All Chapters of Where the Silver Moon Leads: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Three years ago, I had truly loved Kael Blackthorn.He was still the young wolf lord returning victorious from the northern frontier then, his black tail cutting across the snowfields and moonlight spreading over his silver armor. I stood at the highest point of the altar and watched a hundred clans bow to him. I thought a man that proud would at least never trample another person's sincere heart.My father, Aldric Silvercrest, was the Silver Moon High Priest. The old king died without warning, and Kael Blackthorn took the throne on the strength of his victories. The war-wolf clans and the priestly elders distrusted one another. To bind the two factions, I accepted the Moon Goddess marriage bond and became the court's Moon-Bound mate.I entered the Wolf Keep carrying a hope I refused to admit.At our bonding rite, Kael Blackthorn took my hand before all the clans. He said the Silver Moon priesthood and the war wolves would share glory and loss from that day forward. He also said I woul

Before dawn the next day, Seraphine Voss summoned me to Moonlight Hall.She accused me of insulting the Wolf King the night before and ordered me to kneel in the storm while reciting the Lessons for She-Wolves one hundred times. Several noblewomen attached to the war-wolf clans waited beneath the gallery, eager to watch me bow my head.The Voss clan had invented the Lessons within the last few decades. Every line instructed women to submit to their mates and surrender their cubs, yet it did so in the Moon Goddess's name. The greatest absurdity was that Seraphine Voss had broken every one of its rules when she led armies in the north as a young woman. Only after securing her place as Wolf Queen did she use it to discipline women weaker than herself.Matron Sable stood behind me holding the scroll. Whenever I missed a word, her cane struck my shoulders. A few women laughed softly at the first blow. The second fell just as Elder Eamon, the White-Bearded Elder, entered the outer gate with

Before the Moon-Eclipse Rite, I went to Moonlight Hall one last time.Seraphine Voss thought the punishment in the snow had finally ground the defiance out of me, so she deliberately allowed me half an hour with the two children.Before I entered, Matron Sable pierced my wrist with a silver needle to test whether I carried moon-blood that could awaken the mother-child bond. They confiscated my hairpin and perfume sachet and even ripped open the hidden pockets in my lapels, but they did not find the two thin moonstone slivers sealed behind my hollow tooth.Every adult Silver Moon priest retained one wolf tooth that had never fully emerged. The night before, I had Lucian hollow mine out, then split the moonstone into two thin slivers and seal them inside it. As long as I did not take wolf form, that trace of moon-breath would not escape.To see my own children, I had to prepare as though I were infiltrating an enemy camp. I added that absurdity to the account as well.Rowan hid behind hi

Cedar Valley was the ancestral home of the Silver Moon priesthood. Mountains enclosed it on three sides, and only a wolf could pass through the final fissure in the ice.For the first month after my arrival, I slept almost constantly. Two births and long exposure to black-obsidian powder had emptied me of moon-breath. When I took wolf form, black fissures even spread across my silver-white coat.The valley healer, Mara, washed my wounds with moon salt every day. Whenever the obsidian poison was forced out, fever raged through me again and again. On the worst night, I even forgot I had left the Court and clutched the edge of the bed, trying to go to Moonlight Hall to see my children.Mara did not deceive me with comforting words. She simply held me down and, once I was lucid, told me that strength of will could not make a body heal overnight. If I wanted to fight the battles ahead, I first had to admit that I had been wounded.That was when I allowed myself to stop. I drank my bitter me

A letter written by Seraphine Voss eventually reached me.It had not been addressed to me. A neutral courier intercepted it on the road to the Voss clan's northern estate and delivered it to Eamon under the council's evidence order. Seraphine had written to her uncle, asking him to hold the war-wolf regiments together. The first pages recalled how she and Kael Blackthorn had met in the north, how they had crawled from a mound of corpses, and how, when an obsidian arrow pierced her abdomen, he had sworn that no one would ever take her place.I understood the weight of everything they had survived together. It explained the fear running through her letter; it did not alter what she had ordered done to me.She did not know whether I was alive. In the letter, she insisted that my death had never been her purpose; she had acted, she wrote, because the Court would cast aside a barren Wolf Queen unless she secured the royal heirs as her own.Taken literally, the claim was false. She had order