Page 75 of Marked By the Enemy
He pressed his palm to the floor. We both sensed what had never been written, what had never been erased. A vow built for those used up before anyone thought to give them names.
“They couldn’t seal it,” I said, rising slowly.
He rose slowly with me and looked down into my eyes. “Because they never finished it.” He reached for me. Stopped. Said nothing. That said enough.
My lips tingled, and my heart skipped a beat, but I turned away. We strolled back in silence. Something old had passed between us. It was trust, shaped by memory. I finally trusted him, and he trusted me, because of everything we had learned.
When we returned to the corridor mouth, the marked had already gathered. They had seen what we had seen. I peered back to the chamber behind. All those names with no ink. The ones no one spoke about because naming them would make them real.
“We keep it open,” I said, and the tie stirred in agreement because remembering was not enough, and it needed continuation.
We returned to the hall before dusk. The sky wore that strange silver color that storms liked to borrow.
We waited. The vow-magic kept the walls alive, low ribbons of light slipping across the floor in circles full of patterns and symbols, connected by tangled veins of light in the colors of amber, silver, green, and turquoise.
The marked had already gathered. Willow sat cross-legged near the center, meditating with her opened palms facing up on her knees, and her eyes closed. Branwen leaned on the archway, arms folded. The elders stood apart. The blacksmith, fisher, and baker sat on a bench. Sael watched from the doorway. No one spoke. But they all knew something had changed.
“I saw the chamber,” I said. “Before the courts.”
Branwen straightened. “And?”
“It didn’t demand anything. It helped, exactly as Astrid and Sael had explained. Like a shared mind.”
Darian tied his long hair in a topknot, and for a moment, I hoped he might curl an arm around my shoulders. “It showed us what had been erased.”
Willow’s eyes flashed open. “Any names?”
“Hundreds of thousands. Roles. People who shaped the bond before it was shaped into something else.”
“They were the first,” said Jack. “The unnamed.”
“They weren’t erased,” I said. “They were set aside.”
Sael’s voice echoed in the hall, bouncing off the stone. “The bond remembers out loud.”
The tie stirred in my spine. My gaze darted between Astrid, Jack, and Ruen. “Do you still hear it?”
“Not with ears.” Astrid touched her chest. “I feel it here, in the very center of my heart.”
I sucked in air too fast. Her mark bloomed like mine. A flower. Summer magic in green. It was a flower in the center of her chest, but hers was electric green, like the marks on Branwen’s arm and hand. I wondered for a second if she had an ancestor from the Summer Court, as well.
I dropped to the floor and sat. I closed my eyes and listened. Something answered. It sounded like metal folding under heat. Slow. Careful. Then an image rose. A blade forged for memory.
The air shaped around it. Three runes lifted from the bone comb, drawn into the mix like breath pulled into flame. The metal’s source was a mystery to me. It wasn’t mine. But it waited, quiet and sure.
“What did you see?” Darian asked, always beside me, always close.
I looked up at him, towering above me. “A weapon. I think I’ll be asked to carry it.”
He crouched beside me, then sat. The tether eased. Without a word, Darian opened his arms and pulled me in. And for the first time, I didn’t resist the wanting. I let it hold me.
I leaned into him, and his warmth wrapped around me like it had always known how. His scent hit first—woodsmoke and something deeper, warm and worn like old cedar left in the sun.
The comfort wasn’t loud. It didn’t demand anything. But it was too much. The kind of too much that didn’t hurt. The kind that made everything else fall away. There was no war. Just this. His chest steady beneath my cheek. His breath brushing my hair. I wanted to stay inside that stillness forever. Like we were the last two marked—and for once, the bond didn’t burn.
Chapter twenty-one
The Blade that Remembers
