Page 66 of Marked By the Enemy
She passed it back, but didn’t meet my eyes.
Rainer, Willow’s mother, touched Astrid’s arm. “You and Talia. You’re both from the northern lands, aren’t you?”
Astrid went still. “My ancestors were from Lunegard. I was born there, but was forced to leave when I was a little girl. My ma was called Isis, but she abandoned me. I had a sister, also, whose name I can’t remember. Everyone else I forgot.”
The woman sucked in a breath through gritted teeth, then swallowed hard.
“I was born in Riverell, a village by the river’s edge—the Northern Run, which feeds the Northern Sea. Riverell was across the river from Lunegard. My mom was born in Lunegard.” I said.
“Lunegard, yes. A beautiful place, especially in the summer.” Lines radiated around Astrid’s puckered lips, and I wondered what wounds she pushed so deeply down to deny me the help I needed to understand. Perhaps dragging memories up of her mother and sister was too painful.
Branwen looked between us. “Maybe this was meant for both of you.”
The redhead’s voice came again, quieter now. “Names don’t carry weight unless someone remembers them.”
I asked her, “What’s yours?”
She hesitated. “Abigail.”
“Who are you?”
“A prisoner to this realm I’m in.”
“I think Talia means to ask who were you before?” Darian said in a deep voice.
My arms prickled.
“I don’t trust you, Son of the Bone Seat,” Abigail said.
I didn’t look at him, but I knew his eyes would be burning into my back. My pulse picked up, but I kept my gaze on Abigail.
A breath left him, though, thin and rough, as if it hurt on the way out. Without touching the thread or seeing what lived behind his eyes, I still understood that his pain was there. I carried it anyway.
His hand touched my waist ever so lightly for a second, like he was reaching out for me to help him, to help that part of him which was born from the Fissured Realm—whatever that place was. His hand trembled against me as ifsomething had cracked at the hinge, and he hadn’t decided whether to let it break or hold it shut. The chamber dimmed.
She pointed to my heart. “You may have lost the coin, but you are the Fifth now.”
I looked down at my chest. A rose of white light had bloomed there. It glowed through the leather of my tunic as a shimmering mark of hundreds of petals. I opened my mouth to speak, but when I looked up, she was gone as if she’d never been there at all.
The puddles on the floor had vanished. The stone was dry. But the mark in the center of my chest shimmered before dimming. We turned to go.
But I glanced back once and whispered, “We’ll find the coin.”
And I perceived, faint and far away, the river move.
Back at the Keep, under a sheet of stars, the fires in the largest fighting ring had burned low and smelled of cold ash. Someone had laid flint in a circle within the fighting ring. It must have taken a lot of time and effort. The flint glowed white under starlight. Only Nessa was waiting inside the ring.
Her eyes flicked over each of us, counting. She nodded. “We went through that corridor, same as you,” Nessa said. “Now we got three circles each.”
“The elders?”
She gave a sharp nod. “Aye. The two old fellas. Baker’s got one. Blacksmith. Me. Even that fancy noble fella.”
Darian stepped up beside me. “The bond let you in?”
Nessa snorted. “Didn’t stop us, did it? We ain’t walked your road, but the Keep opened all the same.”
We entered the courtyard where the others had gathered.
