Page 26 of Marked by the Enemy (The Binding Vow #1)

Chapter eighteen

The Coin

T he corridor seemed to breathe as I walked at the front with Darian’s slow steps behind me. Willow and Rainer whispered together further back. It pleased me that Willow’s mother, Rainer, now possessed three marks. They had intertwined quickly, and the corridor had opened to her even quicker.

Astrid’s staff tapped every so often against the stone, her grip tighter than usual. I questioned her need for it; her posture, like bamboo, was perfectly straight. Branwen and Lymseia brought up the rear, silent.

The path twisted—but the bends came too fast, too sharp.

I extended my fingertips toward a wall and found a mirror instead.

It didn’t show me. The bond surged violently beneath my skin, like an electric current.

It exceeded a mere flicker. It yearned, almost desperately, for something from this place.

When the light thinned and the walls opened wide, I knew who we’d find before she appeared. She stood at the far edge of the chamber, back to us, her hair pulled into a knot at her neck with twine. The redhead. The one who named herself the Fifth.

All my friends could perceive her. They stood there, waiting. I stepped forward, but didn’t speak yet. She turned. Her face appeared sharper than I recalled; her eyes held an unnamable quality. She seemed more authentic now. Like this space allowed her shape to hold.

She looked straight at me. “You lost it.”

The bone comb warmed again in my pocket.

Her voice came out tight. “The coin, I mean.”

Shame slid low in my throat. “I was a child. I didn’t realize what it was.”

Her jaw trembled. Her hands opened and shut. She retreated slightly; the sorrow seemed to be intensifying, with nowhere left to escape. “I sent it to you as a gift. Through a gate I barely held open. I gave it to a boy with silver hair and wise eyes. Do you remember him?”

“Yes. But I only remember since the bond chose me.”

She nodded and sighed. “Well, that’s something. He carried part of me with him. And now that part is gone. That coin was the lock and the key. I am stuck here.”

Her voice cracked. And when she cried, a stream poured from beneath her feet, rising as if the floor itself broke into water. It twisted around our ankles, shimmered up our calves, and then vanished as fast as it came, leaving only puddles.

I stepped forward again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. But I’m here now.”

“It isn’t enough.”

I opened my hand. Showed her the bone comb. “This stayed. I found the runes. In the Moon Court archive. Three human symbols.”

She looked at it but didn’t reach. “And do you understand their collective significance?”

“Two of them, yes. But the moon court with water, I am unsure about.”

She gave a tight nod and turned her face slightly to the others behind me. Astrid stepped closer. Her hand trembled as I passed the comb to the wand bearer. Astrid rubbed her thumb over the carved edge, but didn’t speak.

“You recognize them,” I said.

“I don’t,” she said too quickly.

I stared at her trembling hands. “You do. Or you want to.”

She passed it back, but didn’t meet my eyes .

Rainer, Willow’s mother, touched Astrid’s arm. “You and Talia. You’re both from the northern lands, aren’t you?”

Astrid went still. “My ancestors were from Lunegard. I was born there, but was forced to leave when I was a little girl. My ma was called Isis, but she abandoned me. I had a sister, also, whose name I can’t remember. Everyone else I forgot.”

The woman sucked in a breath through gritted teeth, then swallowed hard.

“I was born in Riverell, a village by the river’s edge—the Northern Run, which feeds the Northern Sea. Riverell was across the river from Lunegard. My mom was born in Lunegard.” I said.

“Lunegard, yes. A beautiful place, especially in the summer.” Lines radiated around Astrid’s puckered lips, and I wondered what wounds she pushed so deeply down to deny me the help I needed to understand. Perhaps dragging memories up of her mother and sister was too painful.

Branwen looked between us. “Maybe this was meant for both of you.”

The redhead’s voice came again, quieter now. “Names don’t carry weight unless someone remembers them.”

I asked her, “What’s yours?”

She hesitated. “Abigail.”

“Who are you?”

“A prisoner to this realm I’m in.”

“I think Talia means to ask who were you before?” Darian said in a deep voice.

My arms prickled.

“I don’t trust you, Son of the Bone Seat,” Abigail said.

I didn’t look at him, but I knew his eyes would be burning into my back. My pulse picked up, but I kept my gaze on Abigail.

A breath left him, though, thin and rough, as if it hurt on the way out. Without touching the thread or seeing what lived behind his eyes, I still understood that his pain was there. I carried it anyway.

