The Complete Marked Series Box Set

by March McCarron

  “You haven’t gotten to the Aeght a Seve. I have, if you recall.”

  He offered her a suggestive smile. “I recall.”

  Bray flushed and stood. “Come on then, up!”

  “Yes, sir!” He hopped to his feet. He seemed in an especially good mood, she thought. His smiles were infectious.

  She led the way apart from the group, closer to the water. She could hear the lapping of the tide on the shore.

  “Close your eyes,” she commanded. His eyelids shut obediently. “Imagine a second version of yourself, your Mearra, standing just across from you.”

  A crease formed between his brows—the one, she had learned, that signified he was truly concentrating.

  “Make him solid—give him detail.”

  Bray paused, allowing him time.

  “Is he there?”

  Yarrow nodded.

  “Now, imagine what he is thinking. What he is feeling.”

  “I’ve got him,” Yarrow said, a proud cast to his voice.

  “Great. Now reach out and touch him.”

  Bray watched as Yarrow’s hand extended and his fingertips brushed against something invisible to her. She couldn’t believe it. He really had advanced with the Tearre.

  “Hit him!”

  Yarrow swung and his fist stopped short in the air, as if making contact with something solid. He ducked and spun on his left foot, then raised his arm to parry a strike.

  Bray beamed—he was really doing it!

  He stumbled, as if hit, then rolled on the ground, grappling an unseen foe. He struggled there for a solid minute before finally laying still and opening his eyes. He smiled triumphantly, his chest heaving with the exertion of the fight.

  Bray sat down on the damp grass beside him, cross-legged.

  “That was incredible,” he said, breathing heavily and looking up at the specks of stars that had begun to appear in the royal blue sky.

  “Did you sense the Aeght a Seve at all?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Yarrow pulled himself up to a sitting position. “I tried to relax and let myself go there, but I couldn’t.”

  Bray couldn’t help but laugh. What a Cosanta thing to say.

  “You don’t enter the Aeght a Seve through passivity and relaxation. You need to be in a kind of fervor. You thrust yourself into it.”

  He raised an eyebrow at her choice of words.

  “Oh, you know what I mean. It’s not a meditation like the Ada Chae. It’s meant to inspire vigor. You need to change your mindset if you mean to enter through the Tearre.”

  “Still,” he said, “that was quite good.”

  “Yes,” she acceded with a nod. “It was quite good.”

  Without a word, Yarrow bounded to his feet and held out a hand to pull Bray up. She took it, and when she was standing upright, neither of them let go. Instead of walking back to the camp, the orb of warm firelight at their backs, they began to walk away, along the shore of the lake. The sun had finally fallen behind the mountains and the scenery had taken on the deep colors of evening. Insects buzzed happily in the long grass.

  “What do you think we’ll find at Easterly Point?” Yarrow asked.

  Bray looked out over the moon-lit ripples. “I honestly don’t know. This isn’t like anything we’ve investigated before. I’ve never even heard of a criminal Chisanta.”

  Bray stopped. They had traveled a good distance from the others. She let go of his hand and began pulling off her boots and stockings. She rolled up the legs of her pants.

  “Going for a swim?” Yarrow asked with a laugh.

  Bray smiled at her reflection in the water. “The first time I came here with Dolla,” she said, wading out into the lake, “she told me that she’d looked her whole childhood for a purple stone. She grew up near here and her mother had one.”

  Bray crouched, but it was too dark to discern the colors. She fished out a few and held them up to the moon light—yellow, red, green. She let them plop back in the water, sending ripples.

  “Come, help me,” she said. “I’d love to find one for her.”

  Yarrow sighed dramatically. He unbuttoned his Cosanta robes and pulled them off. He looked strangely out of character in only high-waisted pants and a white undershirt. He removed his boots and rolled up his pant legs, then waded in after her.

  “It’s freezing, Bray!”

  He fished out a handful of stones and held them up, as she had done. They must not have been purple either, as he let them fall back with a plunk. The water splashed Bray’s arm, raising goosebumps.

  “Watch it!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said innocently. Then he sent a deliberate splash, and the front of her jerkin was soaked with water.

