Chapter 3
AMARIA
We were two alleys away when the voice split the air—amplified and final.
"By decree of the Crown, the Sorting now commences in the Square of Names."
Serenya's head snapped toward me. "Go! The square—I'll check their shelter!"
We knew what that meant. If the boy was already at the Square of Names—before we masked the mark—he was as good as claimed.
I pushed past crates, carts, and the stunned faces of people turning toward the voice.
Smoke from the evening cook-fires hung low and thick: charred fat and temple sage and the sour bite of open drains.
My heart surged ahead of my steps. Please, please not yet.
The square opened like a wound in the city's chest. People packed the perimeter.
Mothers gripping children by the wrists, merchants abandoning their stalls mid-transaction, priests in white filing toward the dais like it was holy ground and not a butcher's block.
The air stank of myrrh with an edge underneath.
Fear. The kind that makes a crowd go still and obedient.
Banners hung limp from the temple columns—Crown-blue and gold-threaded.
Above them, terraces ringed the square like theater boxes for an audience that never had to bleed for the show.
A show where children were displayed like cuts of meat waiting to be graded.
And at the center of it all, raised three steps above the square on polished marble veined with gold and shadow, the Sorting platform waited.
Two Enforcers flanked it, spears upright, faces blank as gravestones.
I pushed through the crowd, surveying faces, movement, anything that might be him.
Please, let Serenya find him hidden and safe.
I found the dais looming ahead, a raised platform just visible through the press of bodies, where the children would be waiting.
A shoulder slammed mine—solid and unforgiving.
I staggered a step. Caught myself. Snarled. Let them bruise. I had worse to outrun.
Sixteen children stood bare-chested on the platform.
Torchlight licked across their shoulders, their collarbones, the soulmarks already surfacing on skin too young to hold them.
Some had their arms crossed over their chests.
Others stood with fists at their sides, chins up, feet bare on marble that had to be cold by now.
Brave little fools. I'd been one of those once.
I scanned the crowd looking for him, then a sound broke through the throng—a child's cry—and everything in me locked.
"One of them—there!"
The shout snapped like a whip—and I saw her.
A girl, no older than seven, dirt-smudged and wide-eyed.
She trembled near the foot of a temple stair, tunic hem snagged on broken tile, eyes darting like a trapped animal.
She stumbled as the enforcers closed in, their movements slow, deliberate. Predators pretending to keep the peace.
"She's hiding a shadowmark," one of them sneered, smirking and confident.
A lie. And my Mark felt it before I did.
My Luminar mark—the Unravel—detected and untangled falsehood.
I could've looked away. I'd done it before. Not this time. Light flared beneath my robes, my own sovereignty rising ruthless. The cobblestones quaked beneath the Enforcers. And the lie—split.
A crack wrenched the air—jarring, final.
Satisfying as sin. Light ripped out of me before I could leash it.
Silver fire tendrils unspooled from my mark, hissing with whispers as they coiled around the guards' throats and unraveled the lie thread by thread—pulling it apart like fingers teasing a knot from silk.
The tendrils wrapped the girl too, but gently, like a fist closing around something breakable. It burned. And it felt damn good.
The crowd gasped. No shadowmark on the girl's skin. Just a young Luminar whose power hadn't yet risen. Just a trembling child, and the raw ache of fear laid bare. The truth held. She was innocent.
My jaw locked.
"False alarm," I said.
Then quieter, but with a defiance I didn't bother to hide:
"Even luminars ignite in the right light. Now you've seen what burns. Lies."
The nearest fae turned quickly, assessing me, measuring the weight of my words.
The enforcers, too far to hear me, gave me a slight bow.
"Thank you, High Luminar," one said, his voice dropping to a reverent murmur. He gestured vaguely at the grime of the square. "But you should be careful, My Lady. The air here is... unclean. It's not a place for one of your purity."
High Luminar, my ass. If they only knew.
"I go where the light leads," I lied smoothly.
A priest nodded in solemn approval beside a decaying fountain, the water dry and green with age. I bit back a scoff. Their praise wasn't comfort. Just permission wrapped in fear.
As the crowd shifted and the Unravel faded, its whispers died last—trailing off like the final note of a song no one else could hear. Air crawled back into my lungs—too thick, too slow. The Mark simmered. Not gone. Just leashed for now.
An instinct tugged at my attention. I turned, searching the upper tiers, at the far side of the square. Someone had been there. Watching. But when I looked, they were empty. The feeling of being watched didn't leave, though.
A few murmurs rose around us—barely whispers.
"They say the Crownforged is here."
"The soulbinder."
"No one sees him until it's too late."
The Crownforged. Great. Just what this night needed —a Crown-leashed weapon skulking around the square while I played saint with stolen balm in my bag.
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Barely.
The whispers made him sound like a ghost story.
Something to scare children into obedience.
But ghost stories didn't make my mark flinch.
And whatever had been watching me from those tiers hadn't felt like a story.
Serenya appeared at my side, breath short, face drawn tight.
She didn't speak at first. Just shook her head once.
He wasn't at the shelter. If they'd taken him, someone had talked.
Someone always did. And my stomach dropped.
One mistake—mine, his, anyone's—and it was already too late.
She must've run the whole way. Her braid stuck to the side of her neck, and the edge of her cloak was damp with sweat or mist or both.
Her gaze swept the square: bare chests, marks blooming too bright to hide.
Face by face. Mark by Mark. We searched for him. Dreading it.
