Her mouth trembles. She tries to turn it into a smile and fails.
“Don’t promise me impossible things.”
“I’m not promising impossible.” I shake my head. “I’m promisingme.”
I take the last step and drop—not all the way to both knees this time, because she asked me to walk beside her—but to one, enough to put my heart level with the chain and my mouth level with the scar she hides inside her quiet. I set my palm over her mark, through the thin shawl, and ask the bond to tell the truth I can’t shape with words.
“I will be the wall,” I say, voice low, steady. “When they come for you with paper and blessing, I will be stone. When they come with knives, I will be a worse blade. When they come with stories about what you owe, I will stand in the doorway and say no in every tongue I own.”
Her eyes shine.
“Even if it kills you?”
“Yes,” I say, because lies become debts and I won’t owe her those. “Even then.”
She shakes her head once, furious and so alive it hurts to look at her.
“I don’t want a grave in the shape of my name.”
“You won’t get one,” I tell her. “You’ll get a life where nobody touches your choices without bleeding for it.”
The ward-chain spits a spark at my palm. I don’t pull away. I’m learning how to hold pain without handing it to her.
“Look at me,” I ask.
She does. The whole garden, all that soft light and beauty, falls out of focus until there’s only the person I ruined and bowed to in the same afternoon. I deserve neither absolution nor the way she looks at me now.
“I said something unforgivable,” I tell her. “And I can spend the rest of my life being more careful with my mouth than the world is with your name. I can be quieter than a room full of men trying to decide what to do with you. I can listen when your fear speaks before it has language. I can be your shadow when you want one and your silence when you don’t.”
Her breath hitches.
“And when I’m the one who breaks?”
“Then I’ll keep watch,” I say, softer. “And I won’t call you weak for bleeding.”
She closes her eyes. A tear threads down and disappears into the moonlit edge of her cheek. It’s the kind of beautiful that makes me wish for a softer word than beautiful.
“Say the vow,” she whispers. “So I can carry it when you can’t.”
I lace our fingers. The ribbon I tied around her wrist peeks from beneath the chain, violet against silver. It looks like defiance pretending to be decoration.
“I vow,” I say, letting the old language of my house burn its way through my teeth, “to lay my wrath at your feet and take it up only where your safety begins. I vow to be one breath away. To be the first wall and the last hand. To be the blade in the dark and the quiet in the morning. I vow that if death comes, it will find me standing between it and you.”
The bond surges—once, twice—hard enough to sting. The chain crackles and then, for the span of a heartbeat, falls quiet. Her shoulders sag like someone put the world down for her so she could breathe. She leans her forehead to mine.
“Then I vow,” she answers, voice shaking, “to be the light that finds you when you forget your way back. To pull you from the fire you think you deserve. To remind you you’re not a weapon until you choose to be.”
My eyes close. The garden comes back into focus as sound: the stream, the vines, a far bell. Everything in me that learned to survive by being alone stares at this moment and doesn’t know where to put its hands.
“Say it again,” she says, barely there.
“I will protect you,” I breathe. “At any cost.”
She laughs, broken and soft, and pulls me up. The shawl slips; I catch it on instinct and settle it over her shoulders the way I wish I had been taught to hold anything fragile—quietly, without wanting to own it.
“Don’t teach me how to live without you,” she says. “That’s all I ask.”
“I won’t,” I promise. “I don’t know how.”
