"Useless. That is all you have ever been to this family." I stood at the long table and waited for it to be over. Lady Vessral did not even look up from her cup when she said announced my insult… That was the worst part. Sixteen years of that word, and to her it was just regular now. The household ate around me. Steward, mark-keeper, guards, none of them looked at me. In this house, looking at the markless boy was not worth the trouble and my father sat at the head of the table, cutting his meat. Lord Draven Veyne. The golden lion. Head of Clan Obsidius. He heard his wife call his only son useless and he had never looked up at me. "Do you hear me, boy?" Vessral said. "Today your cousins receive their marks. Nyra will be blessed before the whole clan. And you will stand in the crowd with empty wrists, embarrassing the blood that feeds you. Do us one useful thing in your life. Stand where no one can see you." "Yes, my lady." "Do not call me that." "Apologies. My…" I closed my m

I did not sleep that night, and it was not fear that kept me awake. I lay in my narrow bed in the old wing of the fort, staring at the ceiling, and turned the day over and over like a stone in my hands. Something had spoken to me on the stairwell. Something had pulled me back from death with words of light only I could see, and filled my body with a heat that closed a sword wound in a heartbeat. At dinner, Sylene had looked into my face and dropped a full goblet to the floor, because my eyes had been glowing. What was happening to me Sixteen years I had been the markless boy, invisible, useless, beneath everyone's attention. Now I was the most interesting thing in Obsidian Fort, and I did not know what I had become. I understood one thing clearly. If I said a single word about any of it, my family would not call it a miracle, instead they would call it a threat, and the clans do not argue with threats. They bury them. My mother had been a warning of exactly that. So I made the de

I couldn't sleep after all I noticed I could do. After Sylene left me standing on the practice ground, I walked slowly back to my room, and I kept looking back over my shoulder the whole way, because I could not shake the feeling that my name was following me through the dark. The corridor was empty. The shadows were only shadows. But my heart did not believe my eyes, and it was still hammering when I reached my door, I went into my room, and locked it. I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time, going over her words. Bad things happen to you when you wander, little brother. She had seen me. She must have seen the water, and she had said nothing to anyone. I turned every piece of it over and over, looking for the trap inside it, until sleep, which had been waiting for me all night, finally pulled me down. When I opened my eyes, I was not in my room anymore which surprised me, I was lying on smooth black stone in a place I had never been before, a wide open space with no door and n

The horn sounded again, closer this time and I made my choice without knowing I was making it. I could not run. Not really. Sable was unconscious in my arms, bleeding through the strips of cloth I had wrapped around her arm, and even if I had dropped her, even if every smart bone in my body had screamed at me to drop her and go, the forest was full of ears now, and a running boy leaves a trail. A thinking boy leaves a plan. I carried her to the biggest tree on the slope, into a hollow between its roots where the shadow sat deep even at noon, and I laid her down as gently as I could. "If I die for this," I told her, and she was too far gone to hear me, but I said it anyway, "you had better be worth it." I pressed her short blade into her hand so her fingers would not forget it, and I climbed back out into the light, and I waited. While I waited, I did the things a boy does when he has decided not to survive quietly. I filled my lungs and made myself breathe slow. I looked at my pa

“That's him.” someone said from behind me.I had barely stepped into the great hall when the conversation around me began to die off… One voice stopped, then another. People who had been laughing over breakfast suddenly found something interesting about the floor.I turned as Sylene stood near the elders' table, dressed in a dark blue gown with her black beads arranged neatly around her wrist. Nyra stood beside her, looking as though she had been waiting for something entertaining to happen, then her eyes settled on me.“Zephyr,” she said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “I didn't expect you to return so soon.”I stopped walking and turned towards her “Did you expect me not to?”A few people exchanged glances and She gave me a small smile. “That's not what I meant.”“Then perhaps you should say what you mean.”Her expression remained pleasant, but something shifted in her eyes. “I was only wondering how you managed to survive out there.”I looked at her for a moment then I replied “