Page 30 of Marked by the Enemy (The Binding Vow #1)

Chapter twenty-one

The Blade that Remembers

T he rain came without warning. I stood beneath the lintel at the southern wall, gazing at the path vanish into mist. The edges of the courtyard blurred first. Then the trees. Then the hills. The sky sealed its eyes. My mark warmed. The corridor pulsed as it recalled.

Behind me, Darian was dressed for travel in a black coat.

“We don’t have to go yet,” I said.

He fastened the last strap and turned to me.

“We do.”

He was right. The corridor hadn’t closed. Some wandered too deep. Most returned. A few were fractured. One path differed from the rest, circling back—to the person it remembered. It had showed me the blade, remembered it, and wanted me to carry it.

“What if it’s a trap?” I asked.

“It probably is.”

“And if it’s not?”

“We come back changed.”

We walked to the foot of the foot of the hill.

He peered at me with those gray-blue eyes. “Are you certain this is the right path?”

“No.”

“But we’re still walking it?”

“Yes.”

The link blinked between us and went still. We tramped up the hill, past the outer wall, and toward the trees. The path opened like a scar, and although the air turned cold, after hours of walking, we were hot from the exertion.

It took us half a day of climbing hills and descending ravines until we entered a place where the trees grew differently. Closer together, limbs twisted in ways that didn’t match the rest of the valley’s rhythm. The leaves were pale and out-of-season, out-of-time. Darian slowed behind me.

His breath changed. “This isn’t natural.”

“It’s not meant to be.”

The bond between us flexed once. Every root beneath our feet seemed to lean toward the silence between our words. The quiet had weight. Even the air held its breath. Up ahead, a break in the undergrowth revealed a worn stone arch. It was cracked down one side and swallowed in moss.

“A bond-site,” Darian said.

I nodded.

The air inside the arch tasted like copper and memory, deep and untouched. We crossed into it. The change was instant. The world shrank to stone and shadow. The trees fell away. The tether stayed with us, steady as breath, but everything else became a chamber of shadow and dust.

Stone lined the walls now. Old, smooth, worn by feet that had passed here long before we were born. At the end of the hall, something flickered and waited. A long table carved from dark rock stood beneath a ring of open sky. A single shaft of misted light cut down to the blade at its center .

The blade was simple. Iron. Plain. Forgettable—except to the vow. The hilt was wrapped in faded cloth, the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a soldier’s belt.

Darian stood beside me. “Is it yours?”

“No,” I said. “But it knows me.”

The moment my fingers brushed the hilt, the vow-magic roared. It wasn’t invasive. It felt like a page turning. The air shimmered with a visionary retelling.

There was a town. Old. Spires and colleges, stone streets baked pale by the sun.

A fountain stood in the square. A statue of a woman, arms raised.

Inside a high-walled ring, men and women danced.

Painted drums, smoke-streaked faces, gold stitched in hem and eye.

Smoke rising from a bowl on the altar—resin, sandalwood, frankincense.

A young woman danced hollow-eyed, something blue burning beneath her skin.

Cropped hair. Closed eyes. When she opened them, she was still the same woman.

But something had risen inside. Blue light.

A fae woman curled in her skin, faint as mist. The others didn’t notice. They kept dancing. Then it vanished.

The next image came as I peered down from the sky. A geoglyph, etched in chalk across hills and valleys, vast and curved like a spine. Seasons blurred. Faces changed. Stones rose. And still, the blue shapes stayed inside them. Each one lit with a blue being inside—body-snatched and possessed.

They laid bricks, carved runes, raised courts over the marks. Castles. Temples. Churches. Every stone placed by hands that were not alone.

The Keepers of the Vow, with their blurred faces, came next. Some crawled like animals. Some clawed the stone like birds. None could leave. The corridor stilled.

Darian exhaled. “What was that?”

“I don’t know.”

He looked at the blade. “Were there only humans before? What were the blue ones?”