  “Yarrow!” she said, backing away from him. “That wasn’t funny!”

  “Really?” he said. “I thought it was funny.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him—something she surely hadn’t done since she was ten years old.

  He raised his hands as if surrendering to her arrest. “I’ll stop. I promise.” He smiled in an entirely criminal way.

  “I don’t trust you,” she said, taking several more steps back. Her foot tangled in riverweed, and she tumbled backwards, landing on her backside with lake water nearly to her shoulders.

  “Yarrow!” she said again, wrenching herself up clumsily, her clothes clinging wetly to her body.

  He laughed, a deep delighted sound. “Don’t look at me. That was your doing alone.”

  Bray was half furious, half on the verge of laughter. She began to splash and kick with all her might, determined to make him as cold and wet as she was.

  He came forward and attempted to pin her arms to her body. She phased, and he fell face first into the water.

  She nearly fell over herself, she laughed so hard. He came back up to the surface, sputtering and shivering, flinging his wet braid over his shoulder indignantly.

  “Truce?” he asked.

  A gust of wind assaulted her wet flesh and she shuddered. “Truce,” she agreed.

  As her laughter and merriment faded, she began to notice that Yarrow’s white shirt clung to his lean chest. That his hair was plastered wetly to his forehead. That he looked, for lack of a better word, beautiful. Something deep within her stirred, wanting him.

  He reacted. His eyebrows shot up in surprise, and then a slow smile crossed his face.

  She felt her face burn. “That isn’t fair.” She pointed a dripping finger at him. “It’s humiliating, you knowing what I feel.”

  “No.” He took several great steps through the water until he stood just before her. “It would only be humiliating if the feeling weren’t reciprocated.”

  He put a wet hand to her face, his thumb running along the line of her jaw, and looked down at her with those soft gray eyes of his, as he leaned in.

  She could not wait—she pushed herself up to the balls of her feet and met him halfway. His lips touched hers softly, a question. Hers responded with fervency, an answer.

  And then there were no doubts. Only intimacy. Only vehemence. Only tenderness. In short, only the perfect expression of a thing so many years in the making.

  And no disappointment.

  As they crossed the Bentall River for the second time in so many days, Yarrow finally saw Easterly Point sprawled out before him, a moderate-sized port city at the base of a small finger of land that jutted out into the Eastern Ocean. At that finger’s tip they would find the ruin of the old Chisanta temple—their destination.

  Adearre clicked his tongue and reined in the horses, guiding them off the road and behind a copse of pine trees.

  He noticed Yarrow’s confused expression. “We cannot simply saunter into town. We will have to be more circumspect if we do not wish to scare our prey off.”

  Adearre hopped down into the grass as the others filed out of the carriage. Peer unharnessed the horses while Adearre pulled a trunk down from the roof. He unfastened the buckles and swung open the lid, revealing a neat p
ile of rough civilian clothes.

  “What are these?” Ko-Jin asked.

  “We don’t want to attract attention,” Adearre said, handing the Chaskuan man a small bundle of clothes. Ko-Jin looked down at the corduroy trousers in his hands dubiously.

  Adearre distributed similar outfits to Yarrow and Peer. To Bray, he handed a rough-looking dress, petticoats, and bonnet. She climbed back into the carriage to change, while the men found what privacy they could in the trees.

  Yarrow unbuttoned and removed his robes and pulled on the common clothes. After a short struggle with the suspenders he emerged, ordinary-looking, in an olive coat, black trousers, cream shirt, and brown cap. If it weren’t for the long brown braid running down his back and the mark upon his neck, he might pass as the shop boy he had once been.

  Bray hopped down from the carriage, her bald head more or less concealed in a blue bonnet. The dress, too, was plain and blue. It reminded Yarrow of the dress he had first seen her in as a girl. She came forward and helped him and Ko-Jin tuck the tails of their braids down their coats.

  “We going through the city or around?” Peer asked.

  Bray pulled up the collar of his coat to cover the mark on his neck. “Around, I think. The fewer who know we are here the better.”

