Reborn Luna Hears Every Lie novel · Chapter 9 of 40

Chapter 9: The Challenge Under Oath

Fen set the tube on the council table and stepped back, and Kael said, 'She will answer it in person,' before Sera had agreed to anything.

The head scribe broke the grey wax with a thumbnail. Four council members sat along the curved bench, and the room was small enough that Sera could hear the paper unfold.

She kept her hands folded in her lap. She let her shoulders sit low. To anyone watching, she was a woman who had been dragged here before breakfast and had not slept, which was true, and which they would read as fear, which was useful.

'Lirien of the founding house,' the scribe read, 'petitions the council to recognize a challenge against the unborn issue carried by Sera of no registered line.'

Dov, seated at the end of the bench, wrote nothing. She had agreed to that before they came in. A neutral midwife who took notes in a council hearing looked like a party to the case.

'Grounds,' the scribe went on. 'The petitioner asserts that the respondent withdrew from the pack voluntarily, forfeited her candidacy, and now carries children whose paternity and lineage cannot be established under pack law.'

Kael's jaw worked once. He said nothing yet, because there was nothing to answer yet, and Sera watched him know it.

'Respondent,' the scribe said, and looked at her over the paper. 'Do you understand the charge?'

Sera let the question sit. She turned her head slightly, the way a person does when they are trying to follow a language they only half speak, and she said, 'I understand the words. I do not understand what she is asking the council to do.'

One of the council members, an older woman with a pinched mouth, leaned forward. 'She is asking us to determine the standing of the children.'

'Their standing,' Sera repeated, slowly, as if turning it over. 'And their custody?'

The pinched-mouth woman glanced at the scribe. The scribe found the line in the petition. 'The petitioner requests that, pending determination, the issue be placed under the guardianship of the pack, with the Alpha as named guardian, the respondent to be recognized as temporary carrier only.'

There it was.

Sera heard the words and let them land in the room the way they deserved to, and she did not move, and she did not look at Kael, because looking at him now would be a question and she was not going to ask it. She was going to make him answer it in front of four council members and a scribe with a wet pen.

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