Page 43 of Marked by the Enemy (The Binding Vow #1)

Chapter thirty

The Spiral Begins

I walked along the lower terrace in the afternoon. High above, the golden falcon circled, too slow for hunting. It looped three times, as if it wanted to warn me about something. A faint blue aura glowed around it for a moment.

The air distorted. I paused under the archway near the watchtower, heart ticking louder in my throat.

And then it reached my ears. A voice. Male.

“This place wasn’t for you, young Talia.

We had planned the binding between you and the Bone Seat’s son, but never, never, did we want to put you in danger. ”

I recognized the voice; it was the same one I’d heard under the Moon Court’s throne, and the same that came from the man with the bright blue aura. He had been trying to warn me about something, but somehow he had forgotten.

I spun and hurried back through the orchard paths, checking corners I didn’t mean to check. Camp shifted in fragments. Some tended fire. Others kept their eyes anywhere but on the Boundless, who settled like a siege.

I saw them again. The ash-covered man stood near the western wall. The strangeness of his winter nudity and ashy covering was surpassed only by the unusual energy he radiated, especially considering the bond’s welcoming embrace .

Beside him, the old man in slate-gray robes muttered into his ear, the twin fish-runes glowing within his right palm. They faced away from us, toward the trees, as if listening to something the rest of us didn’t hear. And then the little things started.

Lord Fen sat near the fire pit in the east courtyard with a book open in his lap. I passed him once, twice, three times. He hadn’t turned the page. His eyes didn’t even blink. A child crouched at the kiln wall, drawing spirals into ash. Over and over. Each perfect.

I found Branwen near the edge of the old memory circle, made from all those flint stones Nessa had brought up from the forest. Alone, hands braced against her knees, her breathing was shallow, as if she’d just finished running.

She flinched and tore her hand from her forearm, fingers curling like she’d touched a coal.

“What is it?” I asked, alarmed.

She whispered, “Someone else was inside of me for a minute or two.”

I touched the hilt of my blade, fingertips resting against the Water Seat of the Moon Court rune. The metal was too warm.

I didn’t remember walking back to the Keep. My boots carried me through the orchard paths and past the courtyard fire pit without thought or destination. The broken spirals in the ash still lingered. The hum of the bond lay submerged, as if trapped or hiding beneath a frozen lake.

I saw him, Darian, high up on the inner wall, one leg slung over the edge like a careless prince in some tale where nothing bad ever happened. The light cut across his shoulder and the wind toyed with his hair, but he looked carved there. Still. Alone.

I hated how far away he seemed. Like if I blinked, the wind might take him.

He seemed to be partially absent already.

I crossed the courtyard and climbed the wall stairs.

His back rested against the stone, one leg drawn up, the other dangling over the battlement as if unafraid of falling. The wind tugged at his hair.

Darian didn’t move when I approached. Didn’t even glance over. “Did it get worse?” he asked .

I leaned beside him, arms folded on the cool stone. “Do you want the truth or something soft?”

A ghost of a smile. “Truth, please. We passed soft a long time ago.”

I told him about the Boundless still being angry, the marked ones still being confused, the man-boy who nearly drew blood, Branwen recoiling at the memory circle, the shimmer in the air.

He remained quiet for a moment. Finally, he said, “It’s me, isn’t it?”

I opened my mouth to deny it. To protect him from his own thoughts. But I sensed it beneath his words—that guilt, heaviness and hopelessness, as if he believed himself the poison in the well.

“No.” I turned to face him fully.

His eyes searched the horizon, but I knew he wasn’t seeing it. “I didn’t ask to be this, to carry something… woven into the thing that breaks people.”

“You didn’t choose what you were born into,” I said. “But you’re choosing what you stand for now. That’s what matters.”

His hand brushed his chest mark absently, and he cringed, like it itched. “I keep dreaming of my mother. The moment before the Bone Seat took her head. It’s worse than a memory. It lingers. It’s as if the bond is trying to show me what I became the moment I signed.”

I wanted to touch him. Not with the bond. With my hands. Before I could answer, a click echoed below the wall. Below, the ash-man stood at the keep’s entrance, the memory circle warping behind him in the largest fighting ring.

Beside him, the old man with the fish-rune kneeled slowly and placed something in the dirt. I couldn’t see what. But when he stood, the vines nearby twisted slightly, like they’d grown wrong for half a breath before snapping back.

Darian stood beside me. “Do you feel that?”

My chest heaved to the point that it groaned with each breath.

The sound of heavy footfalls up the steps broke the silence. Lord Fen appeared. He looked terrified as he squinted down at the ash-man. “The bond appears dense. There’s something wrong with it. There’s something strange about those two.” He nodded toward the strange duo .

I stared back at the coal-black eyes of the ash-man.

My heart kicked a ruckus in my chest, mingling with fear and excitement with my blood, though the bond lay placid.

I touched the coin in my pouch for protection—Abigail’s, passed to me from the boy specter.

It thudded like a second pulse against my fingertips, warm and restless.

The hilt of my blade was scorching hot. That was when Willow screamed. It rang through the Keep—sharp and panicked.I ran to the south edge of the wall, boots slamming against stone.

Willow stood below in the center of the lower courtyard, her hands raised as if trying to push back the sky. Her golden sigil flared across her chest and down her arms, expanding throughout the space surrounding her—a rising sun over curved hills, roots glimmering and writhing underneath.

