Luna Lola: The Moon Wolf novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Writ

Caelen's POV

Harlan came through Highmoor's gate at four in the morning on his hands and knees.

There was dried blood down the back of his neck, and he had walked three miles with a cracked skull.

I got to him first and held him up.

"They took her," he said. "Ashfall wolves. Eight, ten. Dane was on a litter."

"Where?"

"Where do you think?" He spat red. "It's the fourteenth, Cael."

I had told her I wouldn't follow her.

I stood in the courtyard with that promise in my mouth, and I set it down.

She had not left.

She had been taken, and I had never promised to leave her where she was taken.

"Get him to the infirmary," I told the guards.

"Caelen." Harlan caught my sleeve. "Ilsa's father moved his forty wolves out before midnight. They went east, on the Ashfall road."

"Then he's there too."

"Yes."

"Then I need more than forty."

The trouble was that the river is a border, and a border has a law.

No Crown wolf crosses the Black Fir under arms without a writ, and a writ takes a king's hand.

The heir's seal could not pass a writ across the river, and it sat in Maud's sleeve anyway, where I had told her to say no to me.

I wasn't going to ask her to say yes.

I went up the north stair instead, two steps at a time, to the room I hadn't entered willingly in ten years.

My father was propped on three pillows by a window that faced the mountains.

The silver sickness had taken most of him by then.

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