Alle Kapitel von Forbidden Under the Blood Moon: Kapitel 341 – Kapitel 350

POV: WREN THORNE“Tell me it was quick, Maren. Tell me he felt no pain at the end. Tell me the poison did not finish what the song began, because if it did, I will tear this castle down stone by stone.”Maren did not look up from the elder’s hands. She was folding them over his chest one finger at a time, as gently as if he could still feel it. The candles had burned down to stubs. The grey hour before dawn pressed against the window, and I could hear my own heartbeat in the silence.“Child, look at me.” Her voice was raw, but it did not shake. “Silver root is slow. He drank so little of it that it could not have killed him. His heart was tired, Wren. It had carried too much for too long. He went singing, with his hand in yours. Few of us are given that.”“Then why was the ring in his bed?”“That is what I want to know.”Kade stood in the doorway with the black ring crushed inside his fist. Cody had come up from the stairs, his face blotchy from tears he was pretending not to have. Ro

POV: WREN THORNE“I led the soldiers up that hill, Wren. I stood at the circle while they dragged Edda’s family out. Her little girl clung to my boot. I have heard her mother’s voice every night for three winters.”Ronan said it in the stable yard, in the flat grey light before noon, with my hand on a saddle strap and a half buckled girth in my fingers. He did not step closer. He did not kneel. He stood there with his arms hanging at his sides like a man waiting to be struck.For a long moment, I forgot how to breathe.“Tansy,” I said. “The girl with the cord. Her mother was Edda.”“Yes.”“You were the one who left her alone for three winters.”“I was one of them.” His voice did not rise. “I will not hide behind the others. I carried the torch. I was told the keeper family had hidden an enemy of the old rank law. I believed it because I wanted to believe it.”The girth slipped from my hand. I felt a heat climb up my neck that I had not felt since the night I wrote the charter. A hundr

POV: WREN THORNE“Ride faster! If he hums her lullaby backward, he is standing over her cradle right now. Kade, if she is gone when we reach those gates, I will never forgive any of us.”The wind tore the words out of my mouth. We had left Marrick under a cloak with Cody and Ronan to carry him, and Kade and Selene and I rode the whole road back at a gallop, with the dark fields tilting under the hooves. My heart was one hard fist, beating against my ribs. I thought of my daughter’s small hot hand, and the way she had reached toward the open wall.The night rushed past in ribbons of black and silver. Wind stung my eyes, and the horse’s breath came in hot clouds, and I tasted dust and fear on my tongue. Every hoofbeat said the same thing. Too late, too late, too late. I made myself think of her face instead, round and sleepy and serious, and I rode harder.We clattered into the courtyard and I was off the horse before it stopped. Two Thorne guards stood at the nursery stairs, and they b

POV: WREN THORNE“You abolished Vane Law, Wren Thorne, and the moon turned on us the same night. The elder is dead, our children howl in their sleep, and you stand there singing. Tell them the truth!”Orsin’s voice cracked across the courtyard like a whip. It was the hour when the sky went pearl, and the whole castle stood gathered around the bier: Ashborn warriors on one side, Thorne households on the other, and the Vane families in a hard, silent knot beneath the north wall. The elder lay in his grey burial cloth, with a ring of white flowers around his head. A bitter wind lifted the corners of the cloth.I had not slept. My eyes felt full of sand. Kade stood on my left, close enough that his arm touched mine. Ivy was on my right, shivering in a borrowed cloak. Behind us stood Cody and Selene and Ronan and Maren, and the councillors Hask and Tobren, one step back. Tansy held my hand and my daughter rode on my hip, wide awake and perfectly silent.“Say something,” a woman cried from

POV: KADE ASHBORN“Kade, put your arms down. Do not lift her. I promised him I would walk beside our daughter, even if it breaks every part of me. Stay still. Please. Be my stone.”Wren whispered it with her palm flat against my chest, as the two small figures climbed the path ahead of us. We had run through the open panel and down the forty steps and out through a cellar door into the night, and Ronan had found the tracks in the mud. They led straight to the foot of Edda’s hill. My daughter and Tansy walked up the slope hand in hand, with their little shadows stretching out behind them. The moon stood swollen and heavy, streaked with red.Every instinct I had screamed at me to run. I could have caught them in twelve strides. I could have swept my child into my arms and carried her home. My claws pushed out from my fingers, and the hum in my bones grew so loud I tasted copper.“Wren,” I said, and my voice broke. “I cannot.”“You can.” Her eyes were wet, but her gaze did not shift. “Th