Division of the Marked (The Marked Series)

by March McCarron

  She looked up at him as she sprung to her feet, and finally saw anger in his eyes—real anger. The expression looked odd upon his face. She liked it. It was honest, unlike the false coolness usually stamped across his features.

  “There is something seriously,” he swiped at her feet but she jumped out of the way, “wrong with you, woman.”

  “Don’t,” her knee narrowly missed connecting with his groin, “call me woman.”

  He smiled at her—his blood-stained teeth stark against his soot darkened face. “Why?” She punched him in the jaw and he reeled, but stayed upright. “Did the Chiona steal your gender as well as your likability?”

  That stung, in part because she feared it was true. “I am perfectly likable.” She aimed to elbow him, but he caught her by the armpit and thrust her to the ground, the rubble rasping her clothes and skin.

  “No. You were likable. Very much so. Now you are unrecognizable, so angry and cold.”

  She growled, a deep animal sound ripping from her throat. “I’m cold?”

  Her anger boiled over. Spirits, how she hated this man!

  She ran at him with all of her speed and force, and thrust him back, her flying along with him, until he thudded hard against the south-facing wall.

  He slumped, winded. She looked up in time to see the fragment of wall, already unstable, begin to sway ominously—forwards, backwards, and then forwards again—casting its shadow on them as it collapsed, aiming to bury them in charred brick.

  Bray acted on instinct. She threw herself on top of Yarrow, clutched his shoulders, and phased them both into nothingness. The wall fell, passing right through them. In that moment she looked into Yarrow’s eyes, saw them widen in shock and awe. A surge of pleasure rushed through her at his reaction.

  The wall fragment hit the floor so hard that it splintered straight through the wood, tearing a ragged hole that went deep down into the earth.

  They remained still for several long moments, breathing heavily.

  “How?” Yarrow finally asked.

  Bray became conscious that she was still on top of him—she could feel the heat of his body against her, the rhythm of his heart beating in tandem with her own. She jumped back and tried to appear nonchalant. “It’s my gift.”

  She left him where he sprawled, still stunned, and went to inspect the hole in the foundation. It was too dark to see anything, so she stepped to where Yarrow had left his hand light and retrieved it, multiple cuts and bruises protesting as she moved.

  By the time she had returned with the light, Yarrow peered into the opening as well. Bray, with great caution, approached the damage, not confident in the sturdiness of the floor that remained.

  She lowered the light down until its glow glinted from shelf after shelf of dusty bottles. A wine cellar.

  “How did you know?” she asked him.

  He peered down at the cellar with an unreadable expression. “I’m the ‘he’…” he whispered to himself.

  “What?”

  He extracted a slender notebook from his pocket, flipped through the pages, and handed it to her. She leaned into the light and read the Fifth’s dictation, scrawled in Yarrow’s spidery hand.

  “Unknown vinous offerings beneath the ground…”

  “Vinous is from the Adourran for wine,” he explained. He stood and shifted slowly toward the edge of the opening. “I’m going down.” And without waiting for a response he jumped and landed gracefully below.

  Bray wasn’t about to let him explore without her. She followed. The rubble from the fallen wall had knocked over a shelf. The air smelt tart and spirituous. Dark red liquid seeped between brick and shards of glass like blood.

  “Very old vintage,” Yarrow said, more to himself than to her. “Most of these are probably just vinegar by now.”

  “How can someone have a wine cellar and not know it?” Bray mused as she walked along the aisles of dusty bottles, “Unless the house was built on top unknowingly…”

  “That would be my guess,” Yarrow said. She shot him an annoyed look, not needing him to approve her theories, but he was too absorbed to notice.

  “So what is the significance of the wine?” she asked.

  “Nothing really—it’s just a sign. It marks this fire as being related to our losses—our famine.”

  As if to prove that the wine was indeed insignificant, he selected a bottle and, with a swift decisive motion, broke off the neck. He then sat, groaning as he did so, and took a swig. He extended the bottle to her. She laughed—a loud, delighted sound. It sent pain up and down her battered body, but she could not stop. Tears formed in her eyes.

