The Complete Marked Series Box Set

by March McCarron

  She nodded, her chest stuttering. Her efforts to keep herself from crying were at an end, but she seemed determined to finish what she had begun. “And I’m not gonna wait it out and see if you’re gonna stick around. So you’ve gotta choice to make. Stay, be a husband and father, or walk away. That’s it. Nothin’ in between.” She pointed at the door of the stable, as if he might disappear through it in that moment and never return.

  Arlow pressed his hand to his eyes, unwilling to let her see him weep like a child. “Oh, Mae,” he said, his voice choked. “I could never leave you. I might be a right bastard, and a coward. But I’m selfish, and I love you, so I could never walk away.”

  He heard her approach. Her fingers wrapped around his wrist and pulled his hand away from his eyes, so that he had no choice but to look into her face. It was splotchy still, but no longer angry. “Why you hidin’?” She dabbed at the wetness beneath his eye with a finger.

  “Well,” he said, clearing his throat. “I try to never weep in front of livestock. They’re very impressionable beasts.”

  Her laugh was half-sob. “It’s okay if you’re afeared, ’bout the baby I mean. I am too.”

  “Good,” he said. “Because I’m terrified. But, you know, we’ll…” He gestured with his hand, suggesting they would figure it out in time.

  He tilted his face towards her, to see if she might let him kiss her. She angled her chin upward.

  Their lips met, and he had never experienced a kiss that seemed to say so much, most of it too complex for words—it tasted of tears, and asked forgiveness. It didn’t exactly mend all between them, but promised a new beginning.

  A man behind them cleared his throat, and Arlow regretfully pulled away. He kept his eyes on her as she looked over his shoulder.

  “Hey, Foy,” she said, her cheeks flushing. “Is everyone gathered?”

  “Yes,” the man said in his crisp voice.

  “Let’s be off, then,” she said, after scratching Poppy Seed under the ear one last time. “Come on, Arlow.”

  The three of them left the dryness of the mews and marched out into the city street. They were staying in the Narrows, a particularly rough part of town. Arlow eyed the rundown buildings around them uncertainly.

  To his left, a four-story house leaned to one side, seeming to remain upright by habit alone. As they passed the unfortunate-looking property, he noticed the sign—The Central Accord Home for Orphans—and saw a grinning boy in a window offer him a rude gesture.

  Arlow kept a gentle hand to Mae’s back as they trod their way up a deserted alley. She had the meandering stride of a sleepwalker, and he wondered when she had last slept.

  He bent to speak near her ear. “Are you well enough for this?”

  She nodded, her focus on the street. “I’m afraid, though. Without Lin—” Her voice hitched, but she made herself continue, “Linton, the whole thing might just crumble. The Pauper’s Men—we were always in it for him.”

  Arlow watched a fat rat wander up the cobbled streets, picking its way in careful starts and stops. It was hair-raising, how deserted the streets of Accord had become. So many people should not be so quiet.

  “We’re nearly there?” Arlow asked, pulling his coat tighter.

  “Just ’round this next corner.”

  They strode the length of the laneway, their boots slapping smartly on the road.

  The meeting place, this time, took the form of an abandoned factory, a large industrial space that smelt strongly of rust and damp. Someone had lit a fire in a garbage bin, which moderately warmed and brightened the center of the room. The flickering light gave them all dancing shadows.

  Some of the faces were familiar to Arlow, though still nameless. Men and women of means mixed with street ruffians and tattooed thugs. There seemed far more of them at this meeting than any prior one he had attended.

  An old woman in a tartan shawl came forward to hug Mae. “It’s true?”

  Mae could only nod, but she accepted the embrace. Others stepped forward, many with red eyes and noses, to take the first woman’s place. Arlow stood back, observing. It hadn’t occurred to him until just then, that these people were Mae’s family.

  Foy, with eyes of the utmost tenderness, extracted Mae from the crowd and cleared his throat to move matters along. Arlow hung back near the entrance. He felt himself an onlooker. The others had formed a standing semicircle, with the barrel at the center and Mae and Foy across from them.

