Page 61 of Marked By the Enemy
“I remember kissing my husband on the ankle,” Lina said. “Because I was kneading with both hands.”
That made a few laugh. Even Darian exhaled through his nose.
Astrid didn’t smile. “I remember too much. That’s the danger, isn’t it?”
Ulric took another slice of venison. “The danger lies in forgetting.”
The fire popped. Smoke trailed sideways. Somewhere nearby, a beetle clicked under stone. Talia let her hands rest on her knees. The tether wasn’t moving. But it was awake. Listening.
“We’ll stay here for the day,” Astrid said. “But tonight, we ask them.”
“Ask who?” Lina asked, wiping her hands on a cloth.
“The ones who came before.”
“You think they’ll answer?”
“I think they already are,” Astrid replied.
The warmth stayed after the sun slipped down. The stars were clear—sharper than usual, as if the veil above had thinned. We moved back to the old fighting ring.
Someone had swept the dirt smooth earlier, and the soot had settled in soft patches across the edges. The marked ones came in quiet, one by one. Some sat on logs, dragged close. A few on the bare earth, legs tucked or crossed.
Willow curled beside her mother, head against her arm. Fen and Ulric crouched near the edge. Nessa sat cross-legged with a waterskin in her lap. Branwen stood for a moment before sitting near me.
Astrid walked the circle once before she sat, like a woman checking the lines of her own home. Her staff tapped the ground twice. Then she sat, knees apart, back straight. Her hands rested on her thighs. The bone beads in her braids caught the moonlight. Her voice came low.
“We don’t speak to the ancestors. We sing them awake. We braid our breath with theirs.”
No one asked what that meant.
She began to sing—not in words, not in any tongue I knew. Just sound. Low, coarse syllables, throat-deep and slow. It was like the wind in reeds, or the scrape of a grindstone. I didn’t try to follow. None of us did. But the bond stirred. I could feel it down my spine and at the edges of my chest, like something turning over in its sleep.
The air changed.
We didn’t fall into a trance. We didn’t speak in tongues. But each of us saw something—the kind of memory that didn’t come from the mind, but from the heart. Darian sat still, unmoving, but his eyes glinted too brightly in the firelight. I knew something had come to him. His jaw had gone tight. I didn’t ask what he saw.
Mine came without warning. I wasn’t surprised to see it was her, though—the redhead who’d called herself the Fifth. She stood alone on a cliff, salt wind pulling at her skirts, a storm churning over black water below. Her hair was tied back with twine, her fae ears exposed. Five silver rings glinted on her brow, smooth and interlocked.
Her voice was thinner than wind. “You must keep both of these, Talia the Fifth. Talia of Tarnwick. Please keep them both.” She held up a bone comb and an oval-shaped coin, rubbed soft at the edges. Its tree sigil was on one side and thebroken spiral on the other. They were both half-faded from years of handling. “One remembers. One trades. But don’t trust the fish-man and his friend.”
Her eyes were my mom’s. Her voice wasn’t. But something in my bones answered to it.
“Fish-man? Like… a merman?”
But she had already faded away.
Branwen sucked in a breath beside me. Her fingers clutched the edge of my cloak. “I saw someone, too. A woman with eyes like mine, lighting a fire with a knife’s edge. She said my bloodline was never from farmers. She said we were royal.”
“My ancestor ran,” Fen blurted. “The one who looked like me. They burned the names at a feast table. He ran barefoot into the snow. Never looked back.”
Willow blinked. Her mouth opened and closed again. She shook her head. “I didn’t see anything, but I did hear the same words again: ‘You already saw.’”
Astrid didn’t stop the song. Not until the bond went still again, the way water does after wind passes. She opened her eyes, slow and heavy, like she’d come up from deep water. Her gaze moved to me.
I reached into my pocket. “There’s something else. Something I never told you.”
They turned toward me—Astrid, Jack, Lymseia, Nessa, Branwen, Fen, Ruen, Lina. Willow leaned her cheek against her mother’s sleeve. Even Darian looked up from where he sat near the edge of the ring.
