"When did this appear?" My voice came out barely above a whisper.
"The morning after." He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the mark as though it might bite him. "I woke up and it was just... there."
"You've had it for three days and you didn't tell me?"
"I don't know what it is." There was a rough edge to his voice — not anger, something closer to unease. The kind of discomfort that came from encountering something he couldn't fight or argue with or shove into a box. "It just appeared. I thought it might fade."
It wouldn't fade. It would never fade. I knew that with a certainty that went deeper than the texts I'd read — I felt it in the way my seal burned in response, reaching for his mark the way a river reaches for the sea.
I pressed my thumb to the gold dot at its center, and the mark flared — the violet wisps surging, the glow at the crescent's rim brightening, and something warm and vast moved through the connection between us. Hakan made a low sound in his throat, something between shock and want.
"Ada." His voice had gone hoarse. "What is that? What did you just —"
"It's a bond mark." I pulled my hand away, but the warmth lingered, humming between us. "They're in the old archives. I've read about them but I never thought — Hakan, they're not supposed to be real. They're legends."
"What do they mean?"
I looked at him. At those green eyes, guarded and searching and afraid of the answer. At the mark on his wrist still glowing faintly, the violet wisps still curling, my gold still burning at its center.
"It means we're tethered," I said. "Not by choice. Not by politics. By something older than both of us."
He stared at me. Then at the mark. Then back at me. And I watched the war play out behind his eyes — the part of him that wanted to believe it fighting the part that was terrified of what it meant.
He pulled his sleeve back down. Took my hand. Started walking again without a word, his fingers tight around mine.
We walked in silence for a while. The forest thickened around us, branches weaving together overhead until only thin shafts of light penetrated. The air grew heavy with the scent of moss and old magic — the kind that predated courts and treaties and the careful divisions between light and shadow.
I noticed the way Hakan's shoulders loosened in these spaces. The way his breathing deepened. As though something in him recognized the in-between places of the world as home, even if he couldn't explain why.
He steered us onto a narrower path, and I let my attention drift toward a patch of wild strawberries growing in a spill of sunlight between the roots of an old birch. My hand was already reaching before my brain caught up.
"Ada."
I looked down at my own fingers, then at the strawberries, then at him — and had the decency to look sheepish. "I wasn't going to eat them."
"You were absolutely going to eat them. You do this every single time."
"They're so pretty, though. And they smell —"
"Like three days of your face swelling up and your throat closing shut." He caught my wrist and pulled me gently away from the patch. "I had to carry you to the healer when you were still little because you couldn't breathe. Your aunt nearly killed me for letting it happen, as though I was the one who shoved a fistful of wild strawberries into your mouth."
"It wasn't afistful. It was two."
"It was enough." He laced his fingers through mine, steering me back onto the path with the ease of someone who'd been doing it for twenty years. "And then you tried again a few decades later because you'd decided you'd 'grown out of it.'"
"In my defense, I genuinely thought —"
"You went purple, Ada."
I huffed, but my mouth was twitching. "Fine. No strawberries. You'd think you'd get bored of this routine after two decades."
"You'd think you'd stop reaching for them."
His hand squeezed mine. The tension from the bond mark conversation still lived in his grip — too tight, slightly desperate — but the banter had eased something between us. This was what we did. We pushed, we pulled, we circled the dangerous things with sharp words and sharper silence, and then we found our way back to each other through the small, stupid rituals that two people build over twenty years of knowing each other too well.
The strawberries. The staring. The way he freed my hair when it caught on things. The way I let him.
That evening, he took me up to the tower roof.
