Page 15 of Marked by the Enemy (The Binding Vow #1)

Chapter ten

Painful Memories

T he mystical creature’s silver eyes stayed fixed on mine, and I finally gasped in a breath.

“You called,” he gurgled. The voice didn’t come from its mouth but from the inside of my skull.

The vow-magic trembled in recognition low beneath my ribs.

I took a single step closer. “Who are you?”

“A voice they silenced. A tether they tried to cut.” Its limbs flexed, and the silk that hung from its torso like unraveled burial cloth swayed. He raised one hand slowly. A circle was carved into his palm.

My gaze bounced between its palm and head.

Darian’s words echoed in my mind: “The broken fifth circle.”

I kneeled close enough now to see the seams running beneath its wax-like skin.

Its joints were rimmed with threadlike lines of spellwork, pale and glimmering faintly in the shadows under the canopy.

They were dark like veins too old to bleed.

Muscle lay under the surface, but it wasn’t smooth. It was patchworked.

My voice cracked. “Are you alive? ”

“I remember being.” Its head turned slowly, the silver eyes never blinking. “I wanted to keep my memories and the memories of my ancestors. Most of us did, except those promised immortality. I refused to let the demons in.”

“Did you create the bond?”

“No.” The word landed heavily. “I refused to be part of its corruption.”

The trees around the clearing dipped their branches inward.

“You resist. You reshape.”

“I never meant to be chosen.”

“Which is why it chose you.”

“Did the Bone Seat choose me?”

The creature cackled like an old woman in my mind until he started coughing and spluttering. “The Bone Seats only wish they possessed the power to select you for the bond. No. They wanted to prevent you from bonding with the prince.”

He pressed his palm with the circle against the ground. The soil cracked in lines, and a shape emerged—thirteen rings, etched faintly into the earth like star maps. Ten formed the inner wheel. Three more circled farther out, rimmed in silver and slightly raised, like they resisted burial.

“See those three forgotten ones? One of those is me,” he said in my mind, its watery voice unclear.

One of the outer rings was gray and difficult to hold in the eye, but clear when the wind shifted the creature’s silk: a skull standing tall on a cracked urn, ringed in falling ash-feathers.

I froze. Upon examining the book of runes, none had formed that sigil. The skull meant the Bone Seat or death, but none of the courts used the other rune of the urn. It felt... old. Unwritten. Forbidden. And yet the bond seemed to recognize something I wasn’t supposed to.

I swallowed. “Why show me this? Why now?”

“Because I’m unable to enter again. But you can open it. You can choose.”

“Choose what?”

“Whatever comes after. ”

I studied its body again. The bone-pale silk. The stitched sinew. The strange fourth circle on its head which looked to be filled with sticky water. “Are you... what’s left of someone?”

“I am what remains when the bond forgets.” It began to fold in on itself, like a page turned too many times, until its remains were nothing but silk, ash, and bone. Gone.

Just before he dissolved, his voice came one last time. “Choose carefully what survives you.”

The tether in my chest coiled and uncoiled. I walked back the way I came. The forest stopped leaning away, and brambles caught my sleeves. The bond became quiet again—as if whatever test the vow-magic had set was done.

Darian was crouching by the stream, one hand resting in the water. His sword was sheathed. He remained there when I stepped into view and didn’t ask what I’d seen. “Let’s stop testing the bond.”

I nodded. “You’re right. We need to start training it instead.”

“And we should train together.”

Morning heat pressed low and still across the courtyard. I woke to the scent of ash and warm air—and the sound of dripping water.

Darian stood near the fire ring, shirtless, toweling his arms with a cloth that had seen better years.

His skin caught the light in clean lines.

His back was broad, shoulder blades sharp like wings tucked tight against muscle.

His waist narrowed beneath, forming the shape of an inverted triangle carved in motion—built for speed and control.

He didn’t look surprised to see me watching. “Didn’t think you were a morning person,” he said.

“I’m not.” I sat up and pulled my braid loose. “But you’re loud. ”

“That river’s colder than it looks.” He tossed the cloth over a stone and crouched to turn the flatbread warming on a hot stone by the coals.

“Is that breakfast?”

“Unless you want raw roots.” He gestured to the rabbit meat he’d salted the night before, now sizzling softly over the fire.

I crossed my legs, knees drawn in. The dirt was already warm under my skin. He passed me half a strip of meat wrapped in flatbread. Our fingers brushed. I didn’t thank him. The bread was dense, tough at the edges, but the meat inside still held its juices.

Smoke clung to the fibers, sweetened slightly by the herbs he must have tucked into the pack days ago. The first bite filled my mouth with salt and ash and something faintly spiced—like dried mint or ground pine. It stuck to the roof of my mouth, rough at first, before melting.

“Did you dream?” he asked once I swallowed it down with water.

“I didn’t,” I said.

“Is that a good or bad thing?”

“I’m not sure. I had hoped to ask that creature more questions about what it meant by a forgotten kingdom and sacrifice.”

We ate in silence, the kind that didn’t grate. The bond was quiet and attentive. It was waiting for something.

After a while, Darian set his food aside and stood, brushing crumbs from his hands.

I rose, wiping my palms on my tunic. “Let’s see if it’s ready.”

We moved into the center of the ring without weapons. Just open ground and sky, and the stone beneath our boots. The vow-magic felt different. It had steadied overnight and had stopped tightening without cause. It had direction.

I took my place at the northern edge of the ring. Darian stood across from me in the south, his stance grounded. We didn’t bow. We didn’t speak until it mattered.

