Page 19 of Marked By the Enemy
I cupped water in my hands and pressed it to my face. The cold didn’t help. The heat behind my ribs stayed. The memory had surfaced like a wound, refusing to close.
I hadn’t spoken that boy’s name in ten years. Not since the fire. Not since the oath I swore over his body—never aloud, never where anyone could hear. But tonight, the name rose inside me. His name had been Ryn. I had buried him so deep I forgot where I’d put the grief. But the bond hadn’t.
He was the first person I ever tried to protect. And the first one I failed. I whispered his name once, just to hear it again. The vow-magic throbbed under my ribs. Softer than before.
I blinked. “You remember that?”
It thrummed under my ribs as if it had filed the memory away beside its own. I stared into the mirror a long time after that. My reflection remained there, but I saw myself differently. Something inside had changed.
Darian thought he held the truth of this bond. He thought he understood what it gave him. I wondered what it would take to show him something as raw. Something that could hurt him back.
Chapter six
Etched in Bone
When I returned to my chambers, something waited on my pillow. An unmarked box. No ribbon to make it a gift, no seal to declare a sender. Pale, sanded wood. No hinges. No ornament. The lid rested lightly in place, like it wanted to be found.
I didn’t open it at once. I stood at the edge of the bed and stared. My fingers hovered over the seam. The bond lay quiet. Nothing stirred in the corners of my mind. The tether held its silence.
My elbows pressed into my sides. That unsettled me more than any warning would have.
Eventually, I lifted the lid.
Inside lay a white comb made from bone, gleaming with a sheen too fine for any human polish. A shimmer veined through the bone, which was something more elusive than light. Memory, perhaps, or intention.
I’d never seen anything human-made that gleamed like that. It was too fine. Too certain of itself. This work had a magical quality, a vibrancy our tools lacked.
Its surface held long, slender markings, almost too fine to catch at first glance. The first was a crescent moon cradling a water droplet, two river-lines beneath. The second: a star or maybe a flower of eight points, symmetrical and knotted,bound to a circle. The third showed two rings interlocked, pierced by a vertical line with a flame at the top.
The Boundless had shown us scraps of stolen relics from temple ruins up north, once. These were human runes from the Northwest Tarnwick. Unsure what they meant, I decided to find out.
I slid the lid back over the box and pushed it under the bed without touching the comb. The wood caught slightly on the stone floor before slipping from view. I sat on the sheepskin rug, legs unbending, hands slack on my thighs. My eyes drifted to the ceiling, but they didn’t really see it.
Darian wouldn’t have sent this. He spoke plainly. This wasn’t his method. Someone else had been here and had left something with meaning behind. And the tether hadn’t so much as stirred. Not a flicker. Not a push of warning.
That chilled me. The bond hadn’t stopped them. It had let them in. Because it wanted to see what I’d do next. And the worst part was that I wanted to know, too.
I didn’t sleep well. The comb stayed beneath the bed, quiet and harmless in the way sharp things always are before they’re used.
When dawn touched the windowpanes, I dressed in my plainest tunic, tied my hair back, and left without waiting for a guard. Let them wonder where I’d gone.
The palace archive lay beneath the northern wing. Its entrance was narrow and flanked by columns that whispered with spell-runes too old to be decorative. An old woman sat by the door, wrapped in four layers of wool. She barely looked up as I passed.
Inside, dust and vellum hung in the dry air. A steward blinked at me from behind a stack of scrolls.
“I need records,” I said. “Bone combs and runes from Northern Tarnwick.”
He jerked a thumb toward the back. “Far stacks. Keep your voice low. Some of us read in the morning.”
I didn’t bother with a response.
The farther I walked, the older the shelves became. Scrolls wrapped in fabric. Books bound in hide and cord. Some of the volumes crackled when I pulled them free. The paper was brittle, the ink rust-colored with age.
I flipped through a book of ceremonial combs—each carved from bone, each traced to tribes in the various Realms of Humans all over Caldaen. Some of their patterns were ornate, but familiar.
I turned to the rune dictionary. Not fae. Human. That alone unsettled me. I searched for the three runes carved into my comb. The rune on the left of the comb didn’t appear in full—but when I broke apart the shapes, I found water here, and the Moon Court there.
There were so many runes from different continents and islands, so I searched only those in Tarnwick, and then the Northwest Tarnwick river lands. I finally found rune in the middle. It belonged to a northern tribe in Lunegard that worshipped the moon, river, and ocean. That was where Mom came from.
