Reborn Luna Hears Every Lie novel · Chapter 15 of 40

Chapter 15: The Carrier Claim Breaks

Lirien stood at the petitioner's mark with her olive cardigan buttoned to the throat, glasses pushed up her nose, and she was already talking before the head scribe had finished arranging his pages. Sera sat in the low chair across from the bench and kept her hands in her lap. She let her shoulders drop the way a woman sits when her body has decided the argument is already lost.

Kael set his journal on the table beside her chair, open to the page where he had written the hour he signed the rejection, and told the scribe he would answer every question about the bond night himself.

The scribe's pen stopped. Four council members sat along the curved bench with their hands folded, and the one at the center, an old woman named Eln with a chipped slate token pinned to her collar, looked at Kael the way a person looks at a door that has opened on its own.

'Alpha,' she said. 'You were not summoned.'

'I'm here anyway.'

Lirien pushed her glasses up again and smiled at the bench. 'I filed the carrier statement. I'll speak to it.'

Sera let her breath come short. She let the scribe see her swallow. Lirien watched her do it and relaxed by a fraction of an inch.

'The statement is simple,' Lirien said, and her voice came out soft and reasonable, the voice she used for reading aloud in the library. 'The twins are the Alpha's issue, conceived on the bond night. The mother's line is under challenge and unresolved. Until the challenge is heard, the children's standing belongs to the Alpha's house. I ask the panel to name the Alpha's house as custodian at birth.'

'You're asking us to take children from their mother,' Eln said.

'I'm asking us to protect them.' Lirien folded her hands. 'She may be a temporary carrier only. We don't know yet. That's what the challenge is for.'

Sera heard the room before she answered it. Under the spoken words, thin as wire, the amber shimmer gathered at the edges of every head on the bench, and the thoughts bled through in a second voice, low and overlapping.

Eln's: She filed the challenge the day before she filed this. Why would a woman who wants to protect a pregnancy rush the hearing?

The scribe's: The register entry was dated three days ago. I logged it myself.

Lirien's, bright and quick and cold: Say carrier again. Keep saying carrier. It's the only word that makes them hers to move.

Sera held still and let the words land, and she did not look at Lirien when she finally spoke.

'I have one question,' she said. Her voice came out thin, and she let it. 'The petitioner keeps calling me a carrier. I'd like the scribe to read the exact phrase from her filing.'

The scribe turned the pages. 'Temporary carrier only,' he read. 'With the children surrendered to the Alpha's house at birth.'

'Thank you.' Sera let the silence sit one beat, two. Then she straightened in her chair, and the thinness went out of her voice, and the room felt it go. 'Then I'd like the same scribe to read the entry the petitioner signed in the founding register three days ago.'

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