All Chapters of Moonbound: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The stillroom smelled like it always did, dried yarrow and beeswax and the faint green bitterness of willowbark, but with Kael Blackthorn standing in the doorway it felt like a different room entirely, too small, too close, every jar on every shelf suddenly aware of being looked at.He crossed to Sten's bed first. Didn't touch him. Just stood over him with his jaw set, reading the wound the way I imagined he read tracks in snow, patient and total."How long has he been like this?" he asked."Nine days since he came in. Whatever it is started before that. I can't tell you how long.""You've packed the wound.""Six times. It doesn't take. The dressing comes away dry every time, like it's being drunk instead of soaked." I hesitated, then added, because he deserved the whole truth and because withholding it felt, suddenly, like the kind of small cowardice I didn't want to be caught in. "I don't think it's a wound at all. Not really. I think the wound is just where it's easiest to see."Ka

The boundary stones at dawn looked smaller than I remembered, three weathered markers leaning at their own private angles in the mist, and I had crossed within sight of them a hundred times in my life without ever once stepping past the line they marked. Fenmarch's edge. The place where the fiction my whole town lived inside, the one where packs and Free Towns simply didn't see each other, finally had to admit it was a fiction at all.Kael was waiting with four riders and a covered wagon for the wolves too weak to ride, and beside him stood a woman I hadn't met yet, younger than him by several years, dark-haired and sharp-eyed, wearing the same collar-mark I'd seen on the message two days before."Rhian," she said, before I could ask, offering a hand in the human way rather than whatever greeting pack custom might have called for. Her grip was firm, assessing, not unkind. "Kael's sister. Beta of Blackthorn, which mostly means I do the parts of his job he's too proud to admit he hates."

The council met three days later, and Kael insisted I attend, over what I gathered was the quiet but persistent objection of at least half its members."You'll sit at my left," he told me that morning, in the corridor outside the hall, with the particular flatness he used when he expected an argument and had already decided not to entertain one. "Not to speak unless asked. Just to be seen. Half of them are already convinced you're either a spy or a liability, and the fastest way to disabuse them of either notion is to let them look at you long enough to realize you're neither.""And if they decide I'm both?""Then we'll have a longer conversation." His mouth twitched, not quite a smile, and for a moment the tension in his shoulders eased fractionally, the way it sometimes did in the moments when he seemed to forget, briefly, that he was supposed to be entirely composed at all times. "I'd rather you heard what they say about you directly than have Rhian report it back to you filtered th

Old Marta did not like the idea, and she told me so at considerable length the next morning, wooden spoon in hand, punctuating her objections with jabs at the air that made me grateful she wasn't holding anything sharper."You want to reach into a dying man's bond and go looking for a wound neither of us can see with our own eyes," she said. "Girl, do you have any idea how many ways that could go wrong? If the rot's as dangerous as we think, and you go poking at it directly, what's to stop it reaching back?""I don't know," I admitted, because pretending otherwise would only cost me her trust when it mattered most. "That's exactly why I want to try it on someone stable first. Not Sten, not Aldreth. Someone whose case is mild enough that if something goes wrong, we have room to pull back before it becomes dangerous."Old Marta's mouth thinned, considering, and I watched her weigh the argument the way I imagined she'd weighed a thousand difficult treatments before this one, caution and n

Mira Voss arrived at dusk, exactly as promised, and my first thought on seeing her was that she looked nothing like the woman I'd built in my imagination over the past two days of dread.I'd expected someone hard-edged, obviously dangerous, a face that announced itself as a threat before she'd spoken a single word. Instead the alpha who rode through Blackthorn's gates at the head of a small, disciplined guard was striking in a softer way, dark hair braided close against her skull, a warm, easy smile already in place as she dismounted, the whole practiced ease of someone who understood exactly how to make a room feel at ease around her. Only her eyes gave anything away, sharp and assessing beneath the warmth, cataloguing the courtyard, the assembled Blackthorn guard, Kael standing at the top of the steps, with a swiftness that reminded me, uncomfortably, of Kael's own weighing gaze the first time he'd walked into my stillroom."Kael Blackthorn." Her voice carried easily across the court