Page 19 of Marked by the Enemy (The Binding Vow #1)

Chapter thirteen

They Came Without Asking

T hree days passed. On the fourth, they began to arrive.

The first was a girl—no more than nine. Barefoot, a thread of red tied around her wrist. Her hair was long and white-blonde, tangled in places as if the wind had slept in it. She emerged from the trees like someone following a map no one else could see.

Her mother came behind her, slower. Same pale skin, same white-blonde hair that caught the morning light. She was probably younger than twenty-five—too young for such wariness to show in her eyes. One hand hovered near her satchel, the other loose but ready. She didn’t speak.

But she watched everything. Every step. Every breath.

I strolled out from the edge of the Keep’s courtyard.

The girl came right up to me, chin high. “I saw your eyes.”

I blinked. “When?”

“In my dream.” Her voice had a rough lilt to it. Northern valley or east riverfolk. “They were open while you slept. Your inner eyes were open. ”

Darian came to my side, and my heart skipped a beat. I wished it wouldn’t do that. I wished I didn’t notice it every time. And most of all, I hoped with all my self-worth that Darian did not perceive it through the bond.

“What else did you see?” he asked.

She glanced at him, then back at me. “Five circles. And a hand. Could have been yours.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

Her mother finally approached us, hesitating at the edge of the courtyard stones. “We’re from Green Hollow. Three miles downriver. She woke up screaming two nights ago. Last night, she sat up and said we had to come.”

The girl kept staring at me, wide-eyed. “Do you dream often?”

She shrugged. “Never like this. Never where it stays after… except for now.”

“Show me your hand.”

She held out her left one, palm up. There was a faint circle traced into the skin. I glanced at her mother.

“I didn’t do that,” she said.

“I know. You can stay if you want.”

They did—for an hour. We answered the questions we could about him being the prince and me, his consort. We talked about the bond and the corridor I had walked down through the wall. Then they left. But the girl looked back three times.

By dusk, two more arrived. A merchant woman with sun-dark skin and a limp.

A fisherwoman with a crooked shoulder and cracked nails from net-hauling.

Both were older, with faint rings in their left palms. Neither was able to explain why they’d come.

I said they were welcome anytime, and they told me about the village they had come from.

Darian stood with arms crossed. “The bond is spreading.”

“It’s not spreading,” I said. “It’s ringing. And they heard it first.”

That night, we followed the narrow path that wound down the river. The forest thickened. When it broke into rolling fields, it was patched with old gardens and moss-covered wells. The village sat low in the bend, its homes tucked close .

Lanterns flickered behind warped glass panes.

Doors didn’t open, but none had been barred.

A boy hauling water froze mid-step when he saw me.

An old woman tugged her shawl closer and stared like she was trying to place me in a tale she’d forgotten, or one she hoped wasn’t true. One man bowed his head low.

The bond guided my journey back, the pace a low rhythm with the beat of my heart. By the time we returned to the Keep, the moon had climbed high. A hawk had dropped a message on the outer wall while we were gone—five words in a rushed, uneven hand, ink bleeding through the back of a leaf:

We feel what you opened.

I passed it to Darian. He folded the leaf and handed it back. “They’ll come.”

I nodded. “Then we stop waiting.”

The new mark on my chest—the fourth—warmed beneath the fabric. And the tether, silent until now, vibrated for a few beats of a heart. Not yours. Not theirs. Ours.

The Bone Seat came at dusk without any banners, procession, or horses.

He with ten men and one woman, plodding along a narrow path worn by hooves and soles.

One envoy walked ahead—female, tall, her long black braid looped once around her throat.

The threads of vow-magic at her arm, wrist, and palm shimmered faintly beneath her skin.

Three circles. Fused. A blade rested at her hip, untouched.

I flinched. Were they working for the Bone Seat now? Had he chosen the bond, or had the bond chosen her? She was fae. I waited in the clearing just beyond the Keep. Darian stayed behind, calculating. The tether was silent, low and ready, the way a fuse holds before a spark.