  Yarrow’s brows drew up. “What’s so funny?”

  “Life,” she said, taking a seat beside him on the cold stone and accepting the bottle. The wine—a port—danced on her tongue, wonderfully complex in flavor. “Never in an eon could I have imagined myself sharing a bottle of wine with Yarrow Lamhart under the stars…again.”

  He snorted. “And after sneaking out of an inn, no less.”

  “You were the one who snuck.” She took the bottle back and sipped, careful not to cut herself on the jagged glass.

  “On the contrary,” he said. “I strode. You snuck.”

  She laughed through her nose. For some reason, her anger and distrust were, for the moment, gone. Likely she’d grown too exhausted to keep them up.

  “I’ve been thinking about when we were in Gallan,” he said, his tone turning serious.

  “What about it?”

  “There had been a fire, remember? The whole family died. And we were there just days after Du Un Marcu.”

  Bray tried to recall. Her memory of that night was fuzzy. “I don’t see how that could be related,” she said slowly. “I mean, that was ten years ago.”

  “Yes.” He rolled the bottle between his hands. “And it was ten years ago that our numbers began to shrink.”

  It seemed pretty thin to her, but she supposed it was possible. “We can look into it.”

  “Am I a part of that ‘we?’” he asked.

  She had in fact been thinking of herself, Adearre, and Peer, but when she turned to look at his battered face, and saw the softness in his eyes, she could not bring herself to say so. “You must understand,” she said. “It would be stupid of me, in my position, to blindly trust you.”

  He nodded. “But would it be overly stupid to trust me with your eyes open? I swear to you, my intentions are the same as yours. I wasn’t sent. I volunteered to go. I had no idea that you would be the Chiona I was to meet.”

  She looked into his face and saw earnestness and honesty there. She wanted to believe him. She sighed. “I don’t know…maybe.”

  “I can live with maybe.”

  Bray took another gulp, wincing as the alcohol stung a gash inside her cheek.

  “I really don’t see any reason why we, Cosanta and Chiona, can’t get along.”

  She nearly choked and wiped her mouth. “You can’t be serious? We are far too different. I’ll never understand your kind.”

  “Perhaps if we learned about each other, we might find more commonalities beyond the obvious.”

  “The obvious?”

  “We are both marked.”

  “Perhaps…” she said, doubtful, as she began plucking splinters from her legs. “I confess that, at this moment, I do feel inclined to trust you. But it may well be a momentary lapse. Likely as not, I’ll hate you again by morning.”

  He laughed as if she had made a joke, and she did not have the energy or heart to correct him. She could not let her guard down. To do so would make her weak. Which made Yarrow Lamhart a dangerous person to be around.

  “We’d better go get cleaned up,” she said.

  They climbed back out of the hole, acquiring palms full of splinters in the process, and walked back to the inn silently.

  The Central Greystone Post Office was an impressive brick edifice on a bustling corner. The morning had dawned bright and clear, and the finer folk o
f Greystone strolled about, enjoying the weather and gossip.

  Bray trod purposefully, ignoring the stares and whispers her appearance engendered. Yarrow and Peer kept pace with her; the others had stayed at the inn. Bray thought five Chisanta would be rather overkill for such an errand. In fact, three was also overkill, but Peer would not be persuaded to remain behind. It only seemed fair that Yarrow should be included. It had been his idea, after all. And despite her threat the night before, she found she did not hate him again with the sunrise.

  She darted a glance his way and felt a pang of guilt. He appeared in bad shape, his bottom lip fat and split, one eye ringed in purple. His chest must be worse—she remembered dealing the majority of her blows there. Her own cheek had turned blue and swollen and she’d collected a myriad of small scratches and bruises, but her injuries were obviously far more trivial than his. It had been an awkward thing to explain to her friends in the morning.