“They looked like fae. ”

“So why build courts on top of the glyphs?” he said. “Was that how they made people believe? That they were… more?”

I inhaled the dust and let the silence answer for me. “They may have been drawn to the magic.”

“Or perhaps they didn’t belong here at all. Those Keepers of the Vow, the ones from the roots of the Moon Court. They helped us, but they were anxious and sad. They didn’t want the courts. They wanted the old ways, the ways they were supposed to protect.”

I rubbed my temples. “Don’t start rewriting the world.”

“It was never meant to bind two people like this,” he said.

“Has it bound any others?”

He shook his head. “Perhaps that sorceress in the ring was the first link.”

“The one playing the drum in my vision?”

He nodded.

“Maybe she opened something,” I said. “Maybe she tied the realms together.”

He nodded once. “Or broke something that kept them apart.”

When we journeyed away from the bond-site, the wind whistled over the hills.

The valley didn’t stir. And yet the change in energy was everywhere—subtle, spreading, like water moving through seams in stone.

The pull in the bond had changed shape. Instead of pressing inward or reaching out, it moved with me.

Darian kept one step behind because he understood the rhythm better than anyone now.

Even during his silence, I perceived his thoughts.

They were all worried, sad, traumatised, guilty, and ashamed.

Nothing good came through, like any good feelings he had toward me or whether he found me alluring or pretty.

And that silence hurt more than I wanted to admit.

Back at the Keep, the marked had gathered in the courtyard. We told them all that had happened, and all we had seen. Different people had different interpretations. Branwen stood with Willow. Nessa Tidehook leaned against the archway. Jack kneeled in the dirt, drawing circles.

Astrid approached first. Her eyes held a question, but she kept her lips tightly sealed. I laid the blade across the stone ledge at the center of the courtyard. They all saw it. They didn’t cheer. They didn’t kneel. That had never been our way. Instead, they drew closer. Quiet. Steady.

“It’s not a weapon,” I said. “It’s a record.”

“What does the sword say?” Branwen asked, tightening her blue headscarf over her auburn hair.

“It remembers the first bond.” The tie hummed low in my ribs.

Willow perked up. “The real one?”

“The original.”

They didn’t flinch. The blade glimmered.

The dead boy’s mother, with her dark bobbed hair, bowed her head and turned her wrist so the glowing red mark beneath her skin caught our attention. “I always wondered why the vow didn’t silence my grief. Now I believe it never intended to do that.”

The binding vow rippled outward, like a bell struck once and still ringing. Everyone stepped forward, and, one by one, the marked touched the stone so they could be seen. And each time, the vow answered. The blade glowed softly as dusk and settled. A record kept.

When Darian stepped forward, he looked at me instead of touching the stone. “It seems we’ve mistaken silence for peace.”

“And pain for failure,” I replied.

He scratched at his black stubble. “What now?”

I gazed at the blade, at the hands still resting beside it, and at the bond we’d all stepped into together. “Now we build the vow as it was meant to be.”

That night, no one slept, as we all stood ready. The Keep was peaceful, but it held sound differently now. The stones remembered. They passed small movements from one wall to another—footsteps in the training yard, a cup set down.

I sat by the fire in the hearth of the hall to ponder. The corridor hadn’t reopened since the blade’s return. I wasn’t sure if it would open again tomorrow or ever. And perhaps that was the point. The corridor wasn’t ours to summon. It opened when it chose or when we stopped demanding.

Darian leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. He hadn’t said much since sunset, but I felt him watching. I always did. He wasn’t guarding me anymore. He was watching for the shape of what came next.

“We need more than memory,” I said. “We need structure.”

“You mean rules.”

“No. Memory that can be taught. Passed. Built on. We need to know how the Forgotten Numbers before me failed. Abigail hasn’t come to me again. I think she’s angry that I lost the coin. But I have it again now. I only need to know what to do.”

