All Chapters of The Luna They Burned: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Selene Marrow had given just as much time to getting ready for this moment as she had to any other part of the odd, life she had been leading since the fire.She had carried out her practice in the cellar under Moira's cottage as the death-witch was reconstructing her room by room, over a period of eleven months of suffering which made the actual act seem almost merciful when compared with it, a slow and intolerable procedure that Moira described with the kind of clinical detachment characteristic of someone who had carried out the operation many times before, as if she were reweaving a body from a soul which refused to release its old shape. On the long journey south, she had practised with Ivy, going over the same sentences until they no longer tasted like ash. That morning she had practised by herself in a room that she had rented two hours from the border, looking at a face in a mirror that she had borrowed, seeing another person's cheekbones, another person's mouth, and silver ey

Kaelan had not slept well on most nights, not properly, ever since the clearing.He didn't sleep at all that night.He was continually thinking, in vain, of a night two years prior to the fire, before any of those events had taken place, when he had still been a Beta getting used to the weight of a title, he had not yet inherited. Wren had climbed through the window of his rooms rather than go by the door, since, as she said, doors made things seem too formal. They stayed on the floor for hours discussing nothing in particular, such as whether the river flowed more quickly in spring or following the autumn rains, or whether pack law should demand a full trial for every accusation or only in the case of serious ones. Looking back on that conversation, it seemed to him as though the universe were rehearsing a joke it had not yet decided to tell him. She dozed off in the middle of a sentence with her head on his chest. He then thought to himself, with a clarity that still caught him unaw

It took eleven days.For eleven days the rest of the Halloway delegation filled the pack house with strangers, which made it easier for Selene to go through the rooms she had used to run around in without anyone giving her a second look. There were eleven days' worth of trade talks during the day and another activity after dinner, something that neither of them ever named aloud. Kaelan always found excuses to walk down the same corridor that she was walking down. The excuses were always sensible, even though he knew, beneath the sense of reason, that they weren't true.He told himself that it was due to his diligence. Since an Alpha stays near any thing that might endanger his pack and as this woman had no scent record and her eyes didn't match anyone already known, she had to be regarded as a threat until she was proven not to be. That was the form of the lie which he constructed for himself every morning, and it remained intact until the evenings, when it began to fall apart at the

She saw him three more times during that week before he in fact saw her. There was one time in the corridor outside the training yard, racing along because he was late for his shift as he always seemed to be, with a coil of rope slung over one shoulder and mud on his boots. There was another time when he was crossing the dining hall, laughing at something a friend had said, the kind of free laugh that Wren had remembered from when he was twelve and had not yet learned how to keep it, before the world had taught him which laughs it was safe to let out in front of people. And there was one instance at the edge of the sparring ring, arms crossed, watching a pair of Betas go through their footwork with the flat, critical look of someone who used to be one of them and wasn't entirely sure anymore where he stood. He was taller than she remembered, broader in the shoulders, and had a scar along his jaw which hadn't been there three years before; the scar was thin and pale, the sort that r

On that wet Tuesday the other members of the Halloway delegation arrived, consisting of twelve people in total, together with their wagons and guards and a large amount of luggage, all of which indicated that Toren Halloway intended this trade agreement to be more important than he had suggested when he first mentioned it. They arrived along the long drive in a single file, their cloaks damp from the rain, the horses breathing out steam in the cold air, and the household gathered together in the special formal manner that is kept for guests whose goodwill is important. Selene stood by the front steps alongside Kaelan, carrying out her role, and as the waggons came in she felt a growing knot in her stomach even though it had nothing to do with the weather. The leader was a man of broad stature and easy manner called Garrick, and he received Selene as if she were an old colleague even though they had only met on two previous occasions, both of which had been short ones and both of whi