Page 24 of Marked by the Enemy (The Binding Vow #1)

Chapter sixteen

The River Holds

M id-morning was still thick with cloud above the hills. Branwen and Nessa had gone for water after breakfast, two jugs tucked under their arms, their boots already streaked with mud.

When they returned, Branwen brushed past the firepit and gripped my arm. “The river’s gone still.”

She pointed beyond the tree line. I followed her down past the outer wall. The path curved with wet roots, and the quiet only deepened as we neared the bend. There weren’t any birds singing or the trickling sound of the river.

Darian arrived behind us when we stood together at the edge of the water. The current had vanished as though someone had held it in place with an invisible palm. The reeds barely stirred. The reflection in the surface didn’t ripple.

My chest tightened when I realized my own reflection didn’t appear. “The bond is holding it.”

Darian crouched low, dipped two fingers into the surface, but the water stayed still. “It isn’t frozen. And there’s no dam.”

“No.” I crouched lower, watching how the surface held still without reason. “It’s the bond. ”

He glanced at me. “Ours?”

“The Bone Seat’s.” I shook my head and stood. “The piece of it he’s twisted. He’s using it to hold the water.”

“To what end?”

“To cut us off.” The words landed before I understood them. But they felt right. “He’s isolating us to stop what we’re building here.”

Branwen fidgeted beside me. “But we still have water. We drank from it this morning. I boiled oats in it. We can still cook. What kind of trap lets us live through it?”

Down at the river, the current slept. The peace remained. The surface shone flat as glass, but something below it felt wrong.

“It’s not the water,” I said. “It’s what the bond does with water. It carries memory. Sound. Change.”

Branwen sniffed and looped an arm through mine.

I let out a sharp breath through my mouth. “The bond echoes through what’s alive. Through what moves. He’s locked the current to keep the tether from traveling. From reaching anyone else.”

Branwen said slowly, “He’s starving it . ”

I nodded. “He doesn’t care if we live. He cares if the bond grows.”

“If the bond can’t travel… does that mean fewer will come?” Darian asked.

I didn’t turn. The river held my focus. Still unmoving. Still wrong.

“Yes,” I said.

He stepped closer, quiet. “So we’re cut off.”

“We can drink. But spiritually, we’re severed. Powerless to sway others toward freedom. The bond can’t reach, can’t spread—can’t return memory to anyone else.” I bent and touched the surface.

It didn’t react. No ripple. No echo.

“We’ve been sealed in,” I said. “The bond’s reaching—but it can’t get out. And no one else can sense it from the outside. Not while the river holds still.”

Branwen gripped my arm with both hands now, as if she was scared. “In that case, I am certain that the Bone Seat is afraid.”

“No,” I said. “He’s prepared. ”

“So we call in the one thing he can’t stop,” Astrid said from behind us in her soft and sweet voice, too young for such an old person.

We all turned. I hadn’t heard her come up behind us. Nimble for her age, she didn’t drag her feet like Ruen or Jack. I glanced at Branwen and Darian. Judging by their expressions, her arrival had gone unnoticed by them as well.

“What do we call in, Seeress?” Darian asked her.

Warmth flushed my chest. His increased respect toward the half-blood elders was a welcome change.

Astrid’s grip tightened on her staff. “We call in the one thing he can’t stop.”

Darian looked at her. “What’s that?”

“Memory and ancestors. Ours.”

We stared at it a little longer, then turned and climbed back to the Keep.

Late morning slid toward noon as the dry heat settled in. The air was so still that smoke lifted in slow ribbons from the firepit. We sat on splintered logs beneath the shade of the courtyard.

Fen returned from the woods with a young buck slung over his shoulder, sweat streaking his jawline and a nick above his brow from where a branch had caught him. He dropped it close to the Keep wall, and Ulric stepped forward, wiping his hands down his apron.

“Clean shot?” the blacksmith asked.

“Through the lung,” Fen said.

Ulric grunted approval. “Could’ve used a bit more bloodletting, but the meat’s yours to carve.”

The baker woman, whose name I now knew was Lina, was laughing.

“No. You don’t need to butcher that creature.

Let me.” She stood with one hand already reaching for the gutting blade.

Her strawberry-blonde curls were pinned back from her face, streaked with flour instead of age.

“Used to be a butcher before I was a baker.”

“You remember the tools?” Ulric asked, skeptical.

