All Chapters of The Moon's Forgotten Heir: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

They packed the shoulder wound with grey salt, but it did not close. They packed it a second time, and still it refused to close. Finally, the healer—a square, sturdy woman named Ilma, with forearms like a blacksmith’s—voiced the harsh truth everyone in the room already knew.“Moon-silver doesn’t heal,” Ilma declared flatly. “It waits.”She tied off the final strip of bandage with a brisk yank. “It’ll stop feeling so cold in about nine days, and it’ll ache whenever the weather turns for the rest of your life. Don’t use the arm.”“Fine,” I replied.She grunted, eyeing me with deep scepticism. “You are going to use the arm.”“Almost certainly.”They kept Dunstan in the lower hall under the watch of four heavily armed guards. He had not stopped shaking, yet Aldren adamantly refused to lock him in a cell—a detail well worth recording. Half the Court had loudly demanded that the guard be hanged before breakfast, but the King placed him on a wooden bench beside a crackling hearth, forced a w

We fought about it for two days, and I lost, and then I won, and winning cost more than losing would have.His position was not unreasonable, which is what made it unbearable. Blackthorn held eleven leashed people whom I could see and no way of knowing how many more I could not. The Court had drawn a writ once and would draw it again. Hesper had gone home to Frostvein in a state I did not like. And beneath all of it lay the plain arithmetic: the King of the Seven Territories could not order a wash-house girl through a sealed royal door without giving her a standing in law that she did not have.“Then give me one,” I said.“There is exactly one instrument that would do it,” Osbert said, his voice measured and cautious, “and I would prefer that neither of you ask me what it is.”“Say it anyway,” Aldren said firmly.Osbert put down his pen with the air of a man watching a cart go over a cliff from too great a distance to shout.“A blood oath,” he said, letting the words settle heavily. “T

The stair down is not on any plan of the fortress, which is the first thing that ought to have told somebody something four hundred years ago.It begins behind the cold store on the lowest tier, beyond a wall that Aldren had four men demolish with heavy hammers at eight in the morning because he had decided he was finished asking permission from architecture. Behind the demolished wall was a landing, and beyond the landing, the steps descended. They were not Blackthorn work. Blackthorn is built of black stone cut square. These steps were pale and worn hollow in the centre by countless feet, and they turned the wrong way, which no defensive stair ever does.We took lamps. Aldren, Wulstan, Osbert—under loud protest—and me.Balthor stayed above. He stood on the landing with his spectacles held loosely in one hand and said, “I have spent sixty years reading about what lies at the bottom of stairs like this one, and I have formed no ambition whatsoever to see it,” which I thought at the tim

Evander rode into Blackthorn four days later—alone, on a horse he had very nearly ridden to death, with no escort, no letter, and no permission.They took his weapons at the gate, and he let them. They put him in the lower hall, where he stood in the middle of the room for two hours without sitting down. By the time somebody thought to come and tell me, he had been there long enough for the entire household to have formed an opinion.He looked terrible.“Four days,” I said.“Three and a half.” His voice had turned to gravel. “I’ve not slept since the feast. Not properly. Not once.”“Sit down before you fall down.”“Ellie.”“Sit down.”He sat. Up close, he looked worse. He had lost weight he had no business losing, his hands would not remain still, and a tremor passed through him at intervals of about nine seconds—a shudder I recognised because I had felt exactly the same thing at the bottom of a stair with my hand pressed against white stone.“Rosamund sent me,” he said.“What?”“Not s

I stood in the doorway with the forgery in my hand. I did not go in, and I did not go away.I looked.It took perhaps three seconds.Between the two of them lay the thin, worn thread of six years and the bright, unmistakable line of pity, exactly as there had been the day before and one new thing, which I read in the same glance and which flattened the green thing beneath my breastbone entirely.Grief. Hers, enormous and fresh.“They’ve arrested him,” Rosamund said without turning around. She had heard me. She did not care. “My father. Four days after I left. He had worked out that the box was gone, and he did not run. He sat down in his own hall and waited for the King’s men. The message says he asked whether his daughter was safe before he asked what the charge was.”I put the letter in my pocket.“I’m sorry,” I said. I meant it, hated that I meant it, and understood in that moment that I was eventually going to be able to like Rosamund of Thornwake and that it was going to be extrem