Page 20 of Marked by the Enemy (The Binding Vow #1)

Chapter fourteen

Half-Blood Fires

W e gathered around the fire. The warm wind howled, but it wasn’t what we feared. The moon hung above us, full and indifferent. Sparks lifted into the air with the smoke, catching briefly on the breeze before disappearing into the dark.

The girl with long silver hair had returned to us with her mother.

She twisted the red thread around her wrist again and again.

I didn’t ask what it meant. The twin woodcutters with mousy brown basin haircuts and crooked teeth sat side by side, watching the dancing flames.

They must have only been in their late teens.

The eldest elder sat nearest the flame, knees drawn close beneath a thick cloak patched at the shoulders. Her skin was sun-worn, and her eyes stayed on the fire. “We remember the bond.”

Darian sat straighter. “How?”

Even the child stilled. Her legs were crossed. Her eyes weren’t. The baker woman rubbed her wrists absently, her mark glinting .

One of the old men shifted, cracking his knuckles. The fisher woman glanced toward the old archway where the courtyard gate must’ve once stood, as if she half-expected someone to step through it and listen.

The elder stood firm under Darian’s stare. “I sing to the dead as a Seeress, Wandbearer of the eastern river clans. My ancestors murmur behind the veil, growing louder now that I am marked.”

Darian grimaced visibly. “You expect me to believe that?”

“You don’t have to.” She stared at his face. “The bond wasn’t meant to rule, but to remember our ancestors, foster compassion, and connect all fae and humans.”

“The courts never said that.”

“No,” she said, “because your courts serve the Bone Seats, who fear what they can’t own.”

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “Then what do they own now?”

“They own all our memories, past and present. They return them to us as false, rewritten to cleanse and control the past.”

The fire popped. The twin woodcutters gaped.

Darian crossed his arms. “You say the bond wasn’t about control. That’s fine. The Elemental Seats have always ruled it, and they’ve used me as a puppet for the Boundless to blame. The fae Elemental Seats have ruled the bond for thousands of years and—”

“You are wrong,” she interrupted.

He went still.

“They were like me once,” she said. “Balanced. Half of each.”

Darian stiffened. His voice was loud. “Fae and humans can’t mix. That’s impossible. The bond forbids it. That’s what we were told.”

I gasped. Too loud in the quiet. Memories of the redhead surged like water through a cracked gate.

The woman with the five circles on her forehead.

The woman who called herself the Fifth. She floated through my mind, sometimes vibrant with youth, sometimes aged and wise, but always with those pointed ears that lodged behind my eyes and stayed .

The old woman who called herself a wandbearer reached up and tucked her long gray and white-streaked braid behind her shoulder. Next, with a steady hand, she pushed back the hair from one side of her head. One ear, pale and curved to a fine point, caught the firelight.

No one spoke.

Her eyes, which had been veiled by the fog of age only moments prior, suddenly blazed with an intense, piercing green.

“Mixed-bloods are more common than Half-Bloods now. We weren’t erased, though.

The Bone Seats hid and forgot us, replacing us with something else. That started four hundred years back.”

Darian closed his eyes as he squeezed the bridge of his nose. “What else?”

She looked at him with something older than pride. “The Bone Seats are mixed-blood, like you all are, but they’re part of something else as well.”

“What are they?” asked one of the old men, his voice hoarse.

The little girl crept closer to the baker woman and held her sleeve.

I leaned forward. “What are they now?”

The old woman’s gaze dropped to her lap. Her fingers clenched tight in her shawl. “Born from the place where realms split—what some call the fissured one.”

Nessa Tidehook, the fisherwoman, stood slowly, joints popping. Her frame was wide and low-set, shaped by years of hauling nets and gutting catch on the river stone. A gray knot secured her hair. She squinted at the elder, one foot braced like the ground might shift.

“Fissured Realm?” Nessa muttered. “Ain’t ever heard of that in a fisher’s tide.”

"Fissured as in cracked,” said the elder. “Nothing to do with fish, Nessa.”

“What are those Bone Seats now, Astrid, Dear? Please tell us. What are they now? Fae or something else?” She shook her head, muttering again. “What are they now…”

Darian echoed her. “What is the Fissured Realm?”

Astrid closed her eyes. Her mouth pinched like the words tasted wrong. She shook her head. “Let’s skip that. ”

Nessa dropped back onto the stone with a grunt, knees wide, elbows on them. “Well, I asked it plainly, didn’t I?” She picked at a scar along her forearm and gazed into the flames. “I remember my grandmother used to hum to water. She said it hummed back.”

