Dan Blackwood's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The flowers had bought Dan a little ground with Lily, and the bond at the council had given him more than he had asked for. Two mates now. Lily on one side and Darius on the other, both of them tied to him by something he could feel in his teeth. He wanted to mark them. He wanted it done before the week was out. But marking was not a thing you did in a borrowed room at a five-faction manor, and it was not a thing you rushed. He picked the tree first. A wide oak past the creek, far enough from the manor that no courier would wander through. He spent two days building. He laid platforms in layers around the trunk and linked them with rope bridges. He wove the railings from pale birch branches because Lily liked things that grew wild. He hung a ladder from the lowest deck and tested every knot with his own weight. By the second night the treehouse stood quiet above the moss, and Dan sat on the top platform and let his hands shake where no one could see them. He brought Darius up first, in the morning. Darius climbed the ladder in his long coat and looked around at the birch railings and the rope rings. "You built this," Darius said. "I built this." "For us." "For us." Darius did not smile, but his shoulders came down the way Lily's had on the path. He sat on the platform and waited. Dan went back down for Lily. She came up the ladder without asking what it was. She stepped onto the platform and saw Darius already there and did not flinch. Dan pulled a cord from his pocket. On it hung a pendant of three linked rings, two gold and one silver, balanced so no ring sat above the others. He had paid a witch to forge it in one night. He held it out flat on his palm. "I want to mark you both," he said. "Tonight. If you want it." Lily looked at the pendant. She looked at Darius. "Yes," she said. Darius said, "Yes," a half-beat after her, shorter and more final. Dan marked Darius first because his hands were steadier then. He marked Lily second because he wanted to remember her face last. When it was done the three of them sat on the platform with the cord passed between them, and Lily laughed once, low, at something Dan said about the knots in the railing. He had not heard her laugh before. He understood then that he had been working for that sound without knowing its shape. In the morning Dan walked down to the clearing below the oak and set a three-sided stone there, carved with three linked rings. He pressed moss into the base with his thumb. Then he went back up the ladder, because a courier was already on the path, and the next problem was waiting.