Page 87 of Marked By the Enemy
Holt looked on from atop a boulder. His black tangle of hair flipped over the burned side of his skull, face, and neck. His fingers curled around one comb he still hadn’t gifted to someone he waited for. Even the man with goats stood near the edge. The smugglers, too—ginger-haired both of them, the boy’s blindfold tied more neatly than before.
Jack stood slowly. His back hunched, white beard thick as lichen, but his voice rose clearly. “The Fifth isn’t a chain. It’s a return. To the old way. Before forgetting became a kind of silence.”
The vow-magic ran through the circle like a signal. A shimmer touched each palm.
Colleen, with her cloud of black hair cascading down her back, kneeled at the edge. “I want to remember something that isn’t mine.”
“You already have,” I said.
Darian crouched near the coals. He pressed his hand into the ash. A circle. Then another. A fifth mark drawn. He looked up at me. “It doesn’t end here.”
“No,” I said. “It begins again.”
The snow came without warning. The first flakes were thin, dry, and falling gently from a colorless sky. They landed on skin and stayed. Quiet and dry, likeash. I stood at the ridge above the lower ring with Darian and Branwen. Below us, the marked ones lit their fires in silence.
“They’ve learned to light them without the vow,” Branwen said.
“Or the vow learned to wait.” Darian gave me a sidelong glance.
I watched the blind boy—the smuggler’s nephew from Skull Cove—wrap a scarf tighter around his face. Willow passed him one glove. We hadn’t given orders for three days. No one had asked for them. And still, they built, cooked, carried, remembered.
From the trees, near dusk, a woman emerged. Sael was with her, walking beside her like she’d always known her steps. The woman wore cracked boots and a shapeless cloak. Her face was young, ears were fae, and hair was gold.
“Sael’s cousin,” Branwen murmured. “I dreamed of her. Her name is dawn. She has the sight of a falcon, apparently.”
I chuckled under my breath. “You dreamed of all that?”
“Only in parts,” Branwen confessed.
Dawn only spoke when she was close enough to hear, and like Sael, she was beautiful. Her gaze locked on mine. “The Bone Seat of the Moon Court is offering and giving.”
Darian scowled. “Giving what?”
“Power. Any kind. To anyone. All they have to do is forget.”
I frowned. “Forget what?”
She answered plainly. “Name. Place. Language. Parents. Self. He doesn’t care what’s gone, only that it is. It gives him power.”
Darian’s mouth twitched. “He’s unmaking them.”
“No. He’s selling forgetting as freedom.” Dawn unwrapped a cloth from beneath her coat. Inside it: a child’s locket and a half-burned vowstone. “He gave this to a girl in the East Quarter. She was eleven. Now she stares like the dead. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t ask who she is.”
Branwen exhaled a sharp breath through her nose. The thread inside me scanned the story. The stone vibrated with what it had been. The pause in the woman’s breath. The ache in the metal locket’s shape.
“He’s rewriting the spell,” I said. “To erase.” I narrowed my eyes at Dawn. She could almost pass for Sael’s twin sister. Like Sael, Dawn was beautiful and golden, in hair and skin. Her eyes were like molten amber.
My stomach hardened as I peered at Darian, but he was scratching his jaw and frowning at the ground.
“Why are you here?” I asked her.
“To protect my cousin, Sael,” she said. “There are some nasty people looking for her. Being near you and the Keep veils her from them, but my presence will offer her extra protection.”
I let out a long breath through my nose. “Of course. That’s fine. She said she wanted to reclaim part of her soul, as well.”
Dawn shook her head. “That is dangerous. Opening the red gateway is something which should not be done.”
“But don’t we need to if we want to send the demons back?” Darian asked.
