The Complete Marked Series Box Set

by March McCarron

  “Stay back a bit,” Ko-Jin said. “It will be hard for me to ride with that thing near.”

  Bray nodded and watched Ko-Jin swing onto his saddle. He trotted towards the coast. She waited a moment then kicked her heels and her own steed—a well-trained one, it would seem—sprung into motion.

  Yarrow’s flesh felt cold to her. He seemed to be drifting off to sleep. She stirred him. “Yarrow!”

  “Hm?” he asked blearily.

  “You need to stay awake,” she said. She wasn’t sure, medically, if this was true or not. But if he was awake and talking then he wasn’t dead.

  “You better entertain me, then,” he said softly.

  “Alright,” she said and racked her withered mind for ideas. “Let’s play the question game.”

  “It’s not really a game,” he said, a smile in his voice. She forced a laugh, though it sounded weak and strangled.

  “You first,” she said.

  The horse pounded and Bray saw the horizon to the west lighten. Dawn.

  Yarrow did not speak and Bray felt a spasm of panic. “Alright, I’ll go first. What was your mother’s maiden name?”

  He shifted slightly—still awake, at least. “Trevor,” he breathed.

  “Good. Your turn. Ask me a question,” Bray said desperately.

  A moment of quiet—nothing but the wind and the pelting of the rain.

  “Did you pay for the wine?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “At the Gallan Inn, did you really pay for the wine?”

  Her mind darted back to that night—how young they had been. How happy. Spirits, how she had liked him.

  Bray cleared her throat. “No, I nicked it.”

  He let out a shallow, pained chuckle. “I knew it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The fishing village came into view and Bray urged the horse forward. The sun had risen in earnest, casting a weak yellow light across the landscape.

  “Yarrow,” Bray demanded. “I asked you what the name of your shop was?”

  “Hm?”

  “What was the name of your family’s shop?”

  “We just called it the General Store,” Yarrow said at last. Bray let out a sigh of relief.

  She slowed as she entered the village, though it was hardly large enough to be called such. Ko-Jin still led. She was careful to keep back far enough that he would not be touched by the sphere’s effect.

  When they came to the line of boathouses Ko-Jin dismounted. “I’ll find us a boat.”

  Bray agreed. She didn’t want to leave Yarrow. Ko-Jin jogged down to the dock and Bray dismounted, then helped Yarrow down from the horse as well. He collapsed his full weight into her and she only barely kept her feet. She placed his arm around her neck, and held him by the waist.

  “It won’t be far,” she promised. Yarrow nodded, and his feet began to move. Bray saw this with relief, as she was not strong enough to carry him.

  She took the sphere from Yarrow and clutched it in her other arm. Then they trudged, slowly, towards the sea.

  The wooden planks of the dock creaked beneath their weight and the salt stung her nose. Gulls cawed and circled above the heads of the many fishermen, moving about purposefully. The diurnal minutiae struck her as strange. Didn’t they know what had happened, what had been lost? Couldn’t they sense it?

  Ko-Jin appeared a ways down the dock and gestured for Bray to come quickly. “I’ve found us a ride.”

  Bray approached, and as she did so Ko-Jin was again transformed. She looked up dubiously at the boat he had hired. It appeared smaller than many of the others and looked a bit rundown to her untrained eyes. She raised a questioning brow at Ko-Jin.

  “It’s a sound vessel,” he said. “Fastest one here.”

  Bray nodded and she helped Yarrow step up onto the ramp. It was narrower than made her comfortable—perfect for one man, but tight for two people walking abreast. The harbor waters sloshed against the hull below her. Ko-Jin hobbled behind, his ill-formed foot scraping against the wood.

  As Bray stepped onto the deck of the boat she was greeted by a cheery, bearded man with a large pink nose and watery eyes. “Master and Mistress Chisanta.” He bowed his head to her. His eyes moved to Yarrow. “Spirits!” His gaze lingered on the blood. “This man needs medical attention—there are doctors a plenty up at Easterly Point!”

  “I thank you,” Bray said, her breath labored. “But this is, I’m afraid, an emergency. We need to be at sea.”

