The Luna He Failed to Protect novel · Chapter 9 of 32

Chapter 9: Off the Land

The mother's kitchen was very clean.

Everything in it had been put away a long time ago and never taken out again.

She made me sit at the table, and went into the back room, and came back with a tin box that had held biscuits once.

Inside were five envelopes tied with a hair ribbon.

"She wrote me every week the first month," the mother said. "Then nothing. Then they brought her home."

"How did these get out?" I asked. "He reads all the mail."

"A boy from the river farms got his leg torn up and was sent home to heal. She put them in his boot." The mother sat down across from me. "He came to my door with his crutch and handed them over and went away. He's dead now too. Drowned, the spring after."

I untied the ribbon.

I read them in order.

The first was all homesick nonsense about the food and the cold.

It mentioned a funny tall sergeant with a red braid who'd given her the bunk under the hole in the roof.

I had to stop reading for a second after that.

The second said the commander had called her to his quarters.

The third and fourth said what happened there, in a girl's careful handwriting, without the words for it.

The fifth said: Mama, please make them bring me home. Please ask the Luna. She's his sister. She can make him stop.

I put the letters down.

"Did you ask her?"

The mother reached into the tin again.

There was one more envelope at the bottom, thick and pale blue, with the Luna's moon pressed in the corner.

"I went up to the Great House and begged on the steps," she said. "She sent me away. Then she sent me this."

I knew the handwriting from every birthday card I'd ever gotten in that house.

My brother keeps a firm garrison. Girls who make trouble at home make it on the Line as well.

She will learn to behave, or she won't. Don't come to my door again.

Morwenna Ravelston, Luna of Greyhollow.

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