  The main atrium of the post office gleamed, a wide, shining marble floor with smoothly lined pillars. Well-manicured clerks manned a long polished counter. Boys in matching navy coats scurried to and fro, bearing letters and brown paper-wrapped packages, their boots slapping the tiled floor.

  A distinguished man with steel-colored hair and a false smile greeted them. “Masters and Mistress of the Chisanta. Welcome. This way, if you please.”

  They followed the man across the atrium into a smaller passageway. He ushered them into the telegraph room, which was poorly lit and full of the tapping and buzzing of machinery. The men who sat about this room were not nearly as shiny as those in the exterior, but Bray could not but marvel at their proficiency with the technology. Telegraphy had existed all her life, and she had relied on it often, but she did not truly understand how it worked. Something to do with electricity and a code…

  “Excellent timing,” a man in a tweed coat with a friendly smile said. “I’ve got the constable of Gallan on the other end.”

  “Does he have the paperwork we requested?” Bray asked.

  “He does, ma’am,” the telegrapher said. “What would you like me to ask him?”

  “I want the names and exact ages of all those who died in the fire,” Bray said.

  The man nodded, turned back to his shining contraption, and tapped a rapid message.

  After a delay of several minutes, the beeping began.

  The man translated: “Samion Ollas aged forty-one, Melna Ollas aged thirty-nine, Hosper Ollas aged nineteen, Ellsie Ollas aged fourteen, Malcy Ollas aged two.”

  The tapping ceased. Bray and Yarrow exchanged a significant glance. The words ‘aged fourteen,’ seemed to reverberate in the air.

  “What else, ma’am?” the man asked.

  “Date and time of the fire,” Bray heard herself say. Her mind spun with the possibilities. It was only two, she reminded herself, only two fourteen-year-olds, and only one certainly marked. Besides, she did not know that the incident in Gallan was on—

  The beeping sounded again. “Da Un Marcu Eve, 2 AM,” the telegrapher said.

  “What was the submitted origin and cause of the fire?”

  The man tapped with expert fingers and Bray held her breath.

  “Suspected arson. Inconclusive.”

  Without the prompting of a subsequent question, the telegraph machine began to beep again.

  The man read: “Strange case. Only four bodies could be identified in the remains.”

  “Which was missing?” Yarrow asked.

  Tap, Tap. Beep, Beep. “Ellsie Ollas aged fourteen. Never found.”

  “Any more questions, ma’am?”

  “No,” Bray said. “Thank him for his time—and thank you for yours.”

  She turned and walked back through the passageway, across the atrium, and into the street, Peer and Yarrow at her side.

  “Doesn’t add up, does it?” Peer said as they wended their way through the crowd. “That girl’s body was missing, and all of the bodies in this case were found.”

  “Yes—that is true. If the marked are being targeted, why would the fourteen-year-old be missing?” Bray said. “Unless our perpetrator does not always kill the target victim right away…”

  “Aren’t you always saying how the criminal mind’s systematic and predictable?” Peer challenged.

  “Yes. But if Yarrow is right then we’re examining bookends. Over the course of a decade, it does not defy logic that a murderer would alter his method. And there are similarities as well—neither fire could be explained, they happened on the same day at the same time, both could have involved the death of a marked girl—”

  “We don’t know that girl in Gallan was marked.” Peer shoved his hands into his pockets forcefully.

  “We don’t know that she wasn’t, either,” Bray said.

  They turned a corner and crossed a street; the King’s Repose came into view.

  “We need to find out if these are two isolated incidents, or if they represent a greater trend,” Bray said.

  “And how are we going to discover that?” Peer asked, his tone incredulous.

  Bray had no answer for this. There was no reliable overarching law in the three kingdoms. The constables of each district and city worked independently. It was a highly flawed system, and the reason that many murderers and rapists could act with impunity.

  “The library in Accord,” Yarrow said.

  Bray turned to him, her eyebrows raised in question.

  “The Capital Library collects the newspapers of every city across the kingdoms. Fires of this nature are bound to be headlines—if not, obituaries.”

  Peer groaned. “So what, we’re going to read every newspaper ever?”