  Because the carriage itself would draw eyes, they left it and the horses, tied up and happily grazing, behind the copse. They set out afoot.

  Yarrow pulled his coat closer against the wind and glanced up at the overcast sky, wondering if it would snow. It was cold enough.

  He could not allow his mind to wander, as the walk was arduous and footing in the marshy ground precarious. Within the first hour, he’d trodden unwisely often enough that his socks, shoes, and the hem of his pants were soaked. The strip of land that separated the city from the sea was narrow and sloped, the steel-gray waves churning hungrily below.

  It was a virtually silent walk, as they all hunkered against the ocean spray and wind.

  As afternoon gave way to evening, they finally came fully east of the city and were able to move away from the brutal wetness of the shore. Yarrow could see the ruin clearly many leagues before they were upon it. It sat crouched upon the finger’s tip, its stone walls crumbling, but far more intact than Yarrow would have guessed given the length of its disuse. It sat perched upon a sheer cliff, overlooking the sea like a lighthouse.

  Bray and Adearre headed the party, and as they grew closer to their destination, the route they took became increasingly indirect. They sought refuge behind every hill and tree. Yarrow understood why—there was smoke billowing from several of the remaining chimneys, candlelight in the windows, and fresh tracks in the mud that even his novice eyes could discern.

  Yarrow felt rather ridiculous in his efforts to be clandestine. He crouched and picked his way carefully, as the others did, but he could not help but linger on how utterly unqualified he was to be in such a situation. Arlow’s admonishment rung in his mind.

  They approached the outer wall of the ruin with great caution, the sounds of movement and voices plainly audible. Yarrow kept his head down and out of sight behind the stone barrier and watched as Bray peered up over the edge and into the compound.

  She looked for only half a minute, then sat back down. Her eyes, even shadowed in the cowl of her bonnet, were clearly wide with shock.

  “How many?” Peer whispered.

  “There were easily three dozen in the yard alone,” Bray responded, her face pale. “How is this possible?”

  “What are they doing?” Adearre asked.

  Bray’s hands clutched at the fabric of her dress. “Some the Ada Chae, others the Tearre.”

  “Wait,” Ko-Jin whispered, “are you saying there are three dozen Chisanta? That can’t be!”

  “I am aware that it can’t be,” Bray responded, “but it is. Look for yourselves, but don’t be seen.”

  Yarrow removed his hat and raised himself slowly, so that only his eyes crested the top of the crumbling barrier. The yard between the wall and the first building of the temple teemed with people—not just people, Chisanta. They were split into two parties—clearly Cosanta and Chiona by their exercises, though not their dress and hair. There were no robes, no jerkins, no shorn heads or long braids. They all looked perfectly ordinary, save for the marks on their necks.

  The only difference between these Chisanta and the average group practicing exercises at either the Cape or the Isle was their definite youth. Yarrow scanned their faces—they were boys and girls from all three nations, but none seemed older than twenty and the vast majority were in their mid-teens.

  Yarrow lowered himself back behind the wall and shared amazed looks with the others. He could feel all of their shock reverberating in the back of his own mind.

  “It can’t be…” Peer said, his brow furrowed in thought.

  Bray brought her fist to her forehead. “How did we not see it before?” she growled softly to herself. Yarrow felt a pulse of self-reproach from her.

  Adearre slid the rest of the way down the wall and onto his bottom. “All this time, we believed someone was killing Chisanta children. But they were abducting them…”

  “The bodies…” Peer whispered. “It doesn’t—”

  Bray shook her head. “Remember the body of the boy who had a hand but shouldn’t have?”

  “And the girl in Gallan—the first fire,” Yarrow said, the horrible picture beginning to come together in his head, “they never found her body.”

  “So…” Ko-Jin said, “they’ve been killing the families of the kids and leaving another body to erase suspicion?”

  “Yes,” Bray said. “Where they get those poor spirits, I do not know.”

  “But why?”

  “It’s an army,” Yarrow said.

  The others looked at him quizzically.

  He ran his fingers over his forehead, concentrating. “I can feel them. They’re… uniform, determined, militant.”

