Page 50 of Marked By the Enemy
“Some of us carried what we could,” the old man with the beard said. “That knowledge didn’t come from books. That would have been dangerous. In habits. My grandfather had silver in his eyes. He said to trace the circles if we ever forgot our names. We didn’t know why, but that generation did. I’m three-hundred and fifty years old. They hid, and they hid us, too.”
Astrid lifted her head. “Mixed-blood lines flow quietly through the valleys. Some remembered without knowing why, even without marks. Perhaps it’s because we’re Borderlanders or mixed. We stitched, pressed, and carved these shapes into cloth, bread, and doorframes.”
Darian rolled up his sleeves and glared at the fire. I didn’t feel any sympathy for him. How could I when he acted like this?
I pressed my fingers against the place where the first mark had risen on my skin. “Then we start here.”
The tether curled low in my chest—quiet, alert, waiting.
The marked ones slept that night without dreaming.
It started small. A whisper at the edge of morning.
The twin woodcutters stood in the courtyard at dawn. One spoke a sentence. The other finished it without pause. Same words. Same cadence. As if the breath had simply passed from one throat to the other.
“The circle holds when you name it.”
They stared at each other, startled. Laughed. Stopped.
Later, a few of us were tidying the outer hall. The girl with the red thread, called Willow, sat on the edge of a toppled beam, kicking dust with her heels as she hummed something soft under her breath. I didn’t know the tune. Neither did the others, but we paused, drawn to it. She fell silent.
From deeper in the Keep, in one of the side rooms near the old armory, the fisherwoman picked it up and sang it so loudly it reached us all. Same melody. Half a beat later. Like she’d caught it in a dream. Willow looked up. So did I. The little girl had only been singing quietly.
They stared at each other when we brought them together. They were like two strangers who shared something beyond description.
By midday, I heard pieces of my own memory coming from their mouths. The riverbank. The Keep. Mom’s kitchen. Dad’s boots walking away. Ryn.
Darian watched them suspiciously from the perimeter of the fighting ring. When too many voices began finishing each other’s thoughts, he pulled me aside near the Keep wall.
His voice was tight. “The bond is linking them, without me, without asking.”
“Maybe it doesn’t need to ask anymore,” I suggested.
“Or you gave it permission when you walked the corridor.” He gripped my wrist. His eyes flashed silver.
I yanked it back, frowning; the fear hitting fast. What was wrong with him? Why was he angry at us? Was he still my enemy? Had I been wrong to think we’d moved past that?
The fire behind us crackled, like bones under heat.
“You think this is a mistake?” I mumbled.
“I think it’s a threshold. And I don’t know what’s on the other side.”
I looked past him at the twins, drawing circles in the dirt with the tips of their boots. The tether slid down my spine like mist through old stone. “It’s not speaking for us anymore.”
Darian’s jaw tightened as he glared over the fire at the woodcutters and the other marked ones, the other mixed-bloods.
“You still think you’re better.” My voice shook with fury. “Better than the villagers. Better than me.”
“I never said that.”
“No?” I snapped. “Because it sounds like what you meant. Like being part human would be the worst thing that could happen to you.”
He turned his face away, but not before I saw the flare in his eyes. “You’re putting words in my mouth.”
“I’m speaking the ones you won’t say. You look at these people like they’re beneath you.”
“They are strangers. You trust them too quickly.”