  The man shrugged but still eyed Yarrow with concern. “As you say, miss. Molla!” he shouted over his shoulder. A thin woman with greying hair appeared by his side.

  “My wife,” he introduced her. “Could you do something for this lad? I’d hate to have him die on my deck, here.”

  Molla raised an eyebrow, clearly wondering, like her husband, why they did not seek a doctor’s care. “I’ll do what I can,” she said and gestured for Bray to follow her below deck. Bray managed, with trouble, to aid Yarrow down the stair and into the hull of the boat.

  “You and your husband work this vessel on your own?” Bray asked as she helped Yarrow lay on a pallet. She felt the vessel sway beneath her and heard the sounds of footfalls above her as the fisherman moved about.

  “Aye,” the woman answered, as she carefully ripped away Yarrow’s shirt to inspect the wound. She drew in a breath and Bray’s mouth fell open. The cut was just below his navel, about a handspan wide. The metallic odor of his blood assaulted her nose. It looked horrible. She felt her throat clench with panic. He could die, she thought. A wound like that could surely kill him. Tears welled up in her eyes at the thought—weariness overcame her.

  “Now, now,” Molla said sternly. “Tears won’t help the lad. Get me some clean linen from over there.” She gestured to a cabinet at the far corner of the cabin.

  Bray aided the fisherman’s wife as best she could as the woman cleaned the wound then extracted a common sewing needle and thread. She sanitized the needle over the fire, then began to stitch Yarrow back together.

  Bray had never seen anyone receive sutures before. It looked just the same as sewing up a ripped seam in a pair of trousers. She felt an insane desire to laugh and repressed it. Yarrow forced his eyes closed, gritted his teeth. His face, once pale, had turned ashen.

  The woman completed the stitches and moved away to wash her hands.

  Yarrow’s eyes opened—they found hers. She took his hand. “It will be alright,” she said softly.

  He rocked his head back and forth on the pallet. “No. It can’t be alright.”

  Molla returned and looked down at them with shrewd eyes. She crossed her arms before her chest. “How are you possibly still awake?”

  “The drugs are still in my system,” Yarrow murmured. For a moment Bray didn’t understand him. The drugs had made her want to do nothing but sleep. And then she recalled; the Cosanta had been given stimulants to keep them from entering the Aeght a Seve.

  “It will fade soon,” she said.

  He nodded. She leaned down and kissed him gently. His lips burned against hers.

  “Bray?” Ko-Jin’s voice called from the deck.

  She pulled away with reluctance. “Yes?”

  “We’ve got a problem.”

  Yarrow watched from his cot as Bray and the fisherman’s wife hurried up the stairs.

  He could only feel minutely concerned by whatever trouble Ko-Jin had discovered. He hadn’t much room for anything besides weariness and pain. The ship rocked him back and forth, like a babe in a cradle. It should be enough to ease him into sleep—glorious, glorious oblivion. But it was not. Instead, it made him want to heave up the meager contents of his stomach. Even his eyes didn’t want to close. They felt strange and itchy when he did shut them, so they remained open, staring at the grain in the wood.

  The voices of those above drifted down to him.

  “What in the name of the Spirits is that?” Bray asked. Yarrow distantly registered the note of fear in her vo
ice.

  “A cruiser, looks like twenty guns. It could blow us out of the water as easy as sneezing,” a gruff voice answered.

  “Can it catch us?” Ko-Jin asked.

  “Yes—easily,” the man said.

  “Where in the name of the Spiritblighter did they get a warship?” Bray asked.

  Yarrow’s mind perked at this. Quade has a warship? How unlikely. There were so few of them in existence anymore.

  “I don’t think they know which boat we’re on, and we were lucky to have departed simultaneously with all the rest,” Ko-Jin said.

  “They will demand to search the vessels, most likely,” Bray agreed.

  “Who?” asked the fisherman. “What is this?”

  “I’m very sorry to have brought this upon you,” Ko-Jin said. “We will surrender so you and your wife are not harmed. But not yet—we must reach the deeper sea first.”

  Yarrow’s pulse quickened. Surrender? They, after all of this, would go back to that cell, with the Chisanta, the true Chisanta, still utterly in the dark as to what had happened? It could not be. Yarrow would not allow it. He would give anything, anything at all, to deliver them safely from this place.

