Page 59 of Marked By the Enemy
“Yes,” I said.
He stepped closer, quiet. “So we’re cut off.”
“We can drink. But spiritually, we’re severed. Powerless to sway others toward freedom. The bond can’t reach, can’t spread—can’t return memory to anyone else.” I bent and touched the surface.
It didn’t react. No ripple. No echo.
“We’ve been sealed in,” I said. “The bond’s reaching—but it can’t get out. And no one else can sense it from the outside. Not while the river holds still.”
Branwen gripped my arm with both hands now, as if she was scared. “In that case, I am certain that the Bone Seatisafraid.”
“No,” I said. “He’s prepared.”
“So we call in the one thing he can’t stop,” Astrid said from behind us in her soft and sweet voice, too young for such an old person.
We all turned. I hadn’t heard her come up behind us. Nimble for her age, she didn’t drag her feet like Ruen or Jack. I glanced at Branwen and Darian. Judging by their expressions, her arrival had gone unnoticed by them as well.
“What do we call in, Seeress?” Darian asked her.
Warmth flushed my chest. His increased respect toward the half-blood elders was a welcome change.
Astrid’s grip tightened on her staff. “We call in the one thing he can’t stop.”
Darian looked at her. “What’s that?”
“Memory and ancestors. Ours.”
We stared at it a little longer, then turned and climbed back to the Keep.
Late morning slid toward noon as the dry heat settled in. The air was so still that smoke lifted in slow ribbons from the firepit. We sat on splintered logs beneath the shade of the courtyard.
Fen returned from the woods with a young buck slung over his shoulder, sweat streaking his jawline and a nick above his brow from where a branch had caught him. He dropped it close to the Keep wall, and Ulric stepped forward, wiping his hands down his apron.
“Clean shot?” the blacksmith asked.
“Through the lung,” Fen said.
Ulric grunted approval. “Could’ve used a bit more bloodletting, but the meat’s yours to carve.”
The baker woman, whose name I now knew was Lina, was laughing. “No. You don’t need to butcher that creature. Let me.” She stood with one hand already reaching for the gutting blade. Her strawberry-blonde curls were pinnedback from her face, streaked with flour instead of age. “Used to be a butcher before I was a baker.”
“You remember the tools?” Ulric asked, skeptical.
“I remember the weight.” She kneeled beside the carcass, rolled up her sleeves, and looked at Fen. “He died during a ransacking of our village. My husband. A good man. I didn’t want to look at bones again after that. Not even chicken.”
She laid the knife on the deer’s belly and began. The others gathered slowly. Nessa brought out the herbs she dried beside the cistern—rosemary, stinger leaf, a touch of fennel bulb.
Branwen had foraged wild onion earlier in the week and passed around fistfuls, still caked in earth. Talia offered salt, carefully preserved from the stores. Willow turned the spit with both hands, silent and wide-eyed.
By the time the meat was hissing, the mood had loosened. Darian sat slightly apart from the circle but didn’t pull away when someone passed him a strip of cooked meat folded in flatbread. The heat kept the flies away. The fire kept them close. Everyone was tired, but they chewed, and they spoke.
“How long ago did you see the mark?” Lina asked Fen.
“The ring on my right palm? A few days before I came here. What would that be? A couple of weeks ago.” He turned it up, showed them the half-fused ring.
Ulric squinted. “That’s the hand you eat with. Strange it’d appear there.”
“All the men have their marks on the right,” I said. “Right hand, right wrist, right arm. Don’t they?”