“And that fae woman, Sael, wants part of her soul back,” Darian said. “We need to cut the binds from the demons in the Fissured Realm wherever that is.”

I nodded. “Exactly.”

He came to the fire and crouched, resting his elbows on his knees. “You’re thinking about what happens when you’re gone.”

“I’m thinking about what happens if I don’t plan for it.”

The fire cracked sharply.

He said, “So we write it down.”

“Words aren’t enough. They forget. They twist.”

“So we pass it through the bond. Mark to mark.”

“You’re saying we imprint it?” I asked.

“Yes. But we don’t imprint the stone. We imprint the people.”

“That’s what they’ve already done, the Bone Seats and their demons.”

“But those bonds were impure and forced,” he said. “Your bond is innocent.”

“It’s yours, too,” I said. “It chose both of us, remember? ”

“You carry the dominant thread. You belong to the Echoed Chain. Forget the rest for now. The Bone Seats tried to seal it away—but you’re giving it room to grow.”

I agreed and leaned back, letting the heat chase against my spine. The bond magic used to be happy before it became fearful. What we made now wasn’t safe, but it was honest. And the bond seemed to favor honesty.

Willow appeared in the doorway, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “I can help.”

“You should be resting.”

She shook her head. “Sleep doesn’t matter. The trouble’s elsewhere. It’s all the noise. I can hear people thinking. I can hear them remembering in my head.”

“Even now?”

She nodded. “Especially now.”

I sucked in a tight breath and stood. Had the weapon I now wielded caused this to happen to the girl? “Come closer.”

Crossing the room, she kneeled by the fire. I clearly saw three marks on her forearm, wrist, and palm. But through her cotton layers beneath her collar, a bright orange shimmer continued forming at her heart center.

I took her hand gently. “What else do you hear?”

“Names,” she whispered. “Some still unsaid. Some don’t belong to us.”

Darian stiffened. “Don’t belong to us?”

She nodded. “From beyond the corridor. From other realms.”

I looked at him. Then back at her. And I understood. “The vow is listening to others as well.”

“The spiral is cracked,” she said. “And that makes the corridor insecure.”

The marked stood at the edge of the largest fighting ring, eyes on the ridge where a lone man had appeared, naked and covered in ash. He had a completely bald head. He stopped at the old trail’s end. And waited .

Darian came beside me. “He’s marked.”

“Look closer.”

No circles. No lines. But when he stepped into the light, we saw them—white threads beneath his skin, faint as cracks in stone. They ran across his chest and arms, a broken lattice. The kind of mark made by surviving what should have erased him.

He raised one hand as he walked up the path and stopped at the gate.

The bond leaned toward him. Up close, I saw grey at his temples.

His eyes didn’t crave power, only friendship and permission to join us.

I didn’t believe him to be from this world, though, and although the bond agreed, it felt warm toward him.

“You went from memory to that which lay hidden,” I said.

He nodded. “And you brought it back.”

“Who are you?”

“A record,” he said. “One that survived the burning.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that, but confirmed, “You helped write the vow.”

“Yes, and you’re rewriting it now.”

“You must be ancient,” I said, unsure how someone could live for longer than a fae.

“I am very old indeed.” He looked past me, toward the Keep and the corridor.

I noticed his face didn’t look old at all, despite the ash that covered his naked skin. Perhaps he was pure fae. He certainly had fae ears. His face was smooth, and his skin was stretched thinly over bone.

“This won’t end quietly,” he said. “You need wardstones, and I know where they are.”

“In a town called Oxford?” The voice came from nowhere, out of my mouth.

He smiled once. “Yes. I’ll walk behind you. I’ve seen enough to know you lead. But first, pack up your bedrolls and belongings. We journey to the ancient city, and it will be a three-day hike.”

“My old knees can’t endure that,” Jack said, no longer crazy, since I’d returned with the blade .

“Anyone who isn’t able or doesn’t wish to come, stay here,” the ash-man said. “We will return with more Vowborn within this moontide.”