Chosen by the Moon, Claimed by Him

Chapter 12: The Trial of the Moon Goddess

They weren't careful enough.

Or perhaps there was no way to have been careful enough—perhaps the moment she'd touched the obelisk, the moment the bond had formed and deepened and become what it was, the ending had already been written.

The Elder Council moved at dawn.

She had thirty seconds of warning—the feeling of the guards before she heard them, the sharp organizational alertness of men following orders. She had time to hide nothing, confirm nothing, warn no one.

Lex was taken from his chambers. She was taken from hers.

The trial was not a trial. A trial implies uncertainty. What the Council held was a recitation—evidence laid out with the satisfaction of people who have been waiting for exactly this. The dreams had been monitored; she learned this while sitting in an iron chair with her hands bound in silver-threaded rope that made the Moonheart energy hum wrong inside her. Letters between her and Lex—she'd written two, had given them to a servant she'd trusted incorrectly. The first kiss in the east corridor, witnessed by a guard she hadn't sensed.

Through it all, she felt Lex across the room. The cold fury. The guilt—not for what they'd done, but for what it was costing her.

The verdict came from Elder Caelan's mouth without inflection: heresy. Corruption of the sacred. Death.

She looked at Lex.

He looked back at her with an expression she'd never seen on him before—something past calm, past controlled. The face of a man who has made a decision.

They were separated before she could speak to him. The guards moved with efficient kindness, which was worse somehow than cruelty would have been.

Her cell had a stone wall at the back.

She sat with her spine against it in the dark, listening to the silence on the other side, and after a long time she heard—so faint she might have imagined it—the first notes of a song.

Her mother's song.

Her breath caught.

She pressed her back harder against the stone and began to sing.

Two voices, separated by twelve inches of rock and everything else—the law, the prophecy, the weight of forty thousand lives—meeting in the dark. She couldn't see him. She didn't know if he could hear her clearly. But she felt him through the bond, the steadiness of him, the message transmitted not in words but in the simple fact of the melody continuing.

I'm here. I'm still here. I'm not leaving you.

She sang until her voice gave out and the guards came at dawn.