“I remember the weight.” She kneeled beside the carcass, rolled up her sleeves, and looked at Fen. “He died during a ransacking of our village. My husband. A good man. I didn’t want to look at bones again after that. Not even chicken.”

She laid the knife on the deer’s belly and began. The others gathered slowly. Nessa brought out the herbs she dried beside the cistern—rosemary, stinger leaf, a touch of fennel bulb.

Branwen had foraged wild onion earlier in the week and passed around fistfuls, still caked in earth. Talia offered salt, carefully preserved from the stores. Willow turned the spit with both hands, silent and wide-eyed.

By the time the meat was hissing, the mood had loosened. Darian sat slightly apart from the circle but didn’t pull away when someone passed him a strip of cooked meat folded in flatbread. The heat kept the flies away. The fire kept them close. Everyone was tired, but they chewed, and they spoke.

“How long ago did you see the mark?” Lina asked Fen.

“The ring on my right palm? A few days before I came here. What would that be? A couple of weeks ago.” He turned it up, showed them the half-fused ring.

Ulric squinted. “That’s the hand you eat with. Strange it’d appear there.”

“All the men have their marks on the right,” I said. “Right hand, right wrist, right arm. Don’t they?”

The circle went still. One by one, they looked down at their skin, turning over palms, pushing up sleeves. Murmurs passed between them as the pattern revealed itself.

“The women,” I said, slower now, “it’s the left.”

Heads nodded.

“Where’d you come from?” Branwen asked Fen.

Fen hesitated. “East coast.”

“That’s a long way to walk.”

“I didn’t walk all of it. I was given a lift on horseback most of the way. ”

The blacksmith eyed him sideways. “Skin soft on your hands and heels—proof you never worked a day. Tidy blade work. You been trained.”

Fen said nothing.

“You born noble?” Ulric pressed.

“I thought you had guessed that already.” Fen chewed slowly.

“What house?”

“I’d prefer to keep that to myself.”

Branwen tilted her head. “You running from something?”

“From someone.”

Ulric scoffed. “Well, we all are.”

Fen shrugged as he stared into the fire. “After the first mark, things changed. My family. The servants. I’d known them my whole life. But it was like… they stopped remembering how to speak unless spoken to. Like I’d walk into the room and they’d forgotten how to exist.”

No one spoke for a beat.

“It was like they were alive—but empty inside.”

“That’s what happens when the bond leaves a place,” Astrid said. She sat with her staff beside her knees, back straight as a post. “It doesn’t only take memory. It rewrites the need for it.”

I handed Fen a strip of flank. “What made you come here?”

“A dream. Of this place. Of a girl with a thread on her wrist and a woman who carried something in her chest she couldn’t name.”

Willow blinked. They ate in silence for a few minutes.

Lina leaned forward. “Do you remember what bread tasted like before the bond woke up in you?”

“Definitely tastes better now. Used to be saltier—and that ain’t just because I’m an old fishwife. Strange, ain’t it?” Nessa muttered.

“Are you a wife, Nessa?” I asked. “I mean, does your husband mind you being away?”

“I doubt he would even notice,” Nessa said.

“And thank the Goddess of the rivers that we never had children. I think I remember wanting them. I expect it is something the Bone Seat let us want so we would produce his labour force. I’m blessed I need not worry about littlens in such a turbulent time. ”

“But don’t you miss your husband?” Ulric asked.

She shrugged. “They’re all empty. They can survive, sure. They can work, get money, and survive. But I do think now that the Bone Seat took our souls. Took their souls. We’re getting ours back now, and that’s why everything tastes better.”

Branwen smiled. “I remember eggs. After lambing season. The smell in the thatch. My son throwing yolk at the post.”

“I remember kissing my husband on the ankle,” Lina said. “Because I was kneading with both hands.”

That made a few laugh. Even Darian exhaled through his nose.

Astrid didn’t smile. “I remember too much. That’s the danger, isn’t it?”

Ulric took another slice of venison. “The danger lies in forgetting.”

The fire popped. Smoke trailed sideways. Somewhere nearby, a beetle clicked under stone. Talia let her hands rest on her knees. The tether wasn’t moving. But it was awake. Listening.

“We’ll stay here for the day,” Astrid said. “But tonight, we ask them.”

“Ask who?” Lina asked, wiping her hands on a cloth.

“The ones who came before.”

“You think they’ll answer?”

