Page 48 of Marked By the Enemy
“What will you do with them?”
“I won’t lead them,” I said. “I’ll try not to become what they’re hoping for.”
Chapter fourteen
Half-Blood Fires
We gathered around the fire. The warm wind howled, but it wasn’t what we feared. The moon hung above us, full and indifferent. Sparks lifted into the air with the smoke, catching briefly on the breeze before disappearing into the dark.
The girl with long silver hair had returned to us with her mother. She twisted the red thread around her wrist again and again. I didn’t ask what it meant. The twin woodcutters with mousy brown basin haircuts and crooked teeth sat side by side, watching the dancing flames. They must have only been in their late teens.
The eldest elder sat nearest the flame, knees drawn close beneath a thick cloak patched at the shoulders. Her skin was sun-worn, and her eyes stayed on the fire. “We remember the bond.”
Darian sat straighter. “How?”
Even the child stilled. Her legs were crossed. Her eyes weren’t. The baker woman rubbed her wrists absently, her mark glinting.
One of the old men shifted, cracking his knuckles. The fisher woman glanced toward the old archway where the courtyard gate must’ve once stood, as if she half-expected someone to step through it and listen.
The elder stood firm under Darian’s stare. “I sing to the dead as a Seeress, Wandbearer of the eastern river clans. My ancestors murmur behind the veil, growing louder now that I am marked.”
Darian grimaced visibly. “You expect me to believe that?”
“You don’t have to.” She stared at his face. “The bond wasn’t meant to rule, but to remember our ancestors, foster compassion, and connect all fae and humans.”
“The courts never said that.”
“No,” she said, “because your courts serve the Bone Seats, who fear what they can’t own.”
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “Then what do they own now?”
“They own all our memories, past and present. They return them to us as false, rewritten to cleanse and control the past.”
The fire popped. The twin woodcutters gaped.
Darian crossed his arms. “You say the bond wasn’t about control. That’s fine. The Elemental Seats have always ruled it, and they’ve used me as a puppet for the Boundless to blame. The fae Elemental Seats have ruled the bond for thousands of years and—”
“You are wrong,” she interrupted.
He went still.
“They were like me once,” she said. “Balanced. Half of each.”
Darian stiffened. His voice was loud. “Fae and humans can’t mix. That’s impossible. The bond forbids it. That’s what we were told.”
I gasped. Too loud in the quiet. Memories of the redhead surged like water through a cracked gate. The woman with the five circles on her forehead. The woman who called herself the Fifth. She floated through my mind, sometimes vibrant with youth, sometimes aged and wise, but always with those pointed ears that lodged behind my eyes and stayed.
The old woman who called herself a wandbearer reached up and tucked her long gray and white-streaked braid behind her shoulder. Next, with a steady hand, she pushed back the hair from one side of her head. One ear, pale and curved to a fine point, caught the firelight.
No one spoke.
Her eyes, which had been veiled by the fog of age only moments prior, suddenly blazed with an intense, piercing green. “Mixed-bloods are more common than Half-Bloods now. We weren’t erased, though. The Bone Seats hid and forgot us, replacing us with something else. That started four hundred years back.”
Darian closed his eyes as he squeezed the bridge of his nose. “What else?”
She looked at him with something older than pride. “The Bone Seats are mixed-blood, like you all are, but they’re part of something else as well.”
“What are they?” asked one of the old men, his voice hoarse.