  “As you’ve all, no doubt, already heard,” Foy said in a powerful voice, “our king was lost to us two days ago. Killed by Quade Asher while meeting with the Bellra ruler.”

  There came a collective moaning; not one of surprise, but a guttural expression of grief that echoed in the large vacant space. Foy paused, allowing the people to express their feeling. He, himself, swallowed hard and wiped at an eye.

  “We’re here to discuss what’s to be done next,” he resumed at length. “Where do we go from here?”

  The fire cracked and sparked at this, causing several people to jump. Arlow walked from the back of the crowd around to the side, but kept his distance. He wanted to be able to meet Mae’s gaze, while still not presuming too much.

  “What’s to be done?” an angry voice called out from the far right of the gathering. “It’s clear, ain’t it? Justice. This Quade, he’ll have to answer.”

  “Aye,” several called out.

  “Kill him!” shouted Cline, his ugly face twisted with bewildered rage.

  Mae’s complexion was uncommonly pale, her eyes hollow and weary. Though she hadn’t yet spoken, more of the Pauper’s Men were looking to her than to Foy. Arlow wondered, for the first time, who would step up and fill the vacancy of leadership.

  “Justice?” Foy asked, in a deep and resounding tone. “Death, you mean?” He did not sound as if he disagreed, but merely desired clarity.

  “Aye,” said the same ruffian—a short, bearded man with watery blue eyes, whose coat was little more than rags. “Cut him down. Our king might’ve had a no-kill policy, but there comes a time, don’t there?”

  “Aye,” came the booming reply, universal. Arlow agreed, but kept his opinion to himself.

  The old woman in the plaid shawl took a step into the empty space. “Mae?” she asked.

  Mae’s eyes moved up from the bare floor to the people, as if surprised to find them there. She bobbed her head in agreement.

  The crowd waited, listening to the snapping of the fire and the howl of the wind through broken windowpanes. They were waiting for her to speak. Arlow could see the hunger on all of their faces plainly enough. These people needed a leader, and they wanted her.

  Mae licked her lips, looking around with the appearance of increasing lucidity. “Linton,” she began, in a voice that was small yet carrying, “was the finest brother any girl could have. He was…” She looked up, to keep tears from falling. “I don’t have to tell you what he was. You know—you saw him, you ate with him—ate because of him. Quade—” She paused once more, but this time to suppress the naked hate that looked, to Arlow, wholly wrong upon her affable features. “He put out a light, and now this world is blacker for it, hungrier. Heroless.”

  “Not heroless,” Foy interjected, still with those blighted lover’s eyes. “When a king without progeny falls, a queen takes his place.” Foy went down to one knee, head to fist, paying obeisance to Mae. She looked across the room, to Arlow, in shock. He smiled slightly, not surprised.

  It took only a moment for others to follow Rodgeman’s lead. They descended to the factory floor in an erratic wave, until Arlow and Mae were the only two people standing.

  Arlow, still holding Mae’s eye, went down to one knee. And it was not for show. She had earned the love and loyalty of all these people, himself included. He felt the hard coldness of the floor, and it sent a chill straight up his body.

  Mae appeared to grow in that moment; she stood tall, chin held high. She had a self-possession that, despite all her roughness, se
emed fitting for a ruler.

  “Pauper’s Queen,” Foy said.

  “Pauper’s Queen,” the assembly echoed.

  Mae lifted a hand to quiet them. That hand turned to a fist. “We’re many, and he’s only one. For Linton, for all of us, we’ll get him.” Her hand drifted down to her abdomen in a brief, unconscious motion. “For our children, for the future. We’ll get him.”

  Arlow’s mouth thinned. She was right—he did not want any child of his sharing space in a world with the likes of Quade Asher. He had never experienced such a keen rush of protectiveness before that moment. It was primal, wordless, and fundamentally unselfish, and it left him feeling off-kilter—yet hopeful.

