Marked

PART ONE

My breath clouds in the frigid air, curling close before vanishing. My feet throb from standing too long in the cold. Ahead, people fidget—some shifting from foot to foot, others still, eyes fixed on the snow-covered ground as if staring hard enough might let them disappear into it. Silence presses in—thick as wool, colder than frostbite.

The sound of what waits is a raw, echoing chorus that reverberates off stone walls like a wound that never closes. A scream cracks through the cold. Another follows. Then another. Choked sobs, hoarse cries, guttural wails—proof that pain has a voice and today it’s loud enough for the sky to hear.

The line moves too slowly. Or maybe too fast—I can’t decide which is worse, and the uncertainty makes it harder to breathe. We step forward. We sit. And sooner or later, we rise again—branded. A permanent mark: a serial number threaded into the skin of our forearms. Proof that we exist. Proof we belong to the system. The threading isn’t just a mark; it’s a ledger—age, assignment, lineage, even our share of the war.

By the end of the day, eight digits will be stitched into the inner stretch of both my forearms, identifying me for the rest of my life. It happens the year we turn eighteen—our transition into adulthood branded in thread.

Before sunup, the last of the citizens from the surrounding villages of the capital—Regalis, Vallmere, Paysan, and Briarhold—began forming the threading line along the south corridor of the château’s courtyard. The line moved at a slow but steady pace until the highborns arrived. From six places back, I watched them glide to the front. Each of them extended one arm and then the other—unflinching, composed.

The highborns glide forward, their marks inked instead of stitched—neat, bloodless, invisible unless you’re looking. A ritual dressed as equality, but everyone knows better. Among them, a girl yawns as the dye seeps into her skin—her fur-lined cloak slipping from one bare shoulder, as though the cold can’t touch her. She inspects her nails instead of the mark, bored as if this were no more than waiting for a seamstress to finish a hem. Their names stay safe; if a highborn tile is ever drawn, someone lower always pays the price. Providence makes sure of it—the council pulls the strings, the métier shuffles the ledgers, and the barrel spins only as far as the crown allows.

When the spectacle ends and the highborns retreat to the safety of the château, the line starts to move again. Screams reach those of us who still stand in line, dulled by distance but impossible to ignore. Each one marks a fate sealed in thread.

“Next,” one of the threaders calls, and the person in front of me steps forward.

From the front of the line, with no one left to shield me, I see everything. There’s nothing between me and what waits. Six chairs. Six bodies. Six arms strapped tight to the threaders’ boards. At the center, a threader with wrists ink-stained black hums under his breath—steady, tuneless, as if he’s found comfort in other people’s agony. Each stitch lands to his rhythm, cold and mechanical.

I watch as the needle punctures a stranger’s skin—the girl jerks against the restraints, a raw, desperate sound tearing from her throat before she can stop it. Down the row, a young man grips the sides of his chair so hard his knuckles bleach white, his jaw locked tight enough to shatter bone. At the far end, a threader bends over a slumped figure, a young man who must have passed out partway through—the thread still weaving steadily into flesh as if his unconsciousness changes nothing.

Behind me, the unmistakable sound of someone retching into the snow.

“Next!” barks a heavyset man with a voice like gravel.

I don’t move at first. I’m frozen in place, watching the girl who just left his station—her face blotchy, her cheeks damp.

“You, girl, I said next!”

I jolt forward.

“Name?”

“Amethyst Baker.”

He licks a gritty finger and flips through a short stack of bonded pages, searching. His eyes flick to me for a second. “Sit down, you ridiculous girl.”

I drop into the splintered chair—no cushion, no comfort. Just straight-backed and merciless, like the man in front of me.

The threader’s chair creaks as he shifts his weight. When he finds my name, he makes a mark beside it. His job is to get the numbers right, and I pray he’s found mine correctly—I have no way of knowing otherwise. I can’t read or write letters to verify the ledger, and we live and die by the numbers we’re given. Then, without warning, he grabs my arm. No words. No kindness. Just practiced efficiency. He binds it to a board bolted to his chair, knots over my palm and forearm.

A sharp gasp from the chair to my right pulls my attention.

The male conscript next to me begins banging the back of his head against his chair and I can’t tell if it’s to stay conscious or not, based on the expression etched into his face. The low, rhythmic snip of scissors cutting the thread after the final stitch comes from my other side, one after another, two people are finished before I get started.

When the chair creaks again, I turn my attention to the man in front of me, the one about to stitch my destiny into my flesh. He says nothing, only reaches for a needle from the bowl that’s appeared next to him. Thread dangles from its tip, black-dyed and soaking. More needles sit in the clay dish beside him, waiting. Beside him, discarded needles pile red on the ground.

