Novels by Didi's Pen

Lyra's POVThe morning after Gareth walked in with that satchel, Blackthorne moved forward the way it always did.I let it.There were things on my table by breakfast. A note from one of the outer families about a border predator that had taken two of their goats. A question from the eastern quarters about a disagreement over shared storage space going into winter. A request from a packmate I had never spoken to, asking if someone could check whether the winter store allocation was being distributed fairly.None of it had been formally directed to me.It had simply arrived.I worked through each one before midday. The border predator issue I passed to Gareth with a note about which patrol route ran closest to that family's land. The storage dispute I handled myself. I walked to the eastern quarters, listened to both sides, and found a middle arrangement that neither party loved enough to keep arguing about. The store allocation question I brought to Gretel, who already had the numbers

Lyra's POVSix people were already seated when I walked into the council room.Nobody stood. Nobody smiled.I took the empty chair near the middle of the table, not the head or the far end, and folded my hands in front of me. The room smelled like old wood and candle wax. Maps were pinned to the wall behind the grey-haired man at the far end. Someone had left a cold cup of tea near the window.It felt like a room that had been having the same conversations for years.I was going to have to be careful about how I entered those conversations.The meeting opened without introduction or acknowledgment of my presence, which told me more than a formal welcome would have. These were people who had been running this pack's internal matters long before a Luna arrived, and they were going to continue running them the same way until I gave them a reason to think differently.I was fine with that.I wasn't here to announce myself. I was here to listen.The first item was eastern boundary maintena

Lyra's POVI found him in the corridor outside his study.He was alone, which was unusual at this hour; normally there was at least one of his wolves nearby, or Gareth with something requiring attention. Tonight the corridor was quiet, and he was standing at the window at the far end of it, looking out at the dark grounds below with the particular stillness of someone whose thoughts were somewhere they hadn't finished with yet.He heard me coming and turned."The hand," I said when I reached him. "At dinner. You said it was a necessary signal.""It was," he said.I looked at him. "Was it?"The corridor was very quiet.He held my gaze for a moment, and I watched something move behind his eyes, the specific quality of a man looking at a question he has already looked at and has not yet decided what to do with.He didn't answer.I let it go. Not because I believed the explanation; we both knew the explanation was technically true and substantially incomplete, the same way because the que

Lyra's POVThey arrived at noon.I heard the horses first—more of them than the messenger had suggested, which told me that Isolde had decided at some point between sending word and crossing the border that this visit warranted a larger show of presence than she had originally indicated. That was probably deliberate. Most things Isolde did were deliberate.I was standing in the main entrance hall with Kael when they came through the gates.Isolde descended from her carriage with the unhurried grace of a woman who had never in her life needed to rush toward anything because things had always arranged themselves to wait for her. She looked exactly as she always looked—composed, elegant, warmly purposeful, the expression of someone arriving somewhere she had every right to be.Ronan came after her.He looked different from the ceremony hall. The composed certainty he had carried on that dais was still there, but something underneath it had shifted—a restlessness in the way he held himsel

Lyra's POVI sat at the writing desk in my room with the letter for a long time before I opened it.Not because I was afraid of what it said. More because once I read it, I couldn't unread it, and right now the envelope was still just an object. The moment I broke the seal, it became something I had to decide how to feel about.Then I opened it.Elara's handwriting was the same as it had always been: precise, slightly slanted to the right, the handwriting of someone who had been drilled in penmanship and taken it seriously.She had written two pages.The letter did not begin with an apology.It began with, "I don't expect you to want to hear from me. I wrote anyway because I think you deserve to know the truth of it, even if you choose to do nothing with what I tell you." I read that twice before I kept going.She told me about Queen Isolde. Not the version of Isolde that existed in public, composed, queenly, and politically immaculate, but the version that had come to Elara privatel

Lyra's POVHe came to find me the next day.That was the first unusual thing. In the two weeks I had been at Blackthorne, Kael had never sought me out before midday. Our interactions happened at meals or in passing, or when I went looking for him with something specific to say. He did not come to me.He knocked on the door of my chambers at the hour after breakfast, and when I opened it, he was already moving."Walk with me," he said.It wasn't a question, but it wasn't quite a command either. It was the tone he used when something needed to be discussed and he had already decided where.I followed him.He took me to the small study off the west corridor, not his main study, the one he used for official work, but a smaller room with two chairs and a low table and a window that looked out over the inner courtyard. The kind of room that said this was a conversation, not a briefing.He closed the door and remained standing."Queen Isolde is coming to Blackthorne," he said.I looked at hi