  “No,” Yarrow said. “We only need look at clippings from Da Un Marcu, and only from the past ten years. It should be relatively straightforward.”

  They had come to the entrance of the inn, but none of them made to enter; rather they tarried on the front step.

  Peer frowned. “Bray, what do you think?”

  Yarrow faced her as well, and the look on his face gave her pause. It was a measuring, thoughtful gaze. He had said he awaited her to display wisdom, and she imagined this was that moment. The moment when she decided if she was going to let mere prejudice blind her from seeking truth. She frowned at him and narrowed her eyes. She did not want his approval, but neither did she want to do the wrong thing.

  “I think,” she said to Peer, “we’re going to visit the Capital.”

  Yarrow inclined his head to her, a smile on his lips, and proceeded through the door. Peer stayed her step with a hand on the shoulder.

  He stared down at her, his expression unreadable. “I’m not liking this.”

  “Which part?”

  “The part where we’re letting a Cosanta direct our next move. Seems suspicious to me.”

  Bray leaned against the hand rail. “Is it just that he’s Cosanta that bothers you? You seem sour of late.”

  He looked away from her, across the street. “I’ve been meaning to check in on the orphanage down in Andle for an age.”

  A slight panic rose in her chest, but she responded with feigned casualness, “If you want to go your own way—”

  “No, that’s the point. I’m no use on this one. These girls have families, they aren’t orphaned. But I’ve not gone, and I won’t, because I’ve got your back, Bray—you and Adearre, that’s what matters to me—”

  “I know, Peer, you’re my best—”

  “And I can’t be watching your back,” he traced a gentle finger along her swollen cheek, “if you’re going off without me—with him.”

  Misplaced as it was, his concern warmed her. “I’ve got my eyes open,” she assured him.

  He nodded and his face lost some of its seriousness. “Good. Make sure they’re staying that way.”

  “Freshen your cup?” the serving girl asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” Bray said.

  The girl, distracted, spilled tea on the linen. It was no wonder, Bray thought.<
br />
  She sat on the back terrace of the Lampton Inn, two days’ journey south of the capital. Ever since her confrontation with Yarrow in Greystone, much of the distrust and awkwardness between the two groups had dissipated. She couldn’t quite have said how that had happened. She found herself, when she let her guard slip, even liking the two men. Ko-Jin, in what Bray estimated was a peace offering, had proposed a series of training lessons as they traveled. Peer and Adearre had both accepted his offer.

  Ko-Jin, as it turned out, was not only gifted physically. He had traveled around Trinitas studying every known fighting technique. He had a mastery of every major weapon in the kingdoms, and he was well-studied in military history and battle tactics. He was the most lethal person Bray had ever seen or heard of, which puzzled her. Shouldn’t he be Chiona?

  “I’m sorry,” the serving girl said, as she attempted to sop up the spilt tea.

  “It’s no matter.”

  The girl’s eyes continually darted upwards through her lashes at the three shirtless men. They were, all of them, rather easy on the eyes. But Ko-Jin was something else altogether. Bray wished he would put his shirt back on…

  She felt something brush against her leg and started, but when she looked down saw it was only a cat. “You’ll receive no love from me, beast,” she told the wide-eyed creature, as it tried to rub up against her boot. “Off with you.”

  Yarrow, beside her, had declined the sparring lessons, saying he had important research to conduct. She suspected, in truth, he had no interest in fighting. She had rejected the offer for a different reason. She did not trust herself to remain calm and clear-headed while being schooled by a Cosanta.

  Yarrow poured over a massive tome—the transcripts of the Fifth. She marveled at his ability to focus so intently on his reading. He hadn’t stirred or looked up once, even despite all of the commotion their companions were making.

  Almost as she thought this, he looked up at her. “Can I ask you something?”

  She gestured for him to proceed.

  “Are you familiar with the mathematical principle of tertiary equivalence?”

  This was so far from what Bray expected him to say that she laughed. “No. I can’t say that I am.”