Each needle draws black thread through flesh, stitching in the numbers that define us—sharp, deliberate, permanent. One loop, one mark, one future—pulled tight beneath the skin. It will stay, and if I’m lucky, my skin will heal around it without complication.

He begins without warning.

The first prick is white-hot. I suck in air through clenched teeth, the breath catching as fire sears into the outer curve of my forearm. Thread pulls through me, slow and deliberate, each tug drawing the ink-drenched strand deeper, tighter.

The needle snags, and my vision flickers.

The pain claws my focus into a narrow tunnel. I bite down hard, tasting iron.

My body fights back, jerking against the restraints, but the board holds. I understand now—its purpose isn’t to steady the arm. It’s to trap us. To tether us in place while our futures are carved into flesh.

He never speaks, but I think I hear him humming under his breath—off-key, steady as the stitches. It’s worse than silence because he’s found a rhythm in our pain.

I bite down hard, iron flooding my mouth, refusing to give the threader my scream. He works without pause—calm, mechanical—branding numbers into flesh.

When he unties me, I force myself to look. Crimson beads along the stitches, the swollen seam raw and pulsing. The digits blur, then sharpen—my future carved into me in black thread.

05 0410 17—eight digits that decide who I am.

05—Paysan, the village where I was born, my home.

04—for the fourth king to hold the throne.

10—the year of his reign.

17—for the seventeenth child born in in my village that year.

Each number stitched into me holds its own quiet truth—a history pressed into thread, a record inked in pain. This is who I am.

He reaches for my other arm without warning, and I flinch—too late. The restraints bite harder this time, as if they remember too. The needle follows, fast and merciless. My nerves recoil before it even touches me, already bracing for the fire. And then it lands.

White-hot agony rips through me. This time, I can’t hold still. My body jerks and a scream tears loose, raw and unrestrained. But I don’t beg for it to stop, I don’t plead. Instead, I endure. When the final stitch is drawn, he drops the needle into a bloodied bowl. “Report to the métier for your assignment,” he says, already reaching for the next needle.

After a dizzying moment, I push to my feet, swallowing the burn in my arms and the nausea curling in my gut. I step onto the ice-slick walkway, wearing composure like a borrowed coat. My back aches. My legs are stiff. And my ass is numb from that wretched chair. Worst of all—my forearms blaze despite the blood sliding down them chills in the air, the cold biting until it stings through the muscle.

The cobblestone walkway along the east corridor is slick with ice, each step a quiet negotiation. Mounds of trampled snow press against the edges, dirty and packed from the countless feet that came before me today—some steady. Some not.

All of us walking the same path. But none of us truly together.

Ahead, a narrow alleyway cuts between two stone buildings, nearly hidden in shadow. It’s vacant—untouched, unbothered. I glance around once, then slip down it. The cold follows, but the eyes do not. And for a moment, I am alone.

I lean against the wall; the stone bleeds its chill into my spine, deeper than the winter air ever could, granting me a sliver of privacy.

It’s done, but the thought won’t settle.

My breath comes too fast, too shallow, as if my ribs forgot how to hold it. I slide down the wall until I’m crouching, arms resting threadmark-side up on my knees. I feel small, tucked between stone and sky, invisible for just a breath longer.

The courtyard beyond the alley is alive with movement—the low murmur of voices, the clack of boots over ice—but here, in this sliver of shadow, I am allowed to just be myself. Just Amethyst. Not a number. Not a name scratched onto a ledger, waiting to be called to war. Just a girl reclaiming breath.

Overhead, the sky churns with heavy clouds—grey and bloated with snow. I watch them move, my breath curling in the still air, and I let myself feel it. All of it. The pain. The fear. The quiet shame of being sewn into a future I didn’t choose.

When the tears come, they’re silent and quick. I bend to let the weight pass through me. The pain hums in my arms, sharp and sour, but it’s the hollow ache in my chest that feels worse. When the moment is gone, I press the heels of my palms against my eyes, as if I can push the ache back inside. Then, with a breath that scrapes the inside of my throat, I push myself upright.

Fingers stiff from the cold, I reach into a cloak pocket and pull out the package Peridot gave me this morning—my sister, always thinking ahead, always tucking care into the folds of a day like this. A folded cloth bundle, soaked through with one of her mixtures. She’d pressed it into my hands with a soft warning: use this or you’ll regret it, Amethyst.

I unwrap the damp strips and begin winding them carefully around each forearm, just as she taught me. The cloth is cool, soaked in willow bark, yarrow, cayenne, lavender. An herbal remedy that stings at first and then numbs. It doesn’t erase the pain completely but it’s so harsh that I wonder if anything ever will. Regardless, the wrappings take the edge off, dulling the burn into something slightly more bearable.

I smooth the last piece flat and then fold the rest back into its bundle before returning it to my pocket. Crouching beside a drift, I scrub the blood from my hands with packed snow, wishing I had a way to press it against my arms and freeze them numb. For now, what I’ve done has to be enough.