“I think they already are,” Astrid replied.

The warmth stayed after the sun slipped down. The stars were clear—sharper than usual, as if the veil above had thinned. We moved back to the old fighting ring .

Someone had swept the dirt smooth earlier, and the soot had settled in soft patches across the edges. The marked ones came in quiet, one by one. Some sat on logs, dragged close. A few on the bare earth, legs tucked or crossed.

Willow curled beside her mother, head against her arm. Fen and Ulric crouched near the edge. Nessa sat cross-legged with a waterskin in her lap. Branwen stood for a moment before sitting near me.

Astrid walked the circle once before she sat, like a woman checking the lines of her own home. Her staff tapped the ground twice. Then she sat, knees apart, back straight. Her hands rested on her thighs. The bone beads in her braids caught the moonlight. Her voice came low.

“We don’t speak to the ancestors. We sing them awake. We braid our breath with theirs.”

No one asked what that meant.

She began to sing—not in words, not in any tongue I knew.

Just sound. Low, coarse syllables, throat-deep and slow.

It was like the wind in reeds, or the scrape of a grindstone.

I didn’t try to follow. None of us did. But the bond stirred.

I could feel it down my spine and at the edges of my chest, like something turning over in its sleep.

The air changed.

We didn’t fall into a trance. We didn’t speak in tongues.

But each of us saw something—the kind of memory that didn’t come from the mind, but from the heart.

Darian sat still, unmoving, but his eyes glinted too brightly in the firelight.

I knew something had come to him. His jaw had gone tight. I didn’t ask what he saw.

Mine came without warning. I wasn’t surprised to see it was her, though—the redhead who’d called herself the Fifth.

She stood alone on a cliff, salt wind pulling at her skirts, a storm churning over black water below.

Her hair was tied back with twine, her fae ears exposed.

Five silver rings glinted on her brow, smooth and interlocked.

Her voice was thinner than wind. “You must keep both of these, Talia the Fifth. Talia of Tarnwick. Please keep them both.” She held up a bone comb and an oval-shaped coin, rubbed soft at the edges.

Its tree sigil was on one side and the broken spiral on the other.

They were both half-faded from years of handling.

“One remembers. One trades. But don’t trust the fish-man and his friend. ”

Her eyes were my mom’s. Her voice wasn’t. But something in my bones answered to it.

“Fish-man? Like… a merman?”

But she had already faded away.

Branwen sucked in a breath beside me. Her fingers clutched the edge of my cloak. “I saw someone, too. A woman with eyes like mine, lighting a fire with a knife’s edge. She said my bloodline was never from farmers. She said we were royal.”

“My ancestor ran,” Fen blurted. “The one who looked like me. They burned the names at a feast table. He ran barefoot into the snow. Never looked back.”

Willow blinked. Her mouth opened and closed again. She shook her head. “I didn’t see anything, but I did hear the same words again: ‘You already saw.’”

Astrid didn’t stop the song. Not until the bond went still again, the way water does after wind passes. She opened her eyes, slow and heavy, like she’d come up from deep water. Her gaze moved to me.

I reached into my pocket. “There’s something else. Something I never told you.”

They turned toward me—Astrid, Jack, Lymseia, Nessa, Branwen, Fen, Ruen, Lina. Willow leaned her cheek against her mother’s sleeve. Even Darian looked up from where he sat near the edge of the ring.

I held out the bone comb. “It was left on my pillow the night before I fled the Moon Court. It was in a plain wooden box. I don’t know who sent it. I still don’t.”

Astrid took it carefully. Her thumb traced the carved lines. I watched her eyes widen—only slightly. But it was there. Recognition, too quick to be surprised. She handed it back. “I am unfamiliar with these symbols.”

But her hand trembled, and she kept her gaze on the ground.

I set the comb in my lap. “It’s fae-carved. That much I know. But the runes—they’re northern. Human. I found records in the Moon Court archive. Old ones.”

Branwen touched my arm softly with hers. I liked her warmth and friendliness. As a trained assassin, I’d never had that before, and it made my heart bubble.

“What else, Talia?” Branwen asked. “What else?”

I studied the comb again. “In the margin of the page, someone had written my name. Talia of Tarnwick.”

Astrid pulled her staff closer. “Perhaps it remembered you.”

“But the runes. You said you didn’t know them.”

“I don’t,” she said, yet her hand still trembled.