“Don’t let him in!” she yelled at me, almost crying.

I leaned over the battlements. “Willow, who—?”

“I saw him, Talia,” she yelled at me, almost crying. “I saw him, Lyr, the seed boy. But his face was blurred, like water, like something was wearing his skin! And there was a door behind him. It wasn’t ours. It doesn’t belong to us.”

A chill cut through me, sharp as river-ice. I turned, drawn by a motion Darian had caught first. At the far end of the wall, the prince sat still as stone, legs still dangling recklessly over the edge, eyes locked on the orchard below.

I hurried to him, heart thudding in my eardrums. “Come behind the wall,” I said, already reaching.

He let me tug him gently away from the drop, rising in one fluid motion. When he stepped beside me, he curled an arm low around my waist. His hand rested against the small of my back, warm through the fabric.

He could have turned to face the enemy. He could have stepped forward like a prince. But he stepped toward me first. He could have faced the threat. He could have played the prince. But he chose me instead.

The bond between us didn’t spark or tense like it usually did during moments like this. It felt loose. Soft. Like it had been drugged with pipe weed and tucked under a blanket. It didn’t match what I felt at all .

I was terrified. Not of dying. I was terrified it would take him from me, and I wouldn’t know who he’d be when it gave him back.

And still, I leaned into Darian enough to make it clear that I would shield him if it came to that.

I loved him, and I didn’t care what ancient rot was staring at us from below. But gods, I was afraid.

The ash-man was there still. His companion still kneeled, drawing long and curling symbols, which dragged into the compacted mud. They vanished after he completed each one, as if the soil was drinking them. Like the world itself refused to remember what he was writing.

I didn’t wait. I ran. Down the wall stairs, across the upper courtyard, through the gate. My feet hit the mud, breath loud in my ears.

When I reached them, the ash-man stared forward, his eyes completely black, statue still. The old man remained kneeling calmly at his side, as if he hadn’t summoned fear from a girl with sunlight in her veins.

“Look at me,” I snapped to the kneeling old man who had only arrived two nights ago.

When he spoke, his eyes rolled up—clouded, electric blue like lit stormglass. His voice scraped out like wind across iron. “The spiral opens when the record turns.”

“What does that mean?” I demanded. “Who are you?”

Electric blue clouds smothered his eyes. “You already knew it once.”

I staggered forward. “What did you do to them? To the bond?” My blade throbbed at my hip, burning with heat, but I didn’t draw it.

The kneeling old man placed both palms flat on the earth. And then he vanished. No spell. No glamor. He sank. Skin, bones, robes—drawn down by the soil. Broken spirals widened beneath him, glowing, writhing, devouring his shape.

The three wolves howled before crying and squirming on the ground. The falcons landed beside them, then lay on their backs, feet kicking. Three fireflies pulsed red and white. One landed on the wolf’s heart.

The ground groaned. The coin in my pouch buzzed so hard it bruised my thigh. The bond screamed. I turned to shout for Darian—but the sky bent. The air around the Keep shivered. Light warped at the edges of everything. Sound vanished. Silence swallowed every breath like snow before an avalanche.

People ran from the orchard, from the courtyards, from the walls. The marked. The Boundless. All of them drawn toward the broken spiraling scar that pulsed in the dirt where the old man had been.

Fen stumbled out of the courtyard, mouth open. “The bond feels—thick—like it’s breathing.”

I barely heard him, because Rainer… Willow’s mother stood solid and still, her limbs tense, and her fingers clawed. Her mouth fell open, but no sound came out. Her eyes flooded white, like moonlight poured into them. She swayed once and dropped to her knees.

Her sun over the rooted hill sigils turned gray before bleeding outward in threads of silver and black, as if her memories unraveled. Her back arched, her mouth was wide in a silent scream, and she collapsed into the mud.

Willow sobbed. “No! Mommy!”

Priestess Jinth dropped to her knees, clawing at her scalp with trembling hands. “He’s within me! I sense him. I can read his mind!”

Others were falling. Branwen. Lina. Nessa. Ruen. Fen. Their sigils bubbled and boiled before twisting and turning gray. Shapes they’d never been marked with bloomed across their skin: black skulls, dripping vines, rotted circles.

They weren’t sigils. They were scars, left by something that fed on remembrance.

The bond thrashed in my chest. It wasn’t magic anymore. It was an animal, panicking inside me, trying to claw free. The coin pulsed so hard I thought it might crack. The blade at my hip screamed.

And still, the ash-man stood. Only now… a cloak of shadow billowed around him. The darkness moving like smoke over his shoulders, the shape of it wrong. Too long. Too alive. Like a cloak worn by absence itself.

I prayed—silently, stupidly—that Darian would run. That for once, he wouldn’t stay for the storm .

The ash-man’s eyes—still bottomless black—locked on me. He held out the four wardstones from Oxford and whispered something to them. They turned to sand, which he let drift to the ground.

Darian was beside me. His chest heaved. His sword was out. I didn’t even see him draw it. He looked straight at the ash-man and roared, “That’s the demon from the orchard! He came through the portal!”

The ash-man tilted his head, as if he were trying to remember what we were. He opened his mouth.His voice was ancient, unbothered, and made of stone grinding on stone. “This world was not marked for you.”

The earth ruptured behind him. A broken spiral burned into the ground between the ring of memory stones, to the gate of the Keep, tearing open the ground in a widening ring of ultraviolet light.

And then the screaming began.