All Chapters of Moonbound: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The attack came on our second day riding north, well before we'd reached the safety of familiar Blackthorn territory, and it announced itself not with the chaos of Corin's feral transformation or the desperate violence of the gathering, but with a silence far more unsettling than either.I noticed it first, an absence rather than a presence, the ordinary forest sounds of birdsong and small rustling creatures falling away around us with a suddenness that raised every hair on my arms."Something's wrong," I said, low, and felt Kael go instantly alert beside me, his own senses clearly catching the same unnatural quiet a heartbeat after my own less practiced awareness had flagged it."Ambush," Torvin said, his voice tight, already reaching for his weapon. "Formation, now, tight around the healer, "The first arrow took one of our guards through the shoulder before anyone had fully registered the attack was underway, and then the forest erupted into chaos, figures emerging from the treeline

"We can't simply ride down and confront him," Torvin said, once we'd gathered again in the war room, the day's exhaustion beginning to catch up with all of us despite the urgency of what we'd learned. "If he's as careful as Joss described, he'll recognize Blackthorn riders the instant we're within sight of that inn, and whatever advantage we've gained will vanish the moment he sends warning south.""Then we go carefully," Kael said, though frustration threaded through his controlled tone. "Disguised, perhaps. Or we send someone he wouldn't recognize as connected to Blackthorn at all.""I could go," I offered, and watched both men's expressions shift immediately toward the particular protective alarm I'd come to expect whenever I suggested putting myself anywhere near genuine danger. "Hear me out. I'm not pack, I don't carry any obvious mark that would connect me to Blackthorn at a glance, especially traveling without an escort of wolves. A Free Town healer, passing through on ordinary

We moved through the trees in careful silence, Kael's party spreading out to surround the cottage from every angle, and I felt my heart hammering with a fear that had nothing left in it of the careful, professional distance I'd tried to maintain through months of investigation. This was real now, finally, unmistakably real, the woman who'd haunted every corner of my search since Fenmarch close enough to touch.The mysterious man reached the cottage first, disappearing through its door with the particular haste of someone bringing urgent warning, and Kael's expression tightened at the sight, understanding immediately that whatever advantage our careful approach had bought us was rapidly narrowing."Now," he said, low and urgent, and the careful silence of our approach dissolved into swift, decisive action, guards converging on the cottage from every side while Kael himself led the charge toward its single door.What happened next unfolded too fast for me to track every detail, chaos an

The weeks that followed demanded a particular kind of exhausting duplicity, maintaining careful, warm correspondence with Mira Voss while every instinct screamed to confront her directly, and I found myself grateful, more than once, for the discipline my new title seemed to require of me, a Marchwitch's careful patience standing in for whatever raw fury I might otherwise have let show."A letter came from Voss territory," Kael said, one gray morning some three weeks after the council's fateful session, his expression carefully neutral in the particular way I'd learned meant he was working hard to keep something more volatile contained. "Mira's inviting us to a private dinner, just the two packs, to discuss strengthening trade along the shared border. She writes as though nothing at all has changed between us.""Because as far as she knows, nothing has," I said, setting aside the ward-work I'd been studying, Old Marta's careful tutoring alongside my own halting progress through my moth

The attack came before we could execute our own careful plan, striking not at the mill, not at any place we'd anticipated, but at the very heart of Blackthorn Hold itself.I woke to Old Marta's frantic pounding on my door, well before dawn, her face pale with a fear that immediately set my own heart hammering. "Rhian," she said, breathless. "Wren, come now, something's wrong, worse than anything we've seen since the beginning, "I ran, pulling on the nearest clothes with shaking hands, following Old Marta's urgent lead through the Hold's dim corridors toward the infirmary, where Rhian lay curled on her side, her whole body trembling, the hollow, drum-skin wrongness I'd spent months learning to sense now radiating from her with a violence I'd never felt before, not even at the worst of Sten's original suffering."What happened?" I demanded, already reaching for my kit, healer's instinct overriding the terror threatening to overwhelm my careful composure."I don't know." Old Marta's voi