The sun broke fast over the trees to my left and his right, casting long stripes of gold across the ring. It warmed one arm while the other stayed cool. Dust lifted in the breeze and glowed midair for a breath before falling still again .

“Begin,” I said.

He raised a hand. The tether between us wavered. One thread, clean and singular, lifted in the air.

“Now split it,” I said.

He tilted his head. “Into what?”

I met his gaze. “Truth. And resistance.”

A flicker of doubt crossed his brow. “You want it to hold both?”

“I want it to learn contradiction.”

He nodded and narrowed his focus. The thread shimmered as it levitated a couple of feet above the ground.

Then it split—first into two, then into a pair of opposites: one bright, sharp-edged and clean like a blade forged from clarity, and the other dark, a strand of grit and recoil, wound tight as memory withheld.

They hovered between us like options, unchosen. I stepped forward.

The bond flinched. A ripple moved across the threads. But it held. It didn’t recoil. It absorbed the shift.

“Good,” I said. “Now reshape.”

“To what?”

“Memory. And threat.”

He closed his eyes and moved his hand. The threads spurted, the way fire does when it’s fanned from within.

The shape of a hallway appeared. It had stone corridors and was lined with broken statues. Darian was younger and smaller, watching from behind a cracked column.

The Bone Seat stood over a kneeling woman with porcelain skin and ebony hair. Her hands were bound. Her head was low. The strike that followed wasn’t clean.

The image jolted something in me. The way the woman fell—the angle of her shoulders, the curve of her jaw—she looked like him. She could have been his kin. His mother.

I wanted to cry out in anguish. Her detached head lay on the ground, eyes rolled back. Blood spurted from her neck. Poor Darian .

I wanted to ask. But I didn’t because another shape rose over the first. It layered over his image like breath on glass. A cloaked woman moved through the same corridor, blade drawn, feet silent. Her steps were careful. Her face was blurred. Her rage was familiar.

My hands had curled into fists without noticing. I released the thread. The projection shattered.

“Too much?” Darian asked, voice low.

I turned toward him. “No,” I said. “But too raw.”

He nodded as though his breath was bottled in his lungs. But I saw how he blinked more slowly, how his spine sat straighter, like he was holding something back by force alone.

Was that his mother? Had the Bone Seat lied to him? Told him she turned to dust, like all the others? That it was the bond’s fault? I searched his face for any sign of grief, anger, or memory.

He gave me none. We let the air settle between us. The link shimmered faintly, registering the strain.

The morning sun lit the right side of his face, but left the other in soft relief, enough for me to study the line of his jaw, the way he held stillness like it was part of him. A prince raised to wear silence like armor. But no one watched something like that without response. Not even him.

If that woman was his mother, and if the Bone Seat claimed that she’d vanished and turned to ash with his father, what else had he told Darian? What had the Bone Seats erased? What lies had Darian believed?

The memory wasn’t clean. Did he really need to watch that way? Was it a true historical event or not? Or was that what the bond remembered—what it stitched together from pain and silence?

I didn’t ask. Because if he lied, I wasn’t sure I could pretend I didn’t notice. If he told the truth, I wasn’t sure I could carry it.

I turned toward the sun and closed my eyes, letting it warm both sides of my body, letting it seep through me. The bond slid low in my chest again.

Maybe the story about dust was never true. And maybe Darian had learned how to carry lies the way he carried blades—close, silent, always ready to use .

“My turn.” I twisted back around.

He stepped back to give me space. I raised my hand. The tether lifted again—smoother this time, warmer at its core. I split it into two pieces: past and present.

He remained still as the memory formed.

There was a field. A grave dug shallow. The dirt clung to my nails, cold and soft and full of grit. The vow-magic hovered behind me, casting a glow across the ground, trying to fix the edges of the memory so they wouldn’t fray.

“Keep going,” Darian said.

I pushed deeper. The bond trembled. The threads between us rippled.

Something beneath the forge groaned. A deep, dragging noise.

We froze, and the tether recoiled. A stack of blackened stone at the forge’s edge cracked and fell.

It tumbled down the slope beyond the courtyard in a series of sharp, echoing clatters that didn’t stop quickly enough.

“We pushed it,” Darian said.

“No. We scared it.”

The tether curled tight around my ribs—not in panic. In warning.

Darian let go of my hand. “Next time, we pace it.”

“Next time, we ask it what it wants.”

He remained tense and rooted to the spot. “And if it answers?”

“Then we listen.” I turned back to the threads we’d left hanging in the air.

They hadn’t disappeared yet. They were fading. They had flexed. They had held. They had changed shape and learned how to return. They weren’t only responding anymore. They were remembering. And so was I.

The tether lifted again without command.

It didn’t surge. It offered. A new thread curled from my palm and drew a shape in the air.

I let it show me what it had. The field appeared again, wider this time.

Two graves. One newer, one already worn.

My hands were raw. My sleeves soaked to the elbows.

It had rained that night. I remembered the smell of wet soil and old blood.

Mom’s face had been still. Too still. And beside her, Ryn—his cloak still damp, his collar still marked from where they’d tried to drag him away before the blow landed.

Fae. He’d never told anyone else. He had only told me. And I hadn’t saved him. That trust was the last thing he gave.

I had buried them side by side—the grave too small, the dirt too stubborn. I remembered my voice breaking when I said both their names out loud, once each, and then never again.

The bond asked if I wanted to keep it. To anchor this. To let the memory shape the tether.

I stood still, core cold, tears burning my eyes, staring at the flicker of it in the air—my knees in the mud, my hands bleeding, my mouth open in a scream lost to the trees. And I said no. I pulled the memory back. I wasn’t ready to let the bond carry it.