All Chapters of The Moon's Forgotten Heir: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

They cut me at dawn in the healing house, laying me across a heavy wooden table that had borne three generations of birthing women and two of my own childhood fevers.Severance is ancient, brutal work, and it is far from delicate. Beatrice systematically laid out the moonwater, the grey salt, and the small curved knife with its yellowed bone handle. She placed each item in the exact order her mother had taught her while I lay flat against the cold boards with my left sleeve pushed up past the elbow, my heart thrashing inside my chest like a trapped bird in a sack.“Look at the ceiling, Elinor,” she instructed quietly, her hands hovering over the tools.“I’d rather watch,” I replied.“Elinor.” Her tone left no room for debate.I shifted my eyes upward. Nine heavy timber beams spanned the ceiling. A wasp nest sat in the corner of the eighth, empty since I was a child, and a faint water stain looked remarkably like a running hound.The mark sat on the inside of my left wrist. It was a fai

I took the Hollow Road.I’d like to say I had a clever, calculated reason. The truth is simply that the sky came down low and heavy with grey clouds at dawn, sitting over the northern pass like a thick lid. I had forty-one coins, a single loaf of bread, and eighteen straight hours of sleeplessness weighing me down—and the shorter road was the shorter road.Nobody saw me out. That was the unwritten arrangement, unspoken yet strictly observed by everyone. I slipped through the lower gate while the household was still gathered at breakfast. I didn’t look back at the high stone walls, and forcing myself not to turn around took far more out of me than the first nine miles of walking did.The Hollow Road winds east between two steep shoulders of hill. It had borne that name since long before anyone thought to write it down in a ledger. Frost crunched inside the deep wagon ruts. Old, dirty ropes of snow lay packed into the ditches. A lone crow tracked my movement for two miles before losing i

“Get away from her,” Evander repeated, his voice dangerously low as he swung down from his horse before anyone could order him otherwise.Twenty Silverfang riders remained in their saddles behind him, and not one dismounted. That hesitation told me everything I needed to know about how the next minute would unfold. They had ridden out beneath Edmund’s banner merely to collect a lingering problem; now, their Alpha’s son had veered completely off script, and every man in that line was suddenly preoccupied with examining his own reins.Aldren didn’t even bother to turn around. “Name yourself,” he commanded flatly.“Evander of Silverfang.”“Edmund’s boy.” Aldren uttered the words without a trace of heat, which somehow made them sound far worse. “Two nights ago, you stood on a high stone and publicly cast this woman out of your pack before four hundred witnesses. Yesterday, your father exiled her before the noon bell could ring. This morning, six leashed wolves ambushed her on a road she wa

The fortress of Blackthorn was carved directly into the sheer face of the cliff, and it did not care in the slightest whether a visitor approved of its imposing presence.We mounted the final stretch of the steep road at midday, with the fortress looming high above us in three massive tiers of jagged black stone. Figures lined every wall, looking down on our arrival, and not a single person cheered. Word had gone ahead of us—word always goes ahead in the territories. By the time I rode through the heavy lower gates on a borrowed horse, with dried blood still flaking inside one nostril, every soul in that place knew the King had returned home four days early, accompanied by a rejected Silverfang wash-house girl and offering no explanation whatsoever.The Court gathered to intercept us in the great hall before Aldren had a chance to pull off his riding gloves.There were eleven of them in total: territorial representatives, two high priests, a stern woman from Frostvein with cropped whit

I didn’t sleep, and I didn’t manage to reach him.That sounds like carelessness. It wasn’t. I went down to the west stair at first light, only to find Osbert already standing guard. Then the King was locked in council with Thornwake until noon; after noon came the matter of the execution writ; after the writ, he was occupied with the Frostvein delegation. By dusk, I had been politely and immovably prevented from spending a single moment alone with Aldren for eleven straight hours by a man who never once actually said no to me.By the sixth hour of the evening, I finally gave up and retreated to the north terrace to keep myself from throwing something off the walls.Blackthorn’s north terrace extended from the second tier with nothing beneath it but three hundred feet of sheer cliff and the tops of the pines. The air was cold enough to hurt. A fine rime of ice coated the stone parapet, and the valley below had faded into a bleak blue-grey. I stood there with my palms pressed against the