Novels by Leela Wrights

A hand shook my shoulder. I tried to ignore it thinking it was just my mind but it continued insistently. Then I realized someone was actually touching me.I jerked awake, my heart hammering. The room was dark, as the fire in the hearth had burnt out. A figure loomed over me, silhouetted against the dim glow of a single lit candle."You have to get up."I blinked, trying to focus. "Gertha, is that you?""Forgive me, my lady, but the Council... The Council requests your presence."I sat up, rubbing my eyes. "What time is it?""Dawn is still an hour or two away."I stared at her. "The sun has not even risen.""I know." Her voice was flat, unapologetic. "They want you there before the court gathers."I groaned and swung my legs over the side of the bed. The floor was eerily cold and a shiver escaped my lips at the unexpected change in temperature. "They could not have waited until a reasonable hour?"Gertha was already moving toward the wardrobe. "We have just a few minutes, my lady. No

"That's enough for today."My fingers tightened around the sword more. "I can keep going.""I know you can." He stepped closer. "But you don't need to prove anything right now."I looked at him. "What makes you think I want to prove something?"He did not answer.He reached out and took the sword from my hand, not holding my gaze. He looked at the blade in his hands, then at me."Same time tomorrow," he said.I nodded.He hesitated. I saw it – a small pause, like he was deciding whether to say something or not."Lucian didn't mean what he said," he finally said. "That night in the corridor. Whatever he told you – he did not mean it."I looked at him. "How do you know?""Because I know him." He said it like it cost him something. "He says things he does not mean when he's afraid.""What is he afraid of?"His jaw tightened. His eyes flickered away from mine."Same time," he said again. Then he turned and walked toward the racks of wooden swords, his back to me.I watched him go. The bond

The sword was heavier than I expected and its grip was worn smooth from use. I turned it over in my hand, testing the weight.I had never held one like this before; most definitely not with intention.I swung it. The motion was clumsy and unbalanced. The blade cut through the air with no precision, no purpose. I tried again, better this time but still wrong.I did not know why I was doing this. This was not in my schedule for the day, if I had one.I had been walking through the halls, restless, trying to outrun the silence in my room. But my feet had carried me past the gates, past the racks of wooden swords, past the straw dummies that had been stabbed and slashed a thousand times before.Luckily, the training yard was empty when I arrived.Maybe I wanted to feel capable. Maybe I wanted to feel like I could fight back against something. The Council. The fear that had been pressing on my chest since I arrived.I swung again repeatedly, and although my arm ached, I did not stop."You'r

He had not told anyone he was coming. He had not even told himself he would return. But the girl had lodged herself firmly in his mind, and he could not shake her loose and that unsettled him.The sage studied him with eyes that held no judgment. She had seen worse men than him sit in that chair. She had also seen better ones leave and never come back."You came back," she said. It was not a question."I did." He answered regardless.She leaned back, her fingers pattering softly against the wood of the table. "The spell is finished. The blood has spoken.""What does it say to us?"She did not answer immediately. She let the silence abide, let him feel the weight of what he was about to hear. Then she said, "She carries something that has not walked this earth in centuries. Something shifters do not behold often enough to be fully understood and it is buried."Obelix's hands curled on his knees. "Buried where?""In her blood. In her bones. In parts of her being and soul." She tilted he

The wheels turned and dust rose from the gravel. The carriage moved slowly at first, then faster, pulling away from the palace gates.I stood at the edge of the courtyard and watched it go.Pilar's face was in the window. She was not waving. She never waved. She just looked at me through the glass until the carriage turned and she was gone.I did not move.The courtyard was almost empty. I stood alone, except for Gertha's ever-persistent presence, the gravel crunching under my boots. I thought about the morning that had led up to this moment.~`~`~`~`~`~`|~`~`~`~`~`~`|~`~`~`~`~`~`Pilar had packed her bag before the sun was fully up. I had woken to the sound of fabric rustling, of her moving through the room."You're up," she said, not looking at me.I sat up. "You're leaving.""The Queen's carriage is already waiting. She does not like to be kept waiting. I don't need to be on her bad side."She patted her bag that lay on the floor.I swung my legs over the side of the bed. The floor

I turned, and there Elara stood at the edge of the balcony, her arms crossed, her grey eyes fixed on me. She had not moved closer. She did not need to. The question hung in the air between us, like she had all the time in the world.Pilar recovered first. "We were just—""Talking about my brother." Elara's voice was unnervingly calm. "I heard."She walked to the railing and stood beside us, looking down at the now almost empty training yards. Most of the warriors had gone, and the dust had begun to settle. The afternoon light was fading, casting long shadows across the stone.Pilar shot me a look. I ignored her.Elara did not speak for a while. She simply stood there, her raven hair moving in the breeze, her hands loose at her sides. She stood like she had been carved into the stone. Her stillness was majestic and unsettling at the same time; it made you aware of your own restlessness.I waited, calculating what would be her next action."My brother does not send me," she said finally