  Perhaps he might make a tolerable husband and father after all.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Three—”

  Bray closed her eyes against the imminent fall and stepped forward, Yarrow’s gloved hand clasped in her own. But no plunge followed. Her eyelids flew open, and reality rippled.

  The blazing Adourran desert disappeared. Her outstretched boot landed in grass—in a circle of grass, surrounded by sheer stony steps. A different sun shone down upon them from high within a cloudless blue sky.

  “Spirits,” Yarrow murmured.

  Bray was glad of Yarrow’s support, or she might have fallen over in shock. However, she was surprised to find him there beside her. She had never before had company in this place; the solitude of the Aeght a Seve was one of its unquestionable constants. She pinched his fingers to test their solidity.

  The single tree at the center of the Place of Five stood where it always had, but it was not the same. This tree had been burnt; its trunk was now blackened, its branches leafless and grasping. Looking at it, Bray experienced an inexplicable surge of guilt.

  “We’re here,” Yarrow said, looking around. “Really here, in body.”

  “This is…” Bray had meant to say ‘unbelievable,’ but then jerked towards Yarrow in sudden realization. “What you were hiding from Quade. This. You gave up your memories—”

  “For this,” he finished, nodding. He gazed about him with a look of dark satisfaction.

  Bray was so stunned that she laughed. She had never dreamed that this trip might actually yield answers. In the future, she thought, she ought to give more credence to Yarrow’s hunches.

  He released her hand and pulled off his glove, then he knelt and touched the grass with his bare fingers. She stared down at the top of his head, a look of amused confusion on her face. “What are you doing?”

  He smiled up at her. “I’ve never felt grass before. Is it always so very green?”

  “Depends on where you are. But what do you mean you’ve never felt grass?”

  He was already pulling his glove back on. “It’s been winter in Daland for all of my memory, and there’s not much of it here in Adourra. Not like this.”

  “Yes, but you’ve come to the Aeght a Seve before. I saw you on the ship.”

  “When I come here I always appear up there,” he said, pointing far up the stony ledge. Bray followed his gaze, shielding her eyes from the sun and craning her neck. For the first time, she wondered just how Yarrow had managed to climb up and make his sacrifices. It seemed an impossible height.

  “Let’s have a look at the tree. It isn’t burnt when you come here in your mind, is it?”

  “No,” she said, equally curious. “It’s not.”

  They walked together towards this one anomaly in a familiar place. As she drew nearer, she saw that the tree was not dead—not entirely. From within the charred husk of the trunk, a new sapling bloomed with perfect green leaves.

  “Not gone after all,” she whispered, though the words seemed not to be hers. She thought she heard Yarrow say the same beside her, and a shiver raced across her skin. The closer they drew, the more her anticipation mounted.

  Bray blinked, thinking her eyes were playing tricks on her. There was motion near the tree. The shadow of a man came round from the other side. For a moment Bray wondered how Yarrow had passed her unseen, until she looked properly and realized that the man before her was not Yarrow. He was familiar, and the sight of him filled her with love, but he was most certainly not Yarrow.

  Her heart gave a great, painful throb. “Da?”

  “Hey there, monkey,” he said, in an accent even thicker than she recalled.

  She ran forward to embrace him, seeming to become the twelve-year-old girl she’d been when last she saw him. But he wasn’t truly there, not in body. It was like trying to touch the wind.

  “Da,” she repeated. Tears dripped from her chin.

  He smiled at her, his eyes crinkling in just the right pattern. His dark hair lay heavily atop his flat head, and he had the same strong, blunt-fingered hands she remembered.

  Bray knew that she had transitioned from composed to puddle-of-tears in record time. Her chest heaved, and she sniffed against a running nose.

  “Spirits, Da, I’ve missed you so much,” she croaked. All of the wounds that life had dealt her had come after his death, or because of it. In her memory, only when she had been with him had she been whole.

  “Me too, monkey-girl.” The smile left his eyes. “And I’m—I’m so sorry, about…” The torment on his face was too sharp. She had to look away.

  “It’s not your fault,” she whispered.