The envoy was silent, too, as she stepped aside.

The Bone Seat appeared. You might have thought he was a poor man who lived homeless on the streets.

He wore no jewels or sigil or velvet. Only bone-colored robes and silence.

His expression looked hollowed—as if everything that once lived behind it had been burned away and only form remained.

His gait was steady. Unhurried. He moved like someone with nothing left to fear or prove.

He looked at me like he was measuring where to cut. “Selene of the Fifth. Walk with me.”

We took the long edge of a clearing, which led to the largest training circle.

I glanced back at Darian, who was staring at us with a furrow between his brows and gray eyes turned to silver.

I mouthed: It’s all right.

The dirt still held marks from where we’d shaped the tether. He saw them. Said nothing.

“You’re late,” I said.

“You opened it,” he said.

“I didn’t seal it.”

“But you stepped through.”

I wondered how he knew and decided that his envoy might have dreamed it. Of course, fae folk had their own magic, which was unfamiliar to me.

We stopped near a tree stripped bare by lightning seasons ago. The bark peeled like old parchment .

“You walked the corridor. While awake.”

“I didn’t intend to.”

“That’s what makes it worse.”

“The bond didn’t stop me.”

“Because it’s evolving. Past us.” His white-eyed gaze locked with mine, and violet lightning flickered through the irises—not silver, not royal blood of the Moon Court. A muscle twitched in his jawline, and his eyes were plain white with pinpoint pupils once more. “Did it choose you?”

“It opened for me.”

He stepped forward, close enough to read the fourth circle on my chest. “You stopped testing it,” he said. “You’re becoming it.”

I didn’t answer.

“When it echoes in enough minds,” he said, “it won’t need consent. It will act.”

“I know.”

“You have until the new moon. After that, others will come.”

“Others like you?”

“No,” he said, already turning. “Others worse.”

My breath caught, but I held my face still as stone.

“If you took my advice, you would leave it well alone and enter no more gateways.”

The bond within me flared, one, twice, three times. It didn’t like what he had said.

We strolled back, and his envoy turned beside him. Together, they walked the long path east with dust lifting behind them, yet without a final glance.

I stood until the silence settled. “He thinks I was wrong to enter the corridor.”

Darian’s voice came from the shadows. “You weren’t. You did something the Bone Seat’s unable to control. That’s why he’s worried. You walk through truths I have to beg to remember.”

The fire inside the Keep still burned. But something colder had arrived.

Later, after the silence had stretched too long, I sat across from Darian near the fire in the largest fighting ring.

The storm had gone three days ago, and the moon was full.

The gentle yet powerful energy of the Moon Mother on my face and in my heart, and the vow-magic blossomed within me with feminine energy.

Darian frowned into the flames while I bathed in the lunar bliss while it lasted. Mom worshiped the old goddess of moon and water, and it had always confused me since the unseeing usually worshiped one God, who they called ‘he.’

I didn’t want to increase Darian’s anxiety, but I couldn’t presume he understood the Bone Seat’s message, particularly as he’d informed me he only sensed my emotions and no one else’s.

I cleared my throat. “He said others would come. Worse than him.”

Darian didn’t answer right away. He stared at the flames like they could give him back something he’d lost. “He isn’t bluffing. ”

I squinted at him.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “He knows powerful fae from the ten courts.”

I frowned. “How do you know that?”

“I don’t. I can’t tell if they are new memories or old fabrications. Everything’s layered now. But one thing I am sure about is that the Bone Seats aren’t singular. They move together. They’re at war together.”

“Then they’re not a threat.”

“Enemies can band together. Look at us.” He said it without irony, but his gaze didn’t soften. It landed hard on mine, slow and sure, and something unspoken passed through it. It flared behind his eyes before he blinked it away.