The elder stirred the coals with a crooked stick. “You asked why we remember and why the bond marks us.”

I nodded.

“We’re all part fae blood here. Our ancestry carries this blend quietly, hidden in our marrow.”

Darian’s voice sharpened. “All of you?”

“And you, Prince Darian.”

“Ridiculous.” Darian slammed both fists into his thighs and stood. His voice had turned to ice, but his expression burned. “You don’t know anything.” He looked at Astrid like her words had stained something sacred.

I didn’t care how confused he was. I didn’t care how many memories the Bone Seat had tampered with. He still thought he was above us. Still spoke down like we were simple, superstitious folk who’d dragged him into something lesser.

A prince playing peasant. Spoiled, but still smug.

I turned my head and caught the blacksmith rising from the shadows across the circle. His arms were thick with work, forearms streaked with soot. His brown skin gleamed with sweat, black hair cropped tight.

His voice remained low and calm. “You speak to her like that again, and I’ll put you in the ground.”

Darian froze. His hand twitched near his belt, out of habit.

I stepped between them before it twisted further. “Enough. We’re not enemies here.”

The blacksmith’s eyes stayed locked on Darian. “He talks like we’re the enemy.”

I glanced at Darian, but his gaze didn’t fall on me.

And that silence told me everything. The thought of him shedding his clothes and stepping into the river beside me had seemed so enticing in my daydreams. I had pictured our skin brushing as we drifted closer.

But now I wished I had never let such a fantasy escape my mind.

“Only the oldest still carry the true half-blood line,” said one of the two elders, his voice worn. “The youngest came after the purges. Those of you marked now—you’re only part fae. And Prince Darian of the Moon Court here? He’s only part human. A sliver. But enough.”

“We hid,” said the dark-skinned elder with dreadlocks. “After that, we forgot. The Bone Seats made sure of that.” “But now, with these marks, we are remembering our true pasts.”

“My folks were told to breed it out,” Nessa Tidehook said, tugging her sleeve down over her marked wrist. “Came to me in a dream, they did—last night, clear as the tide. Said it lingers if the bond still remembers you and where you come from.”

I peered at a little boy beside me. “And the children?”

Astrid glanced at the boy’s mark, glowing faintly. “It listens to them because it knows what they came from.”

The baker nodded slowly. “My cousin used to draw three circles on the dough before it rose. Always three. Said her mother taught her. Said it helped the bread hold its shape.”

“Some of us carried what we could,” the old man with the beard said.

“That knowledge didn’t come from books. That would have been dangerous.

In habits. My grandfather had silver in his eyes.

He said to trace the circles if we ever forgot our names.

We didn’t know why, but that generation did.

I’m three-hundred and fifty years old. They hid, and they hid us, too. ”

Astrid lifted her head. “Mixed-blood lines flow quietly through the valleys. Some remembered without knowing why, even without marks. Perhaps it’s because we’re Borderlanders or mixed. We stitched, pressed, and carved these shapes into cloth, bread, and doorframes.”

Darian rolled up his sleeves and glared at the fire. I didn’t feel any sympathy for him. How could I when he acted like this?

I pressed my fingers against the place where the first mark had risen on my skin. “Then we start here. ”

The tether curled low in my chest—quiet, alert, waiting.

The marked ones slept that night without dreaming.

It started small. A whisper at the edge of morning.

The twin woodcutters stood in the courtyard at dawn. One spoke a sentence. The other finished it without pause. Same words. Same cadence. As if the breath had simply passed from one throat to the other.

“The circle holds when you name it.”

They stared at each other, startled. Laughed. Stopped.

Later, a few of us were tidying the outer hall. The girl with the red thread, called Willow, sat on the edge of a toppled beam, kicking dust with her heels as she hummed something soft under her breath. I didn’t know the tune. Neither did the others, but we paused, drawn to it. She fell silent.

From deeper in the Keep, in one of the side rooms near the old armory, the fisherwoman picked it up and sang it so loudly it reached us all. Same melody. Half a beat later. Like she’d caught it in a dream. Willow looked up. So did I. The little girl had only been singing quietly.

They stared at each other when we brought them together. They were like two strangers who shared something beyond description.

By midday, I heard pieces of my own memory coming from their mouths. The riverbank. The Keep. Mom’s kitchen. Dad’s boots walking away. Ryn.