Moon Burning - By Lucy Monroe Page 0,77

training.

She had lost so much, first her parents and then, by her own volition, the rest of her family as she left them to join warriors who had never managed to take the place of the others.

Now, she was giving Barr up and her heart screamed against the injustice. A true mate bond should never be abandoned. But she felt no more choice than she had the day she’d taken her vow as protector of the Éan.

Everything inside her contracted with an emotional agony she’d hoped never to feel again.

Since making her connection with Barr, she missed her family with a painful nostalgia she had thought long buried.

Memories she’d tried so hard to push so deep they would never see light again rose to the surface, choking her with old emotion that mixed with the new. Her mother teaching her the healing chants even as she sang Sabrine into sleep at night. Her father holding her brother high in the air to introduce the future prince among their people when the baby boy was born. Her brother’s first steps, not to their mother, but to Sabrine.

She had been his favorite and she had abandoned him.

The inescapable torture that knowledge brought to her soul knocked the breath from her bird’s body. She nearly fell off the branch, but she managed to stay perched as more memories choked her.

Her mother’s stories of the time before the Faol turned on their brethren, the Éan. The sound of her mother’s laughter, her father’s voice as he spoke the Chrechte words of ritual in his role as king of their people.

The look on her aunt’s face when Sabrine insisted on joining the warriors for training, denouncing her role as princess. Leaving her family to deal with their grief as she managed her own the only way she knew how to.

Wetness from her eyes rolled onto her feathers, but she ignored it.

Princesses did not cry. Warriors did not show weakness.

The sound of a wolf scratching at the bottom of the tree she was in yanked her attention from the past to the present with a harsh jerk.

The wolf’s pelt was a reddish brown she did not recognize; fear’s metallic taste filled her mouth. She could not fly and she had no weapons with which to defend herself. She went absolutely still as the wolf’s head came up and sniffed the air.

He snarled and barked. Though she knew he could not see her through the foliage, she did not doubt those sounds were directed at her.

He turned and loped away, then spun on his paws and took a running leap at the tree, landing high up the trunk. His claws dug into the bark and he began to climb.

Sabrine’s heart stilled in her chest. She knew some of her enemy had taught themselves to climb in their wolf form to better get at the Éan. She had been warned by the older warriors, but she had yet to meet one herself.

She did the only thing she could: she herself climbed higher by hopping from branch to branch, hoping she could reach a height where the wolf’s bigger body could not follow.

Without warning, a giant blond wolf came flying, his leaping body so high in the air he was able to knock the reddish brown wolf from the tree. The reddish brown wolf crashed clumsily to the ground, but the blond wolf landed smoothly on all fours. The other wolf turned and bared his fangs.

The blond wolf leapt. He clamped his jaws on the other wolf’s neck and picked it up, an adult carrying a cub, but there the similarity ended. He sent the smaller wolf hurtling toward another tree.

The reddish brown wolf hit the tree with a thud. He yelped, landed and did not move again.

The blond wolf shimmered and then Barr’s double stood there naked at the bottom of the tree. His scent was like Barr’s but just off enough she could not mistake it.

“Come down, mate of my brother. It is time we met.”

She was so shocked, she shifted without thought and then for the first time in memory, she fell off the branch she’d been perched on. She fell, but her reflexes took over and she grabbed the next branch, landing with a jar to her shoulders. She cried out in pain as her injured arm was strained, but she clung to the branch with her good hand and carefully felt with her feet for purchase on a limb below her. She found it