Page 42 of Marked by the Enemy (The Binding Vow #1)

Chapter twenty-nine

When the Mark Speaks

T he Keep seemed smaller by morning. Too many people.

Too many whispers. Eyes that no longer trusted.

I drifted through the orchard path. It was a cold, wet, and miserable day.

Spring was so far away. Steel rang from the forge.

But the forge didn’t laugh. The courtyard had never held so many people.

Now it barely held the silence between them.

The Boundless weren’t leaving. They’d claimed the old stables and a section of the armory hall. Every time I passed by, I was aware of the heat behind their stares. The air warped near them, shaped by old loyalties and older wounds.

The marked had changed too. They moved slower. Spoke softer. A few looked over their shoulders now, as if they were wondering if they should be afraid. This wasn’t what I fought for.

I recalled Oxford and the long hike west, the aching hope that there would be something at the end of it—some place where the broken might meet and become more than what the vow had made of them. A place where magic might mean belonging .

Instead, the bond was tight and stretched, cracked around the edges like old pottery.

Darian hadn’t come to breakfast. I reasoned that the strain kept him distant. The guilt, the shame. But the longer the morning dragged, the more that absence gnawed at something soft and stupid in me. What if he didn’t shun the camp? What if he shunned me?

I perceived him leave in the night—quiet, respectful. The tether between us had dulled. Numbness filled it, as if Darian held me at arm’s length.

His guilt sat heavy. Enough to dull my appetite. The shame he carried for being the Bone Seat’s offspring travelled through that numb thread to me as a hypersensitivity to noise, crowds, and activity. Those were his feelings, but they were permeating to me.

Maybe he preferred men. Maybe he preferred the fae. Maybe he felt nothing for me at all. But I still ached like someone waiting to be chosen. And right now, I pitied him more than anything. I understood his reason for departing the hall. He thought his presence only made things worse.

But understanding this didn’t stop the hollowness behind my ribs.

“You feel it too, don’t you?” Willow’s voice broke through the quiet. She was sitting on the edge of the stone basin, her hands clasped around her knees. Branwen stood beside her, slicing an apple with a small, wickedly curved knife.

I didn’t answer right away.

“They hate us all, don’t they?” Willow whispered. “They don’t just hate the prince. They hate all of us.”

Branwen’s knife didn’t pause.

“That’s because hate is easier than confusion.”

Willow looked up. Her eyes were too big for her face in the morning light.

Branwen met her gaze. “They remember pain. But they don’t remember what caused it. That’s the Bone Seats’ work. They hollowed it out of them, left only the wound.”

“It seemed to me they knew all about the Bone Seat. But they choose to be unforgiving of any gullible prince boys who were tricked into signing.” I sat down beside them and stared at the miserable sky .

It was pale and empty. For a moment, I wished a storm would come to shake things up. Something loud. Something honest. Because this quiet—the one wrapped around the Keep like a shroud—was too close to breaking.

The hall was too small for the weight we had brought.

Stone walls. Timber beams. A hearth without a fire.

The table in the center had once been a training map, carved with old river routes and alliance lines.

Now it was only scraped wood between us.

Only a few of the marked had come in, my closest friends–the first ones who had stayed with me before we journeyed to Oxford to collect more.

Jinth stood like she belonged there, even though my marked friends had been the ones to clean and furnish the place for comfort. Her staff was planted at her side, her good eye sharp, the other blank and unreadable. She remained standing. None of the Boundless sat.

I wondered why Prince Darian had set her free when he had told me she’d died under the hands of her interrogator, but I didn’t ask. They had probably sent spies after her to see where she ended up with her freedom and to take them to the Boundless.

Branwen stood with her arms folded, one foot braced against the edge of the table like she might kick it into kindling if the wrong words came next. Her turquoise eyes burned fanatically as she stared at the priestess.

Astrid sat beside her, quiet, teeth worrying at her bottom lip. Jack leaned against a post in the back.

Jinth didn’t wait for an opening. “The fae prince has to leave.”

No softening, no courtesy.

“If he stays,” she said, sweeping the room with her voice, “we walk. All of us. And we’ll take those who remember what your prince did when his name was still written in court ink and children’s blood. ”

My head boiled with fury. “He’s not—“

“He is,” she snapped.

Darian didn’t flinch—but I did, for him.

I wanted to throw myself between her words and his name. I wanted him to see I still would.

