Page 18 of Marked By the Enemy
He was watching the fire now. “You whispered my name.”
“You weren’t invited.”
“The bond doesn’t care.”
“I don’t either.”
He smiled without showing his teeth. “Lie better.” He turned and left.
The link between us throbbed once in the silence that followed.
The summons came before breakfast as a single word on a slip of paper left on my tray: Empathy.
I knew what that meant before I returned to the chamber. The Moon Court of Vyrelen believed in three things: control, response, and vulnerability. The first two I could fake. The third was harder.
They led me into a chamber shaped like a shell cracked open and hollowed. The walls curved inward, smooth and seamless, like the inside of a pearl. Sound didn’t echo here. It sank. Every footstep, every breath, swallowed by the air, which shimmered faintly with a trace of magic that hung like mist waiting to be named.
At the far end, the council stood half-shadowed along the wall’s arc, like the first time, in cloaks that made them partially invisible. Darian was already in place behind a crescent-shaped stone table veined with silver. He glanced up when I entered. Barely a flick of his eyes. He focused on the center of the chamber again. That was where the real focus lay.
A low circle had been carved into the stone floor, etched in shifting bands of red and silver. A new tester stood nearby. Cloaked in grey, he cupped a glass orb in his hands, which gave off a fragrant smoke that smelled of melted cypress oil.The type of artifact I’d learned about in old rebel reports but never seen with my own eyes.
I paused near the threshold, curious and hiding my fear of the unknown.
“You will enter the bond,” the tester said.
“Already in it,” I muttered.
“You will deepen it. You will give it memory. It will choose what to show us.”
“You mean I won’t choose?”
“No. The trial selects.”
My jaw locked. They wanted to understand what I had buried. I stepped into the circle. The bond met me there with pressure and hunger. It opened inside me like a door I hadn’t noticed until now.
And then the room fell away.
I was fifteen, and it was snowing. The mountain pass looked the same in every direction. White. Wind. Ice-blind cold. I stumbled through it with torn gloves and boots too small, my fingers blue, my teeth chattering.
My mom’s voice was still in my ears:Keep moving. Keep your head down.
But she wasn’t here. She’d stayed behind. They’d told me she would catch up. That had been six hours ago. I was alone. I fell. The snow swallowed me to the waist. I kicked free. Cried out, but I was alone.
I crawled to a rock and curled beside it, thinking it might block the wind. My body shook. My face burned. I saw him as a fifteen-year-old boy. He was the same age as me. He had dark hair and boots that fit. A wool scarf wound tight across his neck. He held out a flask.
I remember taking it and drinking. The burn of it down my throat. The way the world steadied a little. He never told me his name, but he asked what my mother was called, and I told him, ‘Ocean.’ He stayed with me until morning. And when the caravan found us, he vanished into the trees.
I remembered his voice. “You aren’t dead yet. That’s something,” he had said with a chuckle.
I gasped as the chamber snapped back into focus. My knees hit the stone. I didn’t remember falling. But the vow-magic brushed my mind—soft and curious. Darian stood at the edge of the circle, watching silently.
The tester tapped the crystal. “She has completed the trial.”
The Bone Seat spoke quietly. “Her pain is old, but real.”
I stood on shaking legs. Darian reached out and brushed my arm, but I pulled away.
Later, alone in my chambers, I stared into the mirror above the washbasin. The candles’ flames were dimming. I let them witness the worst of it. It had projected from my mind, into the crystal ball and then onto the ceiling. How they did it, I didn’t know.
