Page 88 of Marked By the Enemy
“I don’t think so, no. There are other ways, though something is blocking my memory and knowledge.”
Branwen stared at me with her wide turquoise eyes. “So what do we do?”
I didn’t answer. I walked. Past the rings of canvas shelters that Ulric and Lymseia had built from timber and twine. Past the bakery Nessa had scraped together in the old forge, where the scent of ash still lived in every loaf. Past the latrines that had been dug by Ulric and other strong men and marked with simple symbols drawn by Lina and her new friends.
Each section of the Keep had become a kind of memory, each corner claimed and repurposed. The courtyard was filled with tents. The stables were repurposed for sleeping. The eastern wall was painted with old stories in coal and berry stain.
None of it had been ordered. All of it had been remembered. I went down to the lowest tier, where we’d laid the memory stones. They were bone-shaped, smooth with time, but blank with silence. I touched them, one by one. They warmed. They lit. They remembered.
Across the cold dark, beyond the reach of what we chose to keep, we all sensed that the Bone Seat watched. But this time, none of us turned away.
We needed a ritual so that he couldn’t find a way to take our memories from us. We needed a magic spell to protect our dearest memories, which were closest to our hearts.
That night and the next morning, the Bone Seat’s skiffs held the treeline like pale teeth. His remnants stood in rows—silent, motionless, never blinking. By the third night, the marked ones stopped looking toward the ridge, though the torches still burned. Branwen found me at the southern watch, where the wind cut low.
She carried a linen bundle wrapped tight. Frost had bitten her sleeves. Her hair was tied back with twine. “You haven’t slept.”
“Neither have you.”
She sat beside me, unwrapping her bundle. Inside was a copper bowl, a cracked quill, a small ring of iron, shaped on the same forge we’d turned into a bakery.
“Astrid says it’s time,” she said.
“For what?”
“For each of us to name what we refuse to lose.”
I frowned at the iron ring. “A vow?”
“No. A record. One the Bone Seat can’t rewrite. She found this ring, a bowl, and a quill in the library here. She sang to the ancestors of the Keep, and they told her it would protect our dearest memories.”
We carried the copper bowl and other items down together, through the sleeping rings, past the forge, to the center fire where the first torches had burned. Branwen set it on the stone. She stepped back, and we returned to the southern watch, where a small brazier burned to supply some warmth.
Darian came down from the north guard, as quiet as ever. He rarely spoke. His focus stayed on the ultraviolet haze that shimmered beneath the skiffs, but his hand found the back of my shoulder and rested it there.
The weight of it moved through my spine, low and slow. Something that lived between closeness and distance. My breath caught before I let it go. He always touched me like that—barely—yet it still changed the shape of the air around us. He didn’t look at me. But he didn’t let go.
He hadn’t spoken of the Bone Seat since the comb. Since the corridor lit up and flinched from his touch. He still wouldn’t say what he remembered, only that part of it had been buried, and now it wouldn’t stop rising.
From the Southern watch, I saw Lymseia cross the lower ring, alone and barefoot. Her feet were red from the frost. None of us had slept, but Lymseia wore it like rope. She dropped to her knees.
From this high, I couldn’t see what she carried at first. Just a bundle—small, dark, familiar. A velvet pouch. I’d seen it once before, clutched in her lap the night the Bone Seat’s skiffs arrived. She never opened it. Not until now. She placed it in the bowl.
“The Bone Seat killed my son!” she screamed.
No one breathed.
“He was six. His name was Alex. He liked climbing trees and drinking warm milk. My baby boy only had one mark!” She twisted around to glare up at us and snapped, “You tell me if this vow remembers him. Because I don’t know if I can.”
The quill caught fire without flame. The red line cut sharp across its stem. Lymseia left without another word. One by one, others followed. Some with broken things. Some with words. A scrap of a map. A spoon with a carved fish on the handle. A dried petal that had once belonged to a borderland bloom, long extinct.
The corridor opened and held with sparkling golden light.
When Willow placed a bone-handled blade down, she said only, “I won’t forget my mother, Rainer.”
The bond stirred faintly as a witness.
Branwen lifted a ledger I had never seen before with both hands, and I wondered whether she had retrieved it from the Keep’s library. It was beautiful, though, and still vivid despite that time that had passed. The cover was bright green leather, embossed with curling gold vines and sunbursts around red roses at each corner.