“You think the vow forgives you because you wear a different shirt?” she continued. “Because you look tired and talk in half-truths? He signed the pact. His blood runs through the Bone Seat. He’s tied to it by every strand of magic you’re pretending you understand.”

Branwen didn’t flinch. “We understand enough to know he’s our friend.”

Astrid spoke. Her voice was quiet, but firmer than I expected.

“We have the power of memory now. And Prince Darian isn’t a child anymore.

We were all made into tools for something we didn’t choose.

That’s what the Bone Seats did. You need to stop blaming the princes of the Fae Courts.

They were all small boys without the faintest clue. ”

“And you believe Talia?” Jinth jerked her chin toward me. “You believe the trained assassin who walked away from Mountain Stone to kill the prince, but who ended up marrying him instead?”

Jack straightened. “They left the Moon Court. The vow-magic exposed the truth to both of them. We follow truth. Talia brought it back.”

There was a sound from the Boundless side.

A scoff. Younger. Angrier. A young man stepped forward.

Barely eighteen. He had scars across both knuckles and the kind of stance that said it didn’t matter who he hit, so long as it landed hard.

“Why should we trust a woman who abandoned us for a crown?” he said.

“She left us with half a plan. We were counting on her.”

I strolled toward him. “I didn’t leave to forget. I left to remember. I saw things the courts tried to bury. I walked another realm called the corridor. I remembered the rebels of the Bone Seat. I want to break the Bone Seats’ hold, like my great-grandmother did—the Water Seat of the Moon Court.”

A collective gasp filled the air.

“My great-grandmother wasn’t pure fae. She was mixed-blood. Most of us are. Pure fae and pure humans are rare, but the demons inside the ten Bone Seats don’t want us to realize that.”

Another gasp.

“Like all the Elemental Seats used to be. My great-grandmother, the Water Seat of the Moon Court, forged her blade in blood and stone, and she wasn’t alone in her rebellion.”

They didn’t believe me. Not fully.

So I drew the blade. The sound it made wasn’t steel—it was memory. A low, ringing hum that climbed the walls and sank into the stone beneath our boots. My three runes—flickered silver along the edge.

Jinth stepped back. Her staff trembled. Behind her, the young rebel muttered something in mountain dialect, sharp and brittle as cracked bone. I knew the word: Oldblood.

The young rebel who’d spoken first snarled and grabbed the blade at his belt. He threw it. It flew fast and low, aimed straight for my chest.

Jack’s turquoise hammer and tongs sigil with ivy flared around him, and he directed it toward me. It hovered in place mid-air, a perfect circle of protective force. The blade struck it, spun, and dropped harmlessly at my feet.

Jack stroked his white beard. “Next time, aim for someone who doesn’t see you coming.”

Darian hadn’t moved much, but I’d seen the tilt of his stance, one foot sliding toward me with care. The man-boy staggered back, blinking. But the silence that followed felt like the moment before a thunderclap, when the air gets too thick to swallow.

The bond pulsed. I perceived it first in my teeth, then in the soles of my feet and chest, like a second heartbeat thudding out of rhythm with my own.

All around me, the marked went still. They changed, not just in stance, but in focus.

Their eyes changed. Their spines straightened. One by one, they stepped forward.

A circle formed, smooth and instinctual—Willow and Rainer to my right, Branwen to my left, Astrid two steps back, her marks already glowing faintly beneath her cuffs.

Jack didn’t move from the pillar, but his sigils spun like clockwork across his knuckles.

Ruen stood beside him, mirroring him. Lina and Nessa had entered, too, while Lymseia and Ulric stared at the Boundless from the shadows.

Each one radiated something old and rooted. Not rage. Not pride. Memory. The marks glowed. Light shimmered in blues, greens, molten copper, silver, pink, white, and gold. Symbols carved themselves into the dirt beneath our boots, rising in complex shapes.

But even as the magic climbed and bloomed, my eyes found Darian. If this shifted, if anything deteriorated—I needed assurance he was nearby. That he’d be safe and understand I remained with him.

The Boundless froze. They didn’t fear the magic. They couldn’t read its shape.

The magic resembled language, each sigil a sentence, each glow a lineage of something they couldn’t name.

Jinth took another step back. She hid it well. But I saw the tremble in her hand, the tightening of her jaw, and the doubt worming its way into a certainty she’d held too long.

She pounded her staff against the ground. “What are you becoming?”

I looked her in the eye and said softly, “Something older than hate.”

Darian didn’t speak. He looked at me—long and searching—as if memorizing who I was, the moment I chose him, anyway.