Page 65 of Marked By the Enemy
Astrid stepped forward. “You’re becoming what they tried to erase.”
Lymseia stared at her arms. “So let the bond decide.”
She raised her forearm. The others followed. The tether shimmered silver across our skin. It flickered with new colors and new strands, too—threaded, coiling, living.
My third circle was nearly whole now, below the bend of my elbow, with pattern-work between the other rings like stars and moons curling around a forgotten gate.
Willow’s marks shimmered like resin sealed in amber. Astrid’s vowmarks became bright green vines. Branwen’s glowed leaf-green, too. Even Darian’s had changed—his circles thick, the threads between them curled in a script I couldn’t read.
The wind paused, and between two flat slabs at the edge of the ridge, it opened. The corridor.
Chapter eighteen
The Coin
The corridor seemed to breathe as I walked at the front with Darian’s slow steps behind me. Willow and Rainer whispered together further back. It pleased me that Willow’s mother, Rainer, now possessed three marks. They had intertwined quickly, and the corridor had opened to her even quicker.
Astrid’s staff tapped every so often against the stone, her grip tighter than usual. I questioned her need for it; her posture, like bamboo, was perfectly straight. Branwen and Lymseia brought up the rear, silent.
The path twisted—but the bends came too fast, too sharp. I extended my fingertips toward a wall and found a mirror instead. It didn’t show me. The bond surged violently beneath my skin, like an electric current. It exceeded a mere flicker. It yearned, almost desperately, for something from this place.
When the light thinned and the walls opened wide, I knew who we’d find before she appeared. She stood at the far edge of the chamber, back to us, her hair pulled into a knot at her neck with twine. The redhead. The one who named herself the Fifth.
All my friends could perceive her. They stood there, waiting. I stepped forward, but didn’t speak yet. She turned. Her face appeared sharper than I recalled;her eyes held an unnamable quality. She seemed more authentic now. Like this space allowed her shape to hold.
She looked straight at me. “You lost it.”
The bone comb warmed again in my pocket.
Her voice came out tight. “The coin, I mean.”
Shame slid low in my throat. “I was a child. I didn’t realize what it was.”
Her jaw trembled. Her hands opened and shut. She retreated slightly; the sorrow seemed to be intensifying, with nowhere left to escape. “I sent it to you as a gift. Through a gate I barely held open. I gave it to a boy with silver hair and wise eyes. Do you remember him?”
“Yes. But I only remember since the bond chose me.”
She nodded and sighed. “Well, that’s something. He carried part of me with him. And now that part is gone. That coin was the lock and the key. I am stuck here.”
Her voice cracked. And when she cried, a stream poured from beneath her feet, rising as if the floor itself broke into water. It twisted around our ankles, shimmered up our calves, and then vanished as fast as it came, leaving only puddles.
I stepped forward again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. But I’m here now.”
“It isn’t enough.”
I opened my hand. Showed her the bone comb. “This stayed. I found the runes. In the Moon Court archive. Three human symbols.”
She looked at it but didn’t reach. “And do you understand their collective significance?”
“Two of them, yes. But the moon court with water, I am unsure about.”
She gave a tight nod and turned her face slightly to the others behind me. Astrid stepped closer. Her hand trembled as I passed the comb to the wand bearer. Astrid rubbed her thumb over the carved edge, but didn’t speak.
“You recognize them,” I said.
“I don’t,” she said too quickly.
I stared at her trembling hands. “You do. Or you want to.”