Naya had arranged her lunch into a battlefield. Apple slices were soldiers. The honey pot was a fortress. She was making small explosion sounds under her breath, too absorbed in her war to notice I hadn't eaten a bite."The carrots are dying bravely," I said."The carrots are traitors. They're fighting for the wrong side.""Which side is that?"She gave me a look that suggested I had asked something deeply stupid. "The side that loses."I pushed my plate away. The grey gown I'd worn to the funeral was draped over the chair, and I was back in the frayed dress from the dead zone, the one that still smelled faintly of Theron's herbs. I had not been able to bring myself to wash it. Grief made you hold onto stupid things.Naya's battle sounds faded. She had stopped moving, her hand suspended over an advancing carrot, her head tilted toward the window."Mommy."Something in her voice pulled me to my feet before I'd made the decision to stand."There's a bird," she said. "It's been there sinc

The guards at the Western wing stepped aside without meeting my eyes, as they always did.Lila followed me inside. I heard the exact moment she registered the bars on the windows. The gasp she let out was too loud to go unnoticed."Charming," she said flatly."It's temporary.""It's a prison cell with silk curtains." She ran a finger along the iron lattice, tracing the scrollwork that was meant to disguise its purpose, and her mouth tightened into an unimpressed line. "How long have you been locked in here?"I laid Naya on the big bed and pulled the covers to her chin. She was already gone, the exhaustion of the funeral dragging her under before her head touched the pillow. "Since the night we arrived.""And Zarek signed off on this.""Zarek has a council breathing down his neck and a woman in his bed who'd rather I didn't exist. His signature is not required."Lila dropped into the chair by the hearth with the gracelessness of someone who had stopped performing for anyone a long time

"Theron was my teacher," he said, and his voice was rough, surprisingly so. It was not the voice of an Alpha merely addressing his pack. "He was the first man who ever told me I was wrong. He was the first man who ever made me believe I could be right."I did not want to look at him. I looked at him anyway."I was young when he took me under his guidance. Arrogant. Reckless. I thought being Alpha meant being the strongest wolf in the room. Theron taught me that strength was not the same as wisdom. He taught me that a pack was not built on fear. He taught me that the hardest decisions were the ones that kept me awake at night, and if I ever stopped losing sleep over them, I had stopped being the Alpha my pack deserved.""I did not always follow his counsel. There were times I thought I knew better. Times I was wrong." His eyes never left mine. "I was wrong about many things."The words hung in the air between us. I did not move. I did not breathe.Cressida's head turned, just slightly.

"Theron was one of us."The elder's voice carried across the courtyard, thin and reedy, the voice of a man who had spoken at too many funerals and meant too few of his words.I stood to the left of the pyre with my daughter's hand clenched in mine and I thought about what those words were worth.One of us.As if they had not let him walk away. As if they had not spent years pretending he never existed while he tended his herbs and watched the stars alone in the dead zone. As if any of these wolves, with their bowed heads and their solemn faces, had ever truly known him at all.They knew the chief strategist.They knew the name inscribed on old war documents.They did not know the man who hummed off-key while he sorted his herbs, completely unaware he was doing it.They did not know the man who could not tell a joke to save his life, who always ruined the punchline by laughing before he reached it.They did not know the man who taught my daughter to read by firelight. They did not know

I had told her yes. I had told her he would be proud. Then I had tucked her into the big bed and waited for her breathing to slow.Now the fire had burned to embers and the room was dark yet sleep would not grace my eyes.I stood at the window with my palms pressed against the cold stone. The bars were still there, black iron against the night sky, but beyond them the stars were out.Thousands of them. Bright, beautiful and impossibly far away.Theron had loved the stars.I closed my eyes and I could see him. Not as he was at the end, grey and fading and coughing blood into a cloth. But as he was when Naya was still small enough to carry on my hip, when the dead zone still felt like sanctuary instead of exile.It had been one of those nights when sleep refused to come.Naya was maybe eighteen months old, teething and furious about it, and I had spent hours walking her in circles around the cottage while she screamed against my shoulder. When she finally exhausted herself into silence,

The door was unlocked.I discovered this by accident. I had pressed my palm against it while pacing, running through the letter's words for the hundredth time, and the latch gave way beneath the weight. The door swung inward an inch before I caught it.I stared at the gap.Last night, the bolt had been thrown. I had heard it slide home after Oreeka brought me back from Cressida's meeting. This morning, it was open.Probably a mistake by the guard who delivered breakfast. Or perhaps a test by Zarek.Or none of those things. Maybe I was too exhausted to think clearly. Maybe the guards had simply gotten careless.I told Naya I would return soon. I told her to lock herself in and not open the door for anyone, not even if they claimed to have cake. She rolled her eyes at that, which I chose to take as agreement. Then I slipped into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind me.~`~`~`~`~`~`|~`~`~`~`~`~`|~`~`~`~`~`~`The servant's passage was darker and longer than I remembered.I had trie