A scuff of boots against the snow pulls my attention. Someone else slips into the alleyway. He doesn’t see me, his focus scattered like brittle leaves, eyes darting but not focusing.

He slams his back against the wall, hard. Breath fogs the air in a sharp escape. The wall doesn’t stop him—it holds him, steadies him, like a thing rooted deep in the earth. Something unmoving, when everything else is unraveling. I know that posture. I’ve folded into it myself more times than I can count. My chest tightens—not out of fear, but the kind of ache that comes from knowing someone too well.

The son of a lord—a forge owner in Vallemere—dressed the part but denied the grace. By blood, he stands high above me. But he never let it stand between us because no one ever let it matter for him. He’s the boy who once came to the bakery with hands so burned he couldn’t turn the latch. The one who always tries to hide the abuse—the bruises and whip-scars. The one who shies away from kindness like it’s a trap.

Aodhán.

The pact was simple: face this day alone. Not because we don’t trust the other—but because some pain would be too raw, too personal to be witnessed. We both knew we’d come undone in different ways, and we wanted to protect that unraveling, keep it ours.

But here he is—shaking, blood seeping from fresh threadmarks, fury hollowing his face. He hangs there, spine bowed, arms limp. Blood seeps from the raw threadmarks on his forearms. His pale face is contorted not only with agony but with a fury so deep it’s hollowed him out.

Then he screams—raw, teeth-bared, soul-torn. It scatters birds from the eaves, splitting the air with a sound too primal for words.

It dies into a broken sob he crushes down with a curse, low and hoarse. “What more do you want from me?!” he shouts at the sky, voice cracking apart at the edges. Breath claws in and out of his chest, his whole-body shivering—not from cold, but from the weight of being alive.

And still, no one answers. He clutches his opposite arm, right over the threadmarks, his grip too tight. Pain floods his face but he doesn’t let go.

I should walk away—slip into the other end of the alley and give him space to fall apart alone. That was the agreement, after all. But standing here, watching him, something inside me shreds loose. He’s not just another conscript. He’s my closest friend. The one who always tried to be whole when the world was determined to break him. And now, life has dealt him one more blow—and this time, I can’t look away.

Born in death, to a mother who never got to hold her babe, never got to press him to her breast. Left to a father who saw her last breath as betrayal—and made the boy who bore it pay. And yet, Aodhán remained kind. The world has done everything it could to turn him cruel and that is what breaks me. He never let it.

His voice dips into something quieter. I can’t understand the shape of the words only the sound of them. The way they fracture in his throat, the way grief softens fury into something heavier. He paces, muttering—unraveling with every step.

He moves so suddenly it startles me—I don’t even see him bend. One moment he’s pacing, the next he’s hurling something across the alley. It shatters, a sharp as the crack in his composure.

I shift back, bumping a discarded tin pail I hadn’t seen. It clatters against the stone—loud, final. Unignorable. His head snaps toward the noise, eyes wide, body tightening like a bowstring drawn too far. His gaze lands on me—brown eyes heavy with the weight of a settling storm and strained at the edges, raw with everything he can’t contain.

Recognition flickers—and quickly, he begins to rebuild his mask.

He runs a trembling hand through his hair—dark chestnut, damp from sweat and tousled—trying to smooth it into place. It’s more instinct than care, a small act of control. His fingers linger in the strands, just long enough to betray how frayed he really is. Then he squares his shoulders, one breath at a time, jaw tightening like he’s pulling shut a door on everything that nearly spilled out.

His gaze sweeps the alley, searching—hoping no one else saw. When it lands on me, and then the blood on my arms, something flickers behind his eyes. But he doesn’t speak.

We stay where we are, caught in that strange hush. It would be easier to pretend we didn’t see each other, to retreat into silence. But that’s not who we are. So I step forward, closing the space between us one heartbeat at a time.

When I reach him, we hesitate—not out of uncertainty, but caution. Raw arms pause, instinctively guarded. Then I shift, adjusting the angle, and wrap mine gently around his sides, careful not to press too hard. He exhales sharply—like he’s been holding his breath for year. Slowly, carefully, he folds into me as though he’s afraid this comfort might break him further. His hands settle around me in the same guarded way—no pressure, just presence—cradling pain without disturbing it.

He exhales, slow and shaking, and leans in.

The bells toll—nine slow notes that echo across the sky and through the capital.

He swallows, voice rough. “I was just heading to the métier.”

“So was I,” I say, adjusting my cloak.

He pulls back. “Walk with me?”

I nod and pull the extra bandages from my pocket, quietly handing them to him. He takes them without hesitation, knowing exactly what to do with them. And as he wraps his forearms, we step out of the alley—carrying each other forward.