I felt the flicker of heat, anyway. It lit low in my spine, and the bond stirred. We watched each other. Something inside me stepped forward. Something that wanted to be seen. He looked away first, and I was glad he had, because if he hadn’t, I might have kept looking.

“The Ten Kingdoms,” I said. “The ten cracked thrones we both dreamed of.”

He nodded. “He isn’t the only one who’s afraid of what you’re becoming.”

I swallowed. “You sound like you agree with him.”

“No. But I don’t think he was wrong to be afraid.”

I leaned back, letting Darian’s eyes burn slowly across my skin. Part of me wanted to straddle him right there—just to see if he’d stop me. I shouldn’t have let myself imagine it. Not after everything. But I had. And I still did.

The bond pressed lightly behind my ribs, like it was waiting for me to decide whether to keep going–in more ways than one—or turn back.

I didn’t train the tie the next day. I walked—through the woods, into the low village, past the inn with the cracked shutters and the smith’s post bent at the hinge. The sky hung low, and the wind carried an unusual energy .

That’s where I found them. The marked ones.

A little girl with cropped brown hair played near the well, her fingers dipping in and out of the surface as if testing the shape of silence.

A fisherwoman kneeled along the riverbank, gutting the silver-scaled catch with hands that moved faster than thought.

A baker kneaded dough in rhythm with a breath that wasn’t hers.

An old man watched from the shade of a vine-strangled post, his eyes fixed too long on my hands.

Each one bore the circles: one, two, or three. We talked together in the village square, where they’d set up a bonfire for my arrival. Darian hadn’t come. He had issues of his own to sort through. I saw the girl with long white-blonde hair again, though.

Some had dreamed it before it appeared. Others woke to find it burned quietly into skin. None of them knew what it meant. But every one of them recognized me.

I asked each of them one question: “What do you want?”

The girl with white hair and the red thread around her wrist smiled. “To see you again.”

The fisherwoman: “To sleep without their voice in my mouth.”

The baker: “To stop feeling the dying that isn’t mine.”

The old man: “To die before it finishes changing me.”

I gave them offerings: salt, sliced meat from a wild boar I had trapped and killed, a thread from my own cloak.

I asked for nothing. I didn’t speak beyond the question.

But still, some packed up bedrolls and belongings and followed me between rolling hills and through the trees as I returned to the Keep.

The girl with cropped brown hair carried a length of chain-bound rods tucked into her sash and walked a few steps behind me.

In the village, I’d noticed her snapping the weighted ends through the air like she’d grown up with them.

She must’ve only been twelve or thirteen, older than the girl with white-blonde hair by a few years.

A twin pair from the woodcutter’s post joined her, silent as shadows. They were in their mid-twenties and had matching haircuts which sat like bowls on their heads. Three elders came last, slow but certain— two men and a woman.

They didn’t ask why I’d come. They didn’t ask what the mark meant. They followed me in silence, three miles back to the Keep. By the time we entered the courtyard, dusk had taken hold.

I lit a fire in the center ring—no roof above us, only sky—and they stood around its edges, unsure whether to sit or stay standing. A few shifted, murmuring among themselves, but most stared at the flame or at me. They barely blinked or moved. Like they’d already died once to follow me here.

Darian watched from the battlements, his figure shadowed by the rising moon. His cloak caught the breeze, silver-edged by the light. I left the fire behind and climbed the inner stair, boots scraping the stone as I rose above the courtyard.

He didn’t speak until I stood on the top. “They think you called them.”

“Maybe I did,” I said. “Without meaning to.”

The wind stirred between us. The fire below flickered orange against the ruin walls. From up here, the people looked small.

Darian’s eyes remained on them. “They’ll expect answers.”

“They’ll get the truth.”

“And if that’s not enough?”

I didn’t answer.

His throat bobbed, but he said nothing.

“What will you do with them?”

“I won’t lead them,” I said. “I’ll try not to become what they’re hoping for.”