All Chapters of The Luna They Burned: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Selene didn't send the letter until it had gone through three drafts, and even in the third draft she still felt as if she had said both too much and not nearly enough at the same time.She composed it using Moira's old cypher, a substitution system built on ordinary trade language so that any person who intercepted it would see it as no more than a merchant's normal inquiry concerning the price of dyed wool that season; yet the actual message underneath the reference to the wool and the shipping terms was direct a way that she had never before managed to be with Moira.You said that the bond had been cut. It hasn't. He felt it the first moment that his hand closed around my wrist, and it has never stopped since. I would like to find out what you actually did to me and why, and what this debt really demands, since I no longer think that the account you gave me three years ago contains the entire truth. I am no longer willing to regard silence as an answer.The next morning she sent it

Fenn first told another guard, a older wolf called Orin who had for nearly ten years worked at the northern gate with him. He brought it to Orin's attention the way men do when referring to small, persistent matters that don't quite amount to a full report, being somewhere between a complaint and a real mystery; he wanted someone else to listen with him in order to work it through.He said that the Halloway woman moved as if she knew all the paths around the property, leaning against the gatepost during a quiet part of the evening shift. The day before, he saw her walk across towards the eastern orchard, not taking the main path but instead going through the shortcut between the hedge rows—a route that most people don't even know exists unless they've grown up using it. She didn't stop to think at all; she didn't look round to make sure of the way and just walked it as if her feet already did.Orin thought the same thing, just as older guards do when, after spending many years at the

The list had been written by her the night following the final time that Moira had pulled her out of the cellar, and the names were in an order which she had told herself was fair—and in fact, if she was honest with herself even at this moment—was almost entirely based on the amount of suffering each name appeared to have deserved before it finally happened to them.Kaelan's name was at the top, the ink having been pressed so firmly that it had almost torn the page. Then came Delphine. Below her were the two Betas whose evidence had brought about her conviction in less than two days. At the bottom was a name which she had included almost by accident during those early, furious months, before she had realised just how entangled the entire conspiracy really was.Corin.It was he who had told her all those years before, singing a tuneless song as she was folding linens, that Iris was dead and that it was his own blade which was to blame. He had looked her str

That evening the negotiations went on well past their normal time because of a dispute about shipping tariffs which it took three full hours to resolve to an arrangement that was acceptable to both sides. When it had at last come to an end the household had grown quiet around them and the majority of the delegation had gone to bed. The corridors were dark and deserted in the particular manner in which they only assume that state once all the evening's business had properly been concluded.When Kaelan saw Selene still at the table, collecting her papers with the slow and deliberate actions of a person who wasn't in any rush to be somewhere else, he offered, without giving it much thought, to walk her back towards the west wing.She agreed, which came as a small surprise to both of them. As they proceeded through the darkened receiving hall and into the garden by the longer route rather than taking the direct corridor, neither of them remarked on the path they had chosen. Ye

The news got to the pack house on a grey morning by means of a rider who had ridden a long way from the eastern holdings. By midday, it had spread through all the corridors of the house just as news of that sort always does, faster than anyone could contain it.A trial witness had left.Selene first learned of it from a whispering exchange between a servant in the corridor outside the library, only half hearing it and having to put the fragments together, and immediately her stomach sank before she had even checked the name. It took her nearly an hour to find out, through careful movement around the house and by listening rather than asking, that the missing man was a Beta named Torvin, one of the two who had testified three years earlier that they had seen Wren near the garden the morning Iris died.He hadn't just left; his cottage, situated on the eastern part of the territory, was found to be empty, with his possessions mostly left undisturbed, no sign of a fight, no note, and noth