When the Moon Hatched (Moonfall, #1)

by Sarah A. Parker

“Awful trusting of you.” “I trust my folk, and I’m eighty percent certain you won’t kill me now that I’ve saved your life twice.” I open my eyes, smile gone as I look into his intense ember orbs. “Depends.” “On?” I grip hold of my mead and drag it close to my chest. “Your kingdom may be lush and full of smiling, happy folk, but I doubt you’ve experienced life under your brother’s reign. Are you complicit in the way he snatches children from their mahs at the tender age of nine?” I ask, cocking my head to the side. All the color seeps from his eyes, leaving cold, sooty coals. “A whisper of power and they’re immediately snatched from screaming parents and replaced with a bucket of bloodstone. Conscribed. Carted off to Drelgad where they learn how to speak murdering words, practicing on small, fluffy creatures. Ripping out that delicate part of a youngling’s heart that can never be replaced—turning them into true, tortured monsters.” “Raeve—” “Did you know,” I say, gesturing to the hole I sliced into the shell of my own ear, “that younglings confirmed as a null are held down and clipped? That this becomes a marker for vulturous folk who target them, coaxing them into Undercity battle pits with vacant promises of enough bloodstone to feed their families. Discounted folk otherwise forced to live in the Undercity. Where the air is too thick. Where there is no sun, and every slumber is a gamble on whether or not this is the time that you get woken—immobilized by a hushling squatt...