The ferrymen talk. The women at the market stalls in six

Point of View: Kieran (Male Lead)“Do not sign it yet, Briar. Read it once more, slowly, with your own eyes. Last time you wrote something while you were tired, forty one people believed you had answered them. Humor your father.”I am Kieran, and I sat at a candlelit table at midnight and watched my daughter learn to write a letter the hard way.We had given her a corner of the Heron’s back parlor, a clean desk, and a rule. One reply a night. No more. She had agreed to it with a very odd look, like a woman agreeing to a medicine. Rhen sat by the fire pretending to mend a sock. I sat beside the desk with a mug of cold cider and a duty I had given myself, which was to say, enough.“It is a letter, Father,” said Briar. “It is not a treaty.”“It was a stamp once, and look what that became.”She sighed. She read the page again. It was addressed to a keeper named Orla Dunn, at a line in the northern hills, who had asked two years ago whether anyone could send help for her husband’s failing

Point of View: Kieran (Male Lead)“Shut the door, boy, and sit where I can see your hands. They say wolves listen best when they are tired. Good. I am tired too, and I mean to say this only once.”I am Kieran, and I have been called many things in sixty years, but nobody had called me boy in a long while, and I obeyed like a puppy.Tove’s cottage stood at the top of the Marrow’s steepest lane. It was one low room with a peat fire, a cat the color of dust, and a smell of old wool, sour tea and lavender. Shelves ran up to the rafters, crammed with jars and tins and bundles of dried herbs. A narrow bed stood against the wall. Tove sat in a high backed chair by the hearth with a rug over her knees, small and fierce as a hawk in a cage.We crowded in around her, seven of us in a room made for two. Isolde stood by the door. Odalys perched on a crate. Marisol held the lamp, because Tove had demanded it of her the moment she walked in. “You, with the pencil. Hold that where I can see. Your ha

Point of View: Kieran (Male Lead)“Kieran, wake up. Do not argue yet. Odalys has been crying for an hour, and she says the story we told our children for ten years is a story about the wrong thing.”I am Kieran, and I opened my eyes on a hard bench, and my wife was kneeling over me with her fingers digging into my sleeve like claws.“I am awake,” I said.“You are not. You are only upright.”“Rhen, what story?”“The one about why the First Concord broke.” She was white to the lips. “The one we put in the charter. The one Briar read aloud at the opening of the assembly, ten years ago, with her hand on the heron seal.”I sat up. My neck cracked. A cold hand closed on my chest.“I fought for that story,” I said. “I bled for it. Do not tell me it is false.”“I am not telling you anything. I am telling you to come and sit at the table.”“Rhen.”“So did I,” she said, very softly. “Fight for it. So come and sit.”I went.The reading room was filling with a thin gray light. Briar was awake, wr