Page 35 of Marked By the Enemy
The bond flinched. A ripple moved across the threads. But it held. It didn’t recoil. It absorbed the shift.
“Good,” I said. “Now reshape.”
“To what?”
“Memory. And threat.”
He closed his eyes and moved his hand. The threads spurted, the way fire does when it’s fanned from within.
The shape of a hallway appeared. It had stone corridors and was lined with broken statues. Darian was younger and smaller, watching from behind a cracked column.
The Bone Seat stood over a kneeling woman with porcelain skin and ebony hair. Her hands were bound. Her head was low. The strike that followed wasn’t clean.
The image jolted something in me. The way the woman fell—the angle of her shoulders, the curve of her jaw—she looked like him. She could have been his kin. His mother.
I wanted to cry out in anguish. Her detached head lay on the ground, eyes rolled back. Blood spurted from her neck. Poor Darian.
I wanted to ask. But I didn’t because another shape rose over the first. It layered over his image like breath on glass. A cloaked woman moved through the same corridor, blade drawn, feet silent. Her steps were careful. Her face was blurred. Her rage was familiar.
My hands had curled into fists without noticing. I released the thread. The projection shattered.
“Too much?” Darian asked, voice low.
I turned toward him. “No,” I said. “But too raw.”
He nodded as though his breath was bottled in his lungs. But I saw how he blinked more slowly, how his spine sat straighter, like he was holding something back by force alone.
Was that his mother? Had the Bone Seat lied to him? Told him she turned to dust, like all the others? That it was the bond’s fault? I searched his face for any sign of grief, anger, or memory.
He gave me none. We let the air settle between us. The link shimmered faintly, registering the strain.
The morning sun lit the right side of his face, but left the other in soft relief, enough for me to study the line of his jaw, the way he held stillness like it was part of him. A prince raised to wear silence like armor. But no one watched something like that without response. Not even him.
If that woman was his mother, and if the Bone Seat claimed that she’d vanished and turned to ash with his father, what else had he told Darian? What had the Bone Seats erased? What lies had Darian believed?
The memory wasn’t clean. Did he really need to watch that way? Was it a true historical event or not? Or was that what the bond remembered—what it stitched together from pain and silence?
I didn’t ask. Because if he lied, I wasn’t sure I could pretend I didn’t notice. If he told the truth, I wasn’t sure I could carry it.
I turned toward the sun and closed my eyes, letting it warm both sides of my body, letting it seep through me. The bond slid low in my chest again.
Maybe the story about dust was never true. And maybe Darian had learned how to carry lies the way he carried blades—close, silent, always ready to use.
“My turn.” I twisted back around.
He stepped back to give me space. I raised my hand. The tether lifted again—smoother this time, warmer at its core. I split it into two pieces: past and present.
He remained still as the memory formed.
There was a field. A grave dug shallow. The dirt clung to my nails, cold and soft and full of grit. The vow-magic hovered behind me, casting a glow across the ground, trying to fix the edges of the memory so they wouldn’t fray.
“Keep going,” Darian said.
I pushed deeper. The bond trembled. The threads between us rippled. Something beneath the forge groaned. A deep, dragging noise. We froze, and the tether recoiled. A stack of blackened stone at the forge’s edge cracked and fell. It tumbled down the slope beyond the courtyard in a series of sharp, echoing clatters that didn’t stop quickly enough.
“We pushed it,” Darian said.
“No. We scared it.”
