All Chapters of Moon kissed, Blood crowned: Chapter 41 - Chapter 49

KaiWe found the bear site mid-morning. You couldn’t miss it, because the trail told the whole story in mud and hoofprints. Two horses had been moving at a steady pace, and then everything had descended into chaos.The ground was churned up. There was a wide sliding mark where something large had gone sideways, and in the soft mud of the trail was a clear impression that stopped me cold.The shape of a person. Someone had landed on their back, arms flung wide and pressed into the muddy earth like an insignia stamped into papyrus.A woman’s figure. I crouched and took a quick sniff and it was Maya’s scent, not Valeria's. I stood over the impression for a long moment without saying anything.“The horse went over,” Finn said from behind me. He was reading the ground the way he read everything, quietly, methodically, without drama. “Reared and fell backward, from the look of it. Both riders went down.”“Both?” I asked.“Yes. Both.”Liam had wandered farther up the trail and came back pra

MayaI stayed approximately five minutes at the tree line before I couldn’t stand it anymore. Immediately, I swung my leg over the horse’s neck and slid down, taking care to land on my good foot. I turned and passed the reins to Valeria.She placed a hand on my wrist, and her expression made it perfectly clear that I had been told to stay hidden and obey the instruction. I agreed with her principle but in practice, I could hear voices on the trail.Tyler’s voice was low and controlled, and then another voice reached me. My heart stopped.Kai.I was already moving before I had even decided to move. Valeria’s hand fell away as my feet carried me through the undergrowth toward the trail. My bound ribs made every step a negotiation, and my swollen ankle put me on the losing end of it. I came through the tree line and stopped.Tyler was standing with his back against the birch tree, and a young boy stood a few steps away from him, staring at the ground with an unusual amount of concentrati

MayaHaving Kai there was both a relief and a complication.He was my brother, and I had missed him more than I wanted to admit. But Kai had a particular quality to his presence that was loud, certain, and slightly too much. Still, having him around made the camp feel less exposed than it had during the nine nights I’d spent on the road.The complication was that my ribs needed salve, my ankle needed attention, and both injuries were beginning to demand it with increasing urgency. And Kai had been watching Tyler like a wolf that hadn’t decided yet whether something was a threat. I didn’t particularly want to find out what would happen when those two things finally collided.Tyler had found a good campsite; it was sheltered and defensible, with a shallow stream nearby and clear sightlines in every direction. He had the fire going before most of the others had finished tending to the horses. And he crouched beside it, feeding the flames with the same quiet efficiency I’d watched for ni

MayaI knew immediately that this was not Draken’s dream.There was no candlelight, no cold galleries, no perfectly arranged flowers, and no evidence of a man who had spent centuries shaping his world into something that obeyed his every preference.This place had not been arranged by anyone. It simply existed, the way grief existed without design or permission, settling into the spaces people left unguarded until it became impossible to distinguish the pain from the person carrying it. I stood at the edge of a forest and stared into its depths.Every tree was dead.Not fallen. Not rotten. Dead.They stood upright, stripped of everything that made them living things. There were no leaves, no bark, only pale wood exposed beneath, resembling bones left to bleach beneath an unforgiving sky. They stretched as far as I could see, row after row of lifeless trunks, silent, grey, and utterly still. Above them, the sky was the colour of old ash.I had walked through several dreamspaces, and ea