Page 53 of Marked By the Enemy
With the sky so clear, we slept outside. That night, the fire needed no wood. It remembered us.
Chapter fifteen
Purple Fire
They came with the moon. The sky stretched above the Keep like old charcoal. Starless. Thick. Heat still clung to the earth. The fire in the courtyard popped low behind us, and thirty villagers stirred in the dark. Some curled in cloaks. A few children already slept, limbs tucked tight against their mothers’ sides.
We saw them before we heard them. Torchlight cut a slow curve through the lower trees. Like before, there weren’t any banners or sigils. Just the shimmer of tethered riders, ten in total, and the Bone Seat walking ahead of them.
His robes looked like grief worn too long. But his eyes shone ultraviolet in the firelight, brighter than torch-glow, rimmed with something colder than flame. A hue that didn’t belong to any living body.
He had bonded riders. The sight of them made my jaw tighten. I hadn’t expected that. Had the bond chosen them, or had he? Had they even chosen? Their steps matched his without hesitation. Either they were loyal—or remade. My stomach pulled tight.
He was early. Too early. He’d promised the new moon. This was not the new moon. This was a warning pretending to be a reckoning, and I wasn’t sure if Iwas more angry at his timing—or at how easily he’d brought tethered soldiers while calling mine unstable.
We stood at the clearing’s edge. Darian on my left, hand near his blade. Me in the center. The others—Branwen and the villagers—lined out behind us in a loose semicircle, firelight playing off their cheeks. They weren’t organized. They weren’t armed. But they didn’t run.
The Bone Seat stopped ten paces from me. “You were given until moonrise.”
I stepped forward once. “You said the new moon. You’re early.”
His gaze cut past me to the villagers, their faces lit with gold and shadow. “And yet still too late. Who are these?”
“They came on their own.”
His eyes moved over them. “And the bond welcomed them?”
“It didn’t stop them.”
Behind him, the tethered riders dismounted. Torchlight hit their arms. The marks glistened—crooked, knotted, purple, and sickly. They glistened like bruises in the lamplight. They bent and looped like a child’s first drawing. Like a thread pulled too tight before knotting in panic.
They were etched across palms, inner wrists, forearms without pattern or logic. Some bore one mark. Some two. The third was never complete. Its ends never met, like a failed attempt at fusion. Like memory interrupted. One man’s clumsy mark was carved into his cheek. His gaze remained fixed on nothing in particular. His chest barely rose. No awareness. No spark.
“These aren’t envoys,” I said.
“They’re remnants,” the Bone Seat answered. “Failed pairings. Rewritten.”
Darian stepped forward, his voice a blade sheathed in warning. “You hollowed them.”
“I preserved them.”
“Why?”
“The is why. I can’t understand why you pretend, Prince Darian, that you were uninvolved in this.”
I gritted my teeth and frowned.
“Oh, he didn’t tell you about the treaties he signed?” The Bone Seat quirked an eyebrow at me and raised a hand.
The riders moved forward at a medium pace. But it was enough to disturb the torchlight. Enough to make every child stir in their mother’s arms. Enough to make the tether in my back rise like smoke from a forge.
Beside me, Branwen whispered, “They don’t feel real.”
“They aren’t,” I said. “They’re echoes with shape.”
“I preserved what could still serve,” he said.
“For what?” I asked, still unsure about what treaties Darian may have signed.
