THE SEQUEL TO 'LUNA OF ROGUES.'
Last Haven is scattered to the wind. It has been nineteen years since the castle burned - nineteen years of bitter warfare - and rogues are a dying breed. Defeat is starting to look inevitable.
Every rogue has a choic...
Hey folks! We have got two more chapters and then an epilogue, and we're ... well, we're done after that. Pretty weird concept. If you've been here for the entire three years I've been writing it, props to you. It won't be our last adventure in this world, but it will be the last with these characters :(
LittleLoneWriterGirl drew the beautiful thing down below, so be sure to stop and appreciate it.
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Trigger warning for domestic abuse + references to sexual assault.
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"Our pack members are throwing massive tantrums at the idea of fighting alongside rogues," I said. "They might not keep the peace. So can we make sure that they don't come anywhere near the raiders? Like, not within a mile, preferably."
Mam shook her head at me, looking faintly amused. "Nia's leading the attack. Not me. Talk to her."
I made a face. "Would if I could find her. And um, why is she leading it? Are you ill? Are you dying?"
We were standing in a patch of light woodland, half a mile from Lowland's border. The rogues had sat out of the roadside ambush because they hadn't really been needed. But we would need them to draw the Lowland fighters out of their pack house and away from all their rifles. And that meant we had to be very, very careful. 'Allies' or not, the pack wolves would probably slaughter them on sight.
"Nia's going to be doing most of the leading from now on," Mam said. She was in the process of sharpening her knife, and the rasping sounds made me wonder if I'd heard her correctly.
"Are you ill? Are you dying?" I repeated.
"No, Eva. I'm perfectly healthy," she laughed. "But hopefully, what comes after this is a peace of some kind. And I think it's painfully obvious that those men will not make peace with me. Nia's grown up. She's sensible. And she's got good people skills, unlike me."
"She's still a rogue."
Mam smiled at that. "She's a rogue who overthrew me and killed me because she was sick of my cruelty. That's what we'll tell the flockies. We'll frame her as a better kind of rogue. And then we'll hope it's enough for them."
I doubted it, somehow. But it was worth a try. A lot of the flockies were old enough to remember a time when raids had rarely ended in deaths. Even if I wasn't. We'd had nineteen years of constant escalation. It was hard to see how it could escalate any further now, since the flockies were already committing genocide at every chance they got and we scarcely had the resources to raid them anymore.
"What'll you do? If Nia takes over?" I asked her.
"Help her, at first," Mam said, like it was obvious. "And then keep my head down and let her get on with it. She'll do fine. The raiders already love her."
