Page 37 of Marked By the Enemy
His voice came quietly, like it cost him something to say. “Something reached through.”
I frowned. “The bond?”
He swallowed and nodded. “It wasn’t human.”
We both turned, drawn to the same point. The tree behind him. Scorched into the tree’s bark were four deep circles burned into the grain like brands. Below them, a fifth ring remained faint, unfinished, and waiting.
When I extended a hand toward it, the tether snapped forward like a rope, pulling both of us back to the center. It wrapped around us fast and hard—a grip that held and remembered. I wished it would tell us everything it remembered. I wished it could tell us how we could help. I wished it would let me know whether Darian had any ulterior motives.
The whisper came through the trees. “Soon.”
Darian let out a pent-up breath. “It knows we’re trying.”
We headed back to the Keep through the dense forest in silence. The only sounds were the soft crunch of leaves underfoot and the occasional rustle of branches. No footsteps trailed behind us, no breeze stirred the air.
Electricity crackled in the air between Darian and me, an invisible current that seemed to vibrate in the space separating our bodies. It was as if our very presence created a magnetic field, drawing us subtly yet inexorably closer. A part of me yearned to wrap my arms around him, to bury my face into the warmth of his chest and let the tears flow freely, seeking solace in the comforting rhythm of his heart.
I wasn’t a child. My wounds should make me strong. That’s what the Boundless always said. I felt tired from being so unyielding. For a decade, I had endured rigorous training, molded into an assassin. My combat instructors only ever repeated, ‘Again. Again,’ every time I practiced the techniques, my muscles as rigid as stone. I needed softness.
Darian’s physique formed a fortress of muscle and sinew, yet his mind remained a battleground of vulnerability, or so it seemed. I didn’t know what was real for him. What he remembered, what he made up, what the bond stitched together from scraps.
He could be lying. Or worse—he could believe it. The bond hadn’t shown me, and I remained uncertain about the Keeper of the Vows’ role in all of this.
It started speaking in our sleep. At first, it used my voice. Then Darian’s. Then something else. One night, I dreamed that it was a hot afternoon in the courtyard. I stood in the shade of the western wall, and Darian stood across from me, shirtless, bathed in sunlight which looked too pale to be natural.
“Fuse,” he said.
“No.”
His eyes wept silver. A crown melted in his hand—soft metal pooling like it had never fit him.
Panicked, I corkscrewed around and saw ten thrones. Every one of them was broken. The stone cracked, the seats split down the center like they’d failed under weight that never belonged to them.
A voice boomed, “Choose or vanish!”
I woke up gasping. My skin was slick with sweat, and the fire had reduced to low embers. The tremors of the bond-magic hummed loud enough to rattle my ribs. I sat upright. My cloak slid off one shoulder.
That’s when I saw the mark below my collarbone—a single faint line of vow-magic written beneath the skin. I stood, wrapped the cloak around me, and stepped outside. Darian was already there, standing beneath the stars.
“You dreamed it too,” I said.
He nodded. “The courtyard. The crown.”
“The thrones?”
He finally turned and nodded. “I didn’t wake with a mark.”
I opened the cloak to let him see.
He peered at the mark, not touching, as if the contact might shatter something delicate. “It wasn’t from outside.”
I sucked in a tight breath and blew it out slowly through puffed cheeks. “No. It was the bond.”
“It was testing us.”
“Or warning.”
The mark burned once, cooled after.