  The soft blue glow of the sphere caught Yarrow’s eye. Bray had left it on a seat across the cabin. His mind, though fuzzy and sapped, resolved.

  With a pained effort, Yarrow sat up. The stitches pulled at the seam in his belly and he drew in a sharp breath. His feet found the plank floor, and he stood—or attempted to stand. Rather, he fell and caught himself on the side of the cabin, then pulled himself over to the sphere. His fingers clasped the thing, felt its cool smooth surface, as he collapsed into the seat.

  Yarrow took a deep breath. The first sacrifice of the Chisanta is propagation, a sing-song voice in his head chanted. It was rote. He had learned the sacrifices as a boy, like he had learned the names of Kings. Old information, not truly relevant to himself. Yet here he was.

  Yarrow focused his eyes on the swirling blue mist within the sphere. For a moment, nothing happened, and he wondered what he was doing wrong. Was there a trick to working the thing? Then he felt his consciousness pull towards the sphere, as if his spirit were leaving its container, drawn into those blue depths.

  Yarrow left his body behind, and, mercifully, his pain as well. He floated through blue fog, until the mists coalesced, forming landscape and people. They solidified, and the blue leaked away, returning everything to its proper color—flesh tones, the greens of trees through a window, the browns of wood paneling.

  Yarrow, alone, remained a formless thing, a pair of floating eyes. And then, most strangely, he watched as he himself stood and crossed a room.

  It was not a room Yarrow knew, and yet it seemed familiar. Like a home—though no home he had ever known. A fire crackled in a hearth, shelves of books lined the far wall, and a broken-in, comfortable couch sat atop a Chaskuan rug. Upon that couch, lounging carelessly, was Bray. She looked much as she did now, or rather, as she had before their captivity. Her hair was shorn tight about her skull, her face healthy and full. She was more beautiful than Yarrow had ever seen her, positively glowing.

  “Yarrow, she’s kicking!” Bray said, sitting up.

  Yarrow watched himself cross the room and sink down beside her. He placed—and suddenly he was not floating eyes, he was the Yarrow of this place—his hand upon Bray’s large round stomach. He felt the movement deep within, the stirring of his child. Yarrow smiled, then leaned down and pressed his ear against the swell of Bray’s belly. He hummed a few notes of a lullaby his mother had sung to him as a child. Bray’s fingers brushed his neck, beneath his braid, and he lay there, listening to his babe.

  “How are you so certain it’s a girl?” he asked.

  Bray shifted beneath him. “Call it a mother’s intuition. She feels like a girl.”

  “I can’t wait to meet her.”

  The mists swirled and the scene dissolved, washed out into blue again—and then reformed, solidified and popped into color.

  He was in the same room. Bray slept through a far door. He lay on the couch, and though it was late and he was tired, he did not sleep. He could not.

  Curled against his chest, snoring quietly, lay his baby daughter. She looked so very small. It was hard to believe that such a tiny thing could ever become a full grown person.

  Yarrow studied her continually. She was such a wonder. The little copper colored hairs on her head were soft and fine, they stuck up from her skull like the down of a gosling. Her small fingers clutched at the fabric of Yarrow’s robes. Her form pressed warmly against his chest, and she smelt so familiar and comforting. Her eyelids flickered—fine eyelashes, small blue veins against translucent white skin—but they shut again, and she slept on.

  Yarrow felt a love for this small creature that was unlike anything he had experienced before. She was precious; her very existence imbuing his life with a meaning he had not any right to. Arella Lamhart, they had called her. The name stirred in his chest.

  The room swirled blue and he was thrust outside. It was dark, he was returning from an errand, bags with produce clutched in his hands, and he entered his home.

  Arella’s face was bright red, tears flowing down her cheeks, as she bawled.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong. She won’t eat and her diaper’s dry,” Bray said, a note of pleading in her voice. Dark shadows marred the fair skin beneath her eyes.

  Yarrow kissed Bray’s forehead. He felt his daughter’s emotions—they were simple and sweet, usually. Now they were distressed, pained.

  “It’s the rash bothering her,” Yarrow said.