I turned to Serenya. "He's not here." My voice came out wrong, too steady for the dread underneath. "So where is he?"
The question hung between us, unanswered. Had he run? Had someone taken him? Was this luck—or a trap? My eyes bounced from one child to the next.
"We'll give it a few more minutes, in case he's brought in late." Serenya nodded, but neither of us looked away from the platform. "Then we check the shelter. Look for any signs of what happened or where they went."
We squeezed each other's hands, attention back on the dais.
The first name was called.
I'd watched Sortings before. Stood in crowds like this, teeth clenched, fists buried in my cloak. But it never got easier. Because the first time a boy was taken—I wasn't this close, I wasn’t able to stop them.
I was small. Hidden beneath the roots of the old prayer tree as our village burned.
Dirt packed under my fingernails where I'd clawed into the ground, and the smoke was so thick it left a film on my teeth.
The priests called it a cleansing—punishment for living in the wilds, outside their laws.
After they slaughtered our parents, they took the children with potential, measuring worth by the soulmarks on our skin.
The boy with the rarest Mark stood before them. Mud on his knees. Jaw set. Chains already locked.
The boy who'd sworn he'd protect me. No matter what.
I never heard the sentence they gave, or saw where they shipped him off to.
I only knew it was the last day I ever saw my brother.
That was what it meant, sometimes. To be claimed.
I blinked back tears as the first child was called forward.
A girl, slight, quivering, but composed. Her soulmark shimmered gold across her sternum, pulsing like a second heartbeat.
Flame of Clarity.
A Gift of Order.
The priest's staff struck the marble with an echoing crack.
"You are Luminar," the priest intoned, the old rite sliding too easily off his tongue. "Order from fracture. Light from ruin. Assigned to the Temple Scribes."
The crowd exhaled. Soft murmurs, the rustle of robes, the sigh of a family whose child had drawn a lucky mark. As if that made any of this holy.
I shifted my weight. My boots had gone numb against the cobblestones. Behind me, a lady was praying under her breath—the same three words, over and over, fast enough to blur.
Safe. Safe. Safe.
The second child was called: Song of Sorrow. A boy this time.
His mark flickered faintly, empathy most likely, and I found myself hoping it would rank as a minor Luminar trait—something high enough to keep him out of the dark.
The priest hesitated, eyes narrowing, glancing again at the shimmer across the boy's chest. He waited a beat too long. Said nothing.
"Labor class," he intoned finally. "Nurse-Caste."
A collective exhale rippled through the crowd.
Low rank. Scrubbing wounds and emptying bedpans for the rest of his life. The crowd relaxed like that was mercy.
The torches on the dais popped and guttered. Shadows jumped across the children's skin, and the crowd pressed closer, bodies closing the gaps like the square itself was shrinking.
Then came the third.
Bone-Spiral of Hollow Echoes. No one had to explain what that Mark meant. We felt it from where we stood, grief with magnetic hooks. Gasps broke across the crowd before the boy had taken his first step.
The child stepped forward, face unreadable, eyes too old for his frame, his Shadowmark burning dark and strange. He didn't break eye contact with the priest—not even when the priest's voice shifted, cutting and absolute.
"Shadowmarked. Bound for the Veil Mines."
Beside me, Serenya sucked in a breath. I felt her shiver before I heard her speak.
"They shouldn't speak his name. That Mark eats memory. Every word roots it deeper."
I looked away. Not from pity but from fury. That boy had more backbone than the whole damn square, and they tossed him into the dark like spoiled fruit, like the gods would thank them for it. My hands clenched. I knew that look, that defiance. I wore it once, before I learned what it could cost.
The worst part wasn't the fear. It was the silence, the way no one spoke up. Not the priests, not the guards, not the parents clutching their spared children. They all looked away like that boy's courage didn't matter. Like it never had.
My rage was building. I crushed it down. Feelings got people dead.
Then—
A flicker—same place as before. That presence. The one I'd tried to shake.
But this time—I saw him.
There—above the dais, alone on a terrace—stood a figure in slate and obsidian armor, brushed with Crown-blue.
Not just an enforcer. Something deadlier, made for war, not spectacle. Coiled and commanding, like the whole square existed for his gaze and he knew it.
The air around him thinned.
I stilled, as any prey should before a predator.
I didn't know whether to bare my teeth or bare my throat. It was threat laced with a tempting, lethal promise. A poison that would hurt me—and then make me beg for more.
Then I saw it—the V-shaped mark, burned in red, thin-lined and barely visible under his chestplate.
A Crownforged.
The V for the vow they make to the King. Made in blood. Sealed in law. Irrevocable.
Their soulmarks were too rare to be left to fate. So the King marked them back. Bound them in law and blood.
Only the Crown could command their power.
Only the Crown could set them loose.
And their top priority? Hunting someone just like me.
His kind weren't common—not here. That was exactly why Serenya and I had settled in Velmyra. I dared to look up again, toward where his eyes should've been—but the helm masked them in shadow. It didn't stop the force of his gaze.
My fingers found the satchel, feeling cloth and glass and purpose beneath the leather. The vials didn't shift. My pulse did.
His medals threw the light—sharp, blinding. I flinched, shielding my eyes, drowning in the glare and the sudden vulnerability of lost sight.
My Mark flared. My mind scrambled, clawing for coherence. Who was he?
A single thought slid through the chaos:
My Mark knew him.
Or worse—he knew me.
And when the glare faded—when my sight returned—
I saw him.
Looking directly at me.
As if he'd been waiting for me to look up.