Chapter 16: The Moon Court Wakes

Linnea's POV

I saw him standing in the road with a hundred strangers behind him, and I did not slow my horse.

I rode straight at Evander Kray.

He did not step aside.

I pulled up so close that the grey's breath ruffled his hair.

There was a cut on his cheek, and his shirt was torn, and his feet were bare and bleeding.

"I said no coat," I said. "I didn't say no boots."

"I lost them on the second night."

The wagon rolled up behind me, and I jumped down.

"Where's the spring?"

"Under the keep," said an old woman with silver eyes, leaning on a staff.

She looked at me, and her face worked.

"Child. Lift her. Quickly."

Evander was already at the back of the wagon.

He took my mother in his arms, and the old woman led us up the black gate road.

The spring lay in a vault under the burned keep, a round pool of water so clear it showed no bottom.

Silver light moved in it.

We laid my mother in it up to her chin.

The green went out of her skin in long threads and dissolved in the water.

Her eyes opened, and she looked at the vaulted roof, and then at me.

"There you are," she said.

I put my face in her wet hair and cried.

When I came up the vault was full.

The survivors of the Moon Court stood along the walls, hundreds of them, ragged and thin and silver-eyed.

The old woman's staff struck the stone.

"The Queen lives," she said. "And her daughter has come home."

They knelt.

It was not the Voice.

I had said nothing.

They went down by themselves, one after another, until the whole vault was bowed to me.

"Stand up," I said, and my voice broke. "Please. I'm nobody yet. I grew up in a kitchen."

"You grew up under iron and your cuffs split open on your own mother's note," the old woman said. "That's not nobody."

She opened her fist.

A heavy gold ring lay in it, stamped with a wolf.

"He gave it to us," she said. "The Kray. Forty riders at Dunmoor will ride away on his word. He's signing the Moon lands back tonight."

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