If You Leave, I Leave novel · Chapter 8 of 24
Chapter 8: What the Unbinding Does
Corwin's POV
I chained myself to the desk again at midnight, with her sash still wrapped around my left wrist.
I had meant to take it off.
I had not been able to.
The silver cuffs sat on top of the cloth and burned through it slowly, and the smell of singed linen filled the study.
It was the only thing in the room that smelled of her.
I sat on the floor with my back against the leg of the desk and listened to the palace go quiet.
Four years ago, my father had sent me to a river gathering in Dunmere, to shake hands with a pack too poor to be worth anything.
I stood on the bank in good boots, bored, with no idea what I wanted.
A girl stood in the shallows, holding a lantern for an old ferryman.
She looked at my boots and said, "If you're getting in that boat, take them off. My father spent a month's wages on the planks."
Nobody had spoken to me like that in my life.
I took them off.
She laughed at me, once, with her whole face.
I went back to my father that night and asked for her by name.
He said yes, and he said it too easily.
There was a price, and I knew the price before he named it.
The Alpha King's heirs were bound at the crown rite to their wives, wolf to Luna, and the bond was called the Tether.
It made the heir's wolf steady and strong.
It also meant that if the Luna ever left, the wolf had nothing to hold it, and on the thirtieth night after the Unbinding, at the full moon, it went feral.
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