  Bray hurried to the cabinet to find the rash cream as Yarrow unpinned the cloth diaper and shushed Arella. He rubbed in the salve and eventually her wails subsided into hiccups and, a short time later, the small snores of slumber.

  Bray smiled and sighed in relief. “How many parents would kill to know what their babies are feeling?”

  Yarrow pulled her close and kissed her.

  Blue mist swirled, and time passed.

  Arella tottered on chubby legs. Having just learned to walk, she had decided to prove her deftness by utterly rejecting crawling as a means of crossing a room.

  Her hair was still fine, but longer now. It had been tied into two tails on either side of her head, which stood out at right angles. She had wide gray eyes—his eyes. But in all else, she was her mother. She grinned toothlessly at Bray, who sat on the rug at the other side of the room, her hands outstretched. “Here, Arella,” Bray called.

  She toddled across the room, her small feet hitting the rug with muffled thumps, until she fell into Bray’s arms.

  “Very good!” Bray said. “Now go to Daddy.”

  Arella turned, thumped back across the room into Yarrow’s outstretched arms. She fell warm into his lap and said, “Da da da da da.”

  He felt her affection for him—it was so strong and all-encompassing, like her love for him and Bray were the only things worth feeling. Yarrow tried to pull her to his chest, but she was not to be confined. She stood up and tottered back to Bray.

  Blue fog obscured the room.

  Arella was six. She was beautiful—Yarrow’s heart swelled with affection and pride. She sat cross-legged on the rug, knobby knees poking out beneath a green dress. Her hair hung long around her shoulders. In her lap rested a large book. It had paintings and small sections of simple words.

  “Dad, what’s this say?” she asked.

  Yarrow sat beside her and looked close.

  “Sound it out,” Yarrow said gently. Arella tossed him a petulant look. She would rather he just told her. But then, as he constantly reminded her, she would never learn.

  “Ruh…ah…buh…eh…tuh.” She sounded out slowly, squinting down at the page. “Raah…buht.” She looked up proudly. “Rabbit!”

  “Very good,” Yarrow said. He couldn’t believe his little girl could already read—hadn’t she been a baby just moments before?

  Blue mist
.

  “I know you’re disappointed,” Bray said soothingly, rubbing Arella’s back. She was so old now, so big. Her fair face was splotchy and her nose ran as she cried.

  “It’s not fair.” Arella sobbed.

  Yarrow sat down on the bed beside his daughter.

  “I thought I’d be like you.” Arella’s hand rubbed at the patch of clear white skin on her neck, the place where, had she been Chisanta, the mark would have appeared an hour ago. Yarrow could hear the sound of distant firecrackers. Da Un Marcu celebrations.

  Yarrow rubbed his daughter’s back consolingly. She had been hoping, since she was young, to be Chisanta like her parents. Yarrow would not say so, but he was glad she was not. They had the ability to give her the finest education regardless, and he did not like the idea of her going through the testing.

  “You can still be whatever you want to be,” Yarrow said.

  “I…want…to…be…like you!” she said, between sobs.

  “You are like us,” Bray said. “You don’t need any mark to make you a smart, strong woman.”

  The scene swirled and changed.

  “Don’t be so old-fashioned, Dad,” Arella said.

  She was a young woman now, tall and lean. She had a clever face, her mouth quirked in a chastising smile. She wore her red hair in a long braid down her back and, though it was still not the style amongst civilians, she sported trousers rather than skirts. She sounded irritated, but Yarrow knew she was not. Her feelings gave her away—she hummed with affectionate amusement. As if he were a puppy who’d just watered on the carpet.

  He frowned. “Arella, I am your father.”

  “And I love you,” Arella said. “But I’m nineteen years old and I’m perfectly capable of making my own decisions.”

  “You’re too young to be married,” he said, “and that boy isn’t nearly good enough for you.”

  “Who would be good enough for me, Dad?” Arella challenged.

  “No one.” Yarrow crossed his arms. “So you shouldn’t get married.”

  Arella let out a frustrated gust of air. “I’m in love, Dad! And I’m more than old enough to marry—you know that well enough. Davis is a good man, and he understands me. I love him. Can’t you understand that? What if someone had told you not to marry Mom?”