บททั้งหมดของ Rejected Under the Blood Moon: The Alpha's Regret: บทที่ 51 - บทที่ 60

SERAPHINAI saw his hands first.Everyone else was looking at Torvald's face, at the smile and the white beard and the arms spread wide in welcome. I was looking at his hands, because the dark had come up in me the moment we crossed the last ridge and it hadn't gone back down, and in that sharp silver seeing every small thing stood out like a cut.They were shaking. They shook the way your hands shake when you're holding something very heavy and very hot and you've been told not to drop it.Ronan went down the road to meet him, and the old steward put his arms round him like a grandfather, there in front of the whole cheering town, and held on.I was close enough to hear what he said into Ronan's shoulder. I don't think anyone else was."Forty of them. In the tower. They have her at the top." His voice was a thread. "If anyone climbs past the hundredth step, she goes over the edge. They washed me so you wouldn't smell how frighte

RONANI counted the steps with her.When Seraphina went through the tower door and started up, I sat in my chair and smiled at my people and ate bread I couldn't taste, and inside my head I climbed every one of those four hundred steps beside her.At the hundredth I felt the weight begin. At two hundred and fifty I felt it hit her, and I held the thread open the way she'd taught us on the steps at Fenholt, and gave, and kept giving, and felt Kael doing the same at the far end of the hall with his cup going cold in his hand.At three hundred and ninety-nine I felt her stop.Then, somewhere far above us, it was as if a door had slammed open onto winter. The thread blazed. And the weight was gone.I was out of my chair before I'd decided anything.***There were twenty of them at the foot of the stair. Men and women in plain grey with no smell, who'd been standing guard over my tower in my colours for a week while

CASSIASigrun signed the Stone Treaty with her own name, in full, in front of twenty-three Alphas, and she pressed so hard with the pen that it went through the parchment.I was there. Hild let me stand at the back by the Ashmark door, and I watched the King's cousin walk out into the middle of that round stone floor with her chin up and her hair scraped back, pick up the pen, and write SIGRUN THORNE, OF SKARHOLT, HEIR OF THE NORTHERN REACH in letters so big you could have read them from the gallery.Then she held the pen out to Oswin.He witnessed it. And before anybody could leave, he stood up in front of the Saltmere door with his fisherman's cap in his hands and said there was one more thing, and he'd like it written into the treaty while they still had the ink out."No wolf on either side of the river," he said, "shall be put outside pack law for her blood. Only for what she does."Nobody argued. I think they were all too ti

KAELSeraphina marked eleven of them on the map before Ronan made her stop.Eleven small black dots, inked in Ronan's square hand wherever her finger came to rest. She'd found more than that. She'd found dozens. But every time she went back into the dark to look, she came out a little greyer, and her nose bled, and after the eleventh Ilse put a hand on her shoulder and said, "Enough," in a voice even Seraphina didn't argue with.Two of the dots had a line through them. The first two. The ones that had gone out while she watched.I stood over the map for a long time after the others had gone to see to the horses.Both of the dead ones were in the north-east. Not close together, a good day's ride apart. But both of them east of Skarholt, out past the high moors, where the map went pale and the names got further apart.Maren used to tidy the elders' table after every meeting. She'd start at the end nearest her own chair and work outwards, one cup at a time, one paper at a time, so neatly

RONANShe stopped so suddenly in the heather that I nearly ran her down.One moment she was running at my shoulder in the grey half-light, small and dark and fast, and the next she was standing stock-still on two legs in the snow, her eyes black and her face turned south, listening to something none of the rest of us could hear.Kael pulled up on her other side. Ilse and my six came back in a loose ring and shifted, one by one, and stood there steaming in the cold."Sorcha," Seraphina said. Her voice was very flat. "She says the house is a lantern."She told us. Sunstone in the mortar. In every wall and floor and beam. A house built a hundred years ago for one purpose: to keep her kind alive and helpless inside it.Nobody said anything for a while. The wind came over the moor and moved the heather."Then you don't go in," said Kael."Then nobody goes in," said Seraphina. "Not until we know what's in there.""Liv's going in," I said. "Tonight, if Per's right." I looked east, where the