His hand touched my waist ever so lightly for a second, like he was reaching out for me to help him, to help that part of him which was born from the Fissured Realm—whatever that place was.

His hand trembled against me as if something had cracked at the hinge, and he hadn’t decided whether to let it break or hold it shut. The chamber dimmed.

She pointed to my heart. “You may have lost the coin, but you are the Fifth now.”

I looked down at my chest. A rose of white light had bloomed there. It glowed through the leather of my tunic as a shimmering mark of hundreds of petals. I opened my mouth to speak, but when I looked up, she was gone as if she’d never been there at all.

The puddles on the floor had vanished. The stone was dry. But the mark in the center of my chest shimmered before dimming. We turned to go.

But I glanced back once and whispered, “We’ll find the coin.”

And I perceived, faint and far away, the river move.

Back at the Keep, under a sheet of stars, the fires in the largest fighting ring had burned low and smelled of cold ash.

Someone had laid flint in a circle within the fighting ring.

It must have taken a lot of time and effort.

The flint glowed white under starlight. Only Nessa was waiting inside the ring.

Her eyes flicked over each of us, counting. She nodded. “We went through that corridor, same as you,” Nessa said. “Now we got three circles each.”

“The elders?”

She gave a sharp nod. “Aye. The two old fellas. Baker’s got one. Blacksmith. Me. Even that fancy noble fella.”

Darian stepped up beside me. “The bond let you in?”

Nessa snorted. “Didn’t stop us, did it? We ain’t walked your road, but the Keep opened all the same.”

We entered the courtyard where the others had gathered.

Jack stood beside the forge, his pale face streaked with ash. “You were gone a full night. It’s early in the morning now. ”

“It felt like an hour,” I said, leading them all into the main hall. I lit a fire in the hearth beneath the grand chimney. “Why didn’t you sleep?”

“We wanted to make sure you were safe,” Lina, the Baker, said.

“You can see for yourself we are well,” Astrid said from behind me.

“That’s how the deep corridors work,” said the Ulric. “Time knots itself.”

Ruen, older than all of us, looked up from where he sat by the stone table. “I saw a vision of my brother. He was singing in the old tongue. A song we never finished.” His voice cracked. “He remembered the end.”

No one asked what he meant. We didn’t need to.

Willow stepped closer. “She was in there, right? The red-haired one.”

“She told me her name,” I said. “Abigail.”

At that, even the bond turned over, as if it remembered her, too.

“She cried when I told her I lost the coin,” I added. “She said she would be trapped now. Forever. In the Fissured Realm.”

Willow tugged at the thread round her wrist, jaw tight. “So we have to remember her until she’s free.”

All the marked ones had stepped into the corridor, each carrying pieces of their own and others.

“We made us a Memory Circle in the big fighting pit,” Nessa Tidehook said.

“Is that what the stones are?” Astrid asked.

Nessa nodded, tossed her head back, and let out a rough laugh. “Me and Lina thought it up.”

“Are we sleeping out there tonight or in the Keep?” Lina asked.

Willow’s eyes lifted. “Stars are out,” she said. “We sleep under ’em.”

I glanced at Darian. As much of a victim as he was, I couldn’t help but wonder what monster lurked inside of him. If it was true that the Bone Seat was part fae and part something else entirely, then what part of his father was Darian?

We only slept for a few hours. Something woke all of us up. The mist rolled in early, curling through the trees and blanketing the valley with a stillness that was older than the Keep itself.

Darian and I stood on the eastern wall, watching the marked ones gather inside their Memory Circle, in the centre of the largest fighting ring.

They were quiet and focused. The vow-magic had begun to teach us in ways words couldn’t—through pulse and memory, through the steady rhythm of shared thought.

We all knew the Bone Seat would come. We had all been woken with the same words of warning from that creature who I had met in the forest–the same creature who had spoken through Willow’s mouth when she had carried the vow-magic and saved countless lives.

Unfortunately, we failed to save the ten who had perished.

Darian’s arms were crossed tightly over his chest as usual, his gaze fixed on the hills.

He hadn’t spoken much since we had entered the corridor during our walk the day before.

He was a man of few words, though that didn’t mean the revelations of his true father weren’t pressing against the edges of him like armor that hadn’t fully set.

“He’ll come soon,” I said. “He wants to erase the Fifth.”

“But you are the Fifth now.”

The link between us stirred.