All Chapters of Carrying His Claim: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

She came to the nursery four days later, in the thin afternoon quiet when Wren was usually awake and unreasonably cheerful about it, and she knocked so softly that I thought at first I'd imagined the sound."Is this a bad time?" Selene asked, when I opened the door."It's never a bad time for you." It was the truth, and it was also the hardest sentence I'd said all week. I had spent four days being exactly what Kieran had asked me to be, warm, present, unchanged, while the memory of a stable yard lay under every conversation like a stone under a rug. Seeing her now, pale and shadowed and standing in my doorway with something wrapped in a handkerchief, I felt the stone shift.She looked as though she hadn't slept properly in days. Her hair was pinned with less care than I was used to, and the controlled stillness she'd worn for weeks had worn thin enough that I could see the effort of it underneath, like a seam straining under too much weight."I brought something for Wren," she said,

We argued for three hours that night, and I don't think any of us enjoyed a single minute of it.Dessa had taken Wren to the nursery with a look at me that said she knew better than to ask. The study fire burned low. Gideon's map lay unrolled again across the desk, weighted at its corners with Kieran's inkwell and a brass paperweight shaped like a wolf's head, and the three of us sat around it the way people sit around a patient they are afraid to lose."I say we confront her tomorrow," Gideon said, for the third time. "In private. Kieran and Runa, no one else. We lay out what we know and we give her the chance to choose us before the moon.""And if she doesn't?" Kieran asked."Then we know where we stand. That's more than we know now.""We'd know where we stand when it was already too late to do anything about it." Kieran pushed back from the desk and began to pace, a habit that had returned as the weeks wore on. "Think it through. If we sit her down and say the word Blackmoor, one o

Gideon asked me to walk the garden path with him at the same hour of the afternoon that a hooded man had once closed his gloved hand around my wrist.I hadn't set foot on that stretch of ground since. I had told myself it was prudence, that the guards preferred me nearer the house, that the winter wind was unkind to a new mother. The truth was simpler. My body remembered. When Gideon and Kieran met me at the garden's edge, with Wren safe in Dessa's arms back in the nursery, I felt my heartbeat quicken before either of them said a word."Are you certain?" Kieran asked quietly, offering his arm."No." I took it. "But I think I need to see it."We walked together along the old stone path, past the fountain with its empty basin, toward the far edge of the garden where the pines began. Two guards stood within shouting distance now, a lesson learned the hard way. The late light slanted gold and cold through the trees, and it looked so ordinary that for a moment I could almost believe nothin

I had meant to speak to Selene that evening. I had rehearsed it all afternoon, in the nursery, on the stairs, over a cup of tea I never drank. I had chosen my first sentence and discarded it, chosen another, and settled finally on the simplest one I could find. *I know you're afraid, and I'm not afraid of you.* It was the eve of the dark moon, and I had run out of days.At a quarter to four, Wren began to cry in a way I had never heard.It wasn't her hungry cry, or her tired one, or the outraged wail she reserved for the world's general inadequacy. It was thinner and higher, a kind of fretful, breathless whimper that rose and fell without ever fully resolving, and when I lifted her from the cradle and pressed my cheek to her forehead, I felt the heat of her through the blanket before I'd even straightened.I don't remember crossing the room. I remember the corridor, and shouting for Dessa, and Ottilie's door, and the way my own voice sounded, high and frightened, a stranger's. I remem

She came to Kieran's study the next evening with a leather satchel under her arm and her chin held high, in the manner of someone who has decided to walk across a frozen river and refuses to look down.I'd arrived first. Kieran sat behind his desk with his hands folded, and Gideon stood at the window with his back to the room, a deliberate courtesy I understood at once. He wanted her to see no more of an audience than she could bear. I took the chair nearest the fire and kept my hands in my lap."Thank you for seeing me," Selene said, closing the door behind her. "I know it's late.""You never need to apologize for that." Kieran gestured gently toward the chair across from his desk. "Sit. Please."She sat. She set the satchel on her knees and rested both hands on its flap, and for a moment she simply breathed, the firelight turning her cheekbones to sharp gold. She looked ten years older than the woman who had met me in the east sitting room all those months ago, and somehow also youn