Cast Out by My Mate, Crowned by the Moon

Chapter 12 – Lessons in Moving Forward

Vela woke me at dawn by tossing a rolled-up shirt at my face.

“Up, Luna,” she barked. “We’re fixing that limp before it becomes your personality.”

I pushed the cloth away, squinting at her through sleep-blurred eyes. “Do you practice being this charming, or is it instinctive?”

“Natural talent,” she said. “On your feet.”

My leg protested, but it held. The scar tugged when I straightened, a tight, almost-itch instead of the deep throb from before. Progress.

The camp was just shaking off sleep. Smoke from the first fires curled lazy and blue. Rian chased Lysa around a stack of logs, both of them giggling and ignoring Orric’s shouted warnings about “small skulls and large kindling.”

Vela led me to the edge of the clearing where the packed dirt gave way to leaf mold.

“We’re not sparring,” she said. “Not yet. Today you remember how to move without bracing for pain every time you put that foot down.”

“I’m not bracing,” I lied.

She arched a brow. “Your shoulders disagree.”

She made me walk.

Back and forth along an invisible line between two trees, eyes up, shoulders loose. Step, plant, roll, lift. Over and over until the rhythm became something like a dance and the initial stab settled into a background growl.

“Good,” she said eventually, circling me like a hawk. “Now turns.”

“Turns,” I repeated flatly.

“Unless you plan to only ever run away from things in straight lines,” she said. “Which, judging by recent history, is unlikely.”

She had me pivot on the injured leg, first slow, then faster, changing direction mid-step. The scar pulled, complained, but it didn’t buckle. My body remembered more than my fear wanted to admit.

After the tenth wobbling half-circle, sweat slicked my back and my temper frayed.

“You know,” I panted, “for someone allegedly on my side, you take a suspicious amount of pleasure in my suffering.”

Vela’s teeth flashed. “It’s not suffering. It’s investment. I don’t like my Luna falling over if she has to run toward something nasty.”

The word my landed with the same odd weight Luna still carried—neither possessive nor worshipful, just… included.

“And if I’d said no to Sorren yesterday?” I asked before I could stop myself. “If I’d gone with Varyn?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “Then I’d be training someone else this morning.” A shrug. “But you didn’t.”

“That easy?” I pressed. “You wouldn’t have been—”

“Angry? Hurt? Betrayed?” Her gaze met mine, level. “Of course. But your choices don’t cancel what you already did for us. They just… change the story.”

My throat tightened. “You’ve all spent a lot of time thinking about my hypothetical bad decisions.”

“We live with teeth at our border,” she said. “We make contingency plans. Doesn’t mean we don’t hope they rot useless in a drawer.”

A shadow broke off from the treeline. Nyssa trotted up, hair in disarray, cheeks flushed from the morning scout.

“Borders quiet,” she reported. “Blackclaw pulled their patrols back like they promised. No weird symbols, no Maelor fan club, no mysterious strangers begging to breathe Liora’s air.”

“Thank the Moon,” I muttered. “My air’s busy.”

Nyssa grinned. “I did find tracks from a band of loners near the south ridge. Smelled like trouble, but they veered away when they hit our markers. Word’s getting around.”

“That Wildcrest is a place you don’t poke?” Vela said.

“That Wildcrest is where the wild Luna lives,” Nyssa corrected, eyes dancing. “Apparently that spooks some of the bolder idiots.”

My cheeks warmed. “I am not a campfire ghost story.”

“Tell that to the pups,” Nyssa said. “They’ve started daring each other to go whisper to your hut wall at night.”

“I will haunt them if they wake me,” I said darkly.

Vela clapped her hands once. “All right, enough gossip. Liora, we’re adding uneven ground.”

She steered me toward a patch of forest floor crisscrossed with roots and rocks. My stomach tightened. This was where, once upon a time, a misstep could have meant disaster on patrol.

Now, every careful stride was a quiet defiance of the part of me that still expected to fail.

“Eyes forward,” Vela said. “Trust your feet.”

Easy for her to say.

But I did it.

Step, plant, roll. Roots under my boot, moss slick, the give of damp soil. My leg shook, but it held. When I stumbled, I caught myself without that terrifying, empty sensation of a limb that wouldn’t answer.

Halfway through the exercise, a small body barreled into my side. I grabbed for the walking stick, heart lurching—

Tiny hands clung to my hip.

“Sorry!” Lysa chirped, breathless. “Vela, tell Rian he can’t hide behind you, that’s cheating.”

Vela glared down at the girl latched to me like a limpet. “And you think tackling Liora isn’t?”

Lysa blinked up at me. “You didn’t fall.”

The simple pride in her voice punched through my annoyance.

“No,” I said, a little breathless for reasons that had nothing to do with muscle fatigue. “No, I didn’t.”

Rian crashed out of the underbrush a moment later, leaves in his hair. “I wasn’t hiding, I was tactically—”

“If you say ‘retreating,’ I’m making you run laps,” Vela said.

He shut his mouth.

“The point,” I said, leaning more on the stick than I wanted to, “is that everyone here seems very invested in my verticality.”

Nyssa snorted. “We’re fond of you. It’s annoying.”

“Deeply,” Vela agreed.

They drifted back toward camp, towing bickering children with them. I stayed where I was for a moment, listening to the echo of their voices, the forest’s quiet, the steady drum of my own heart.

Feet in the dirt. Pack at my back. Future not yet written.

I took one more deliberate step over a tangle of roots without looking down.

My leg held.

So did everything else.