  This pronouncement met with stunned silence.

  Yarrow plucked the number from his memory. “And there will be one hundred and fifty of them.”

  Ko-Jin let out a long breath.

  “What’re we going to do?” Peer asked. They all looked at Bray—and Yarrow was glad, in that moment, to not be the leader of this party. What could they do?

  “We need more information,” Bray said, “we’ll need to spend some time observing.”

  “We should send a telegram to Dolla,” Peer said.

  Bray bit her lip. “No. They must be relying on the city for supplies, which means they’re likely to have connections down there. We can’t let them know we’re here. With any luck, they think we’re on our way to Che Mire.”

  Beyond the wall feet shuffled and, for a horrible moment, Yarrow feared they’d been discovered.

  Then a clear voice rang out—it was deep and musical, but the accent had a kind of roughness to it, like Bray’s.

  “My brothers and sisters,” it said. Yarrow sensed the bated breath of the crowd, heard the drumming of loyalty in so many minds. “Which of you is willing to offer something of yourselves for our great cause?”

  The gathering resounded with eagerness in Yarrow’s mind. He did not have to see to know there were many hands in the air.

  The man must have chosen from his volunteers, because another shuffling of feet sounded. Yarrow felt the glow of pride from the boy who stepped forward, and the unrestrained jealousy of those who had not been selected. Yarrow understood—there was something compelling about the man’s voice. It seemed to sing. Even at a distance, and not being the one addressed, Yarrow felt a kind of pleasure, like a warmth that spread through his chest and out to the tips of his fingers and toes. But the man’s emotions were jarringly in opposition with the charm of his voice. He was cold and hard as a hail storm. The discord unnerved Yarrow.

  He needed to see this man’s face. Perhaps his ability was playing a trick on him? It seemed impossible that such a voice could come from such a per
son.

  Yarrow scanned the stony wall against which he leaned. Not far to his left, he spied a gap where a stone had fallen loose from its mortar. As silently as he could, he moved to that place and peered through the opening. Long grass grew up over the hole, leaving Yarrow with a partial view, but also shielding him from sight.

  There were perhaps a hundred boys and girls in the courtyard now. They had formed a large arc around a central space where a man and a boy stood. The man was Dalish; he had dark hair, neither braided nor shorn, but in the medium length fashionable amongst civilian men. He had small dark eyes and a sharp spear of a nose. Yarrow thought, all together, he had a rather charming face.

  A girl emerged from a nearby doorway, cradling in her two hands a strange sphere. Its surface gleamed, perfectly smooth and glassy, but its insides churned like an angry fog. Its color was changeable, many shades of blue weaving in and around each other. It glowed, casting a soft azure light that illuminated the girl’s face and the front of her dress. Yarrow watched as she came forward to the center of the clearing and placed the sphere upon a stony pedestal with the delicacy a mother treats her child. She scurried away then, as if eager to distance herself from the thing.

  The dark-haired man clasped the boy beside him on the shoulder in a fatherly way. “What you give, you give for the good of all. We salute you.”

  With a closed fist, he pounded three times on his chest. The hundred teenagers mimicked him, the dull thumping of fist to breast echoing ominously in the air.

  Yarrow watched the boy stride forward. He was Adourran and perhaps sixteen years old. He had the wiry, long-limbed look of a recent growth spurt. His dark face was set in determined lines as he stepped resolutely closer to the sphere. As he approached, a visible shiver ran through him. Yarrow heard the tingling of his discomfort—the sphere must have some kind of unpleasant effect at close proximity.

  But the boy did not falter. He stepped right up to the orb, placed his long-fingered hands on either side of it, and looked into its depths. The sphere glowed brighter and brighter still—some of those near it went so far as to shield their eyes from the glare.

  Yarrow studied the boy’s face, but he needn’t have. His emotions were raw, pained, desperately sad. They crawled at the back of Yarrow’s mind, making him ill with a grief that was not his own. Tears streaked the boy’s face and Yarrow felt wetness in his own eyes. He brushed the tears away impatiently with the rough fabric of his coat.