  “I left you to the mercy of that—that—”

  “You didn’t leave,” she said, strength returning to her voice. “You died. It wasn’t a choice.” Still, something within her eased as she said this aloud. An inner knot loosened. She could not recall ever blaming her father for abandoning her, but perhaps some small silent piece of her had. He had sacrificed his safety every time he went down into that mine, and in the end he had paid the ultimate price. The choice had been all his. But she had paid, too, and never had a say. That is the way of self-sacrifice—the people left behind bleed too.

  “But I am so proud of the woman you’ve become.”

  Her smile was watery and tremulous. “Thank you.”

  Bray remembered Yarrow suddenly, but when she turned to make an introduction, she found him in deep conversation with empty air.

  “He can’t see me. I’m here for you alone. Edged out a young man who very much wanted to speak with you, I’m afraid, but that’s a father’s privilege.”

  “What is this?” Bray asked. She wiped her face, but as the tears had not yet slowed, it was a futile effort. “How is it possible that you’re here?”

  “This,” he said, gesturing to the broken tree. “The Confluence. It is the bridge between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead.”

  “Truly?” she reached out to touch the sapling. There was something peculiarly alluring about that bit of greenery, that new-life which had sprouted from within death itself.

  “Wait—”

  But she had already brushed finger to the velvety leaf, and immediately she felt herself lurch forward, falling.

  “Da?” Bray called out into the blackness.

  A scene materialized around her slowly, only coming into focus and color in increments. “Da?”

  But he was not here. She was not either. Soon she forgot there was a person called Bray Marron. There was only Charlem Bowtar.

  Charlem raised himself from his chair with an effort. All his joints creaked and groaned in protest.

  “Sir?” a young voice asked. “Brother?”

  He shuffled to the window of his Temple office. He gazed out at a Dalish sea, though the cataract in his left eye had made him half-blind. He could remember the full sight of it, though—the sea. He could recall the first time he had set eyes on all that wet. As a young man raised in a desert city, how formidable it had seemed then, how awesome.

  You were there too, weren’t you, Jae-In?

  It was one of the odd truths of age—he could precisely recall a day forty years gone. He could remember the sound of his son’s laugh and Jae-In’s silky straight hair twirling in the wind. He co
uld remember running through the streets of Nerra as a boy, long before Nerra had been abandoned.

  All of it—his youth, his training, his wife—he held in his mind like a scene preserved with oil paint on canvas. But what he had eaten for breakfast, the name of the young man yammering at him at that moment—about things such as these, he had not the faintest inkling.

  “What’s to be done, brother?”

  “Hm?” Charlem asked. He realized that the young man was in a panic. These youths were always in a flap about one thing or another.

  “Chevrre,” the lad cried out, wild-eyed. “He’s gone completely mad. He’s going to burn it all down!”

  “Very well, young man,” Charlem said in a croaky voice. “Calm down. Let’s go have a see.”

  Charlem took up his cane and they began their slow trek out of the office, down the stair, and across the grounds. The young man leading him was plainly in a hurry, and thoroughly annoyed at Charlem’s plodding pace.

  “Peace, young man,” Charlem said. “When you’re as old as I am, you won’t be moving so sprightly.” He gave a barking laugh. “Pray you’re never as old as I am, lad.”

  Ain’t that the truth of it, wife.

  “Yes, sir,” the kid said. “Excuse me, sir. It’s only that this situation is dire.” Though to look at him, perhaps he was in his thirties. Not such a lad in his own estimation, most like.

  But to Charlem they were all children. He was a relic from a previous time—the last of the old Chi’santae. And, by the Spirits, after nearly fifty years of finding marked kids and training them up in the old ways, he had earned the right to a slow walk.

  The smell of the smoke arrested his step. In an instant, he was in another place, another time. The Confluence was alight with embers, and the smoke of it was thick in his nostrils. And his Jae-In, his perfect Jae-In, lay so still, with white ash dusting her black hair like snow.

  No, my love. Not again.

  “Sir?” the lad insisted, shaking him. “Please keep on, sir. The damage he could cause… We need to hurry.”