“Quiet. Distant.”
“Distant.” She repeats the word like she's tasting it. Turns a page in her book, runs one gnarled finger along a line of text I can't read from here. “That matches.”
Maren leans forward. “Matches what?”
Mother Sanque doesn't answer immediately. She closes the book, opens another, flips to a section near the middle. She'sbuilding to something. I've seen scholars do this before, laying groundwork, arranging the pieces before they reveal the picture.
“In the ditch,” she says. “When you healed him. Describe it again. Exactly.”
Maren glances at me. “He was dying. My hand slipped on a broken rib while I was stitching inside his chest. There was blood everywhere. His and mine. I used my sewing kit to stitch the wound, poured alcohol over everything, kept pressure on his chest until his breathing stabilized.”
“Your blood mixed with his.”
“There was no way to avoid it. My hands were torn open.”
“I'm not criticizing.” Mother Sanque's voice is sharp but not unkind. “I'm establishing facts.”
She pulls a third book from the pile, opens it to a page covered in diagrams I don't recognize. Circles and lines, symbols older than anything I've seen in the stronghold texts.
“What I'm about to tell you is pieced together from fragments. The stronghold records Kovren brought me years ago, and older sources. Much older. Some of this is confirmed. Some is my best interpretation. You'll need to decide how much you trust it.”
“Tell us,” Maren says.
“A blood-bond formed between you. In the ditch, when your blood mixed and you saved his life.” She taps the diagram. “The oath magic that's woven into every Bogatyr doesn't just bind them to their duty. It's alive, in a sense. It seeks anchors. Connections. Points of stability. Kovren's oath is intact but straining. It's been straining for eight years, pulled between his duty and the impossible task of freeing Rodvek. When you saved him, when your blood was in his wounds and his was on your hands, the magic latched onto you.”
The words land like stones dropped into still water. I feel each one settle.
“It formed a bond,” Mother Sanque continues. “Involuntary. Neither of you chose it. Neither of you could have prevented it. The oath magic recognized you as someone worth binding to. Not because of anything you did deliberately, but because of what you are.”
“What I am?” Maren asks.
“Someone who saved him. Someone who bled for him. The magic doesn't care about intention. It recognizes action. You protected him. You, a stranger, crawled into a ditch full of his blood and held his lungs together with your bare hands.” She fixes Maren with that sharp gaze. “The magic found reciprocity. Two people saving each other. That's rare enough to trigger a bond even without the blood contact. With it, the bond was inevitable.”
I stare at the floor. At my hands on my knees, the scars across my knuckles.
“The touch response,” Maren says. She's already ahead of me, already fitting pieces together. “When I touch him and the beast goes quiet. That's the bond.”
“That's the bond. An anchor effect. Documented in the old texts, though I had no living cases to study until now.” Mother Sanque pulls a page of notes from the pile, covered in her cramped handwriting. “An anchor can suppress the berserker rage through proximity. Physical contact is strongest. But the effect diminishes with distance, and it's limited by the nature of the bond itself.”
“Limited how?”
“The bond as it stands is incomplete.” She sets the notes down, folds her hands. “The touch-quieting you've observed will weaken over time. Weeks, perhaps months. Eventually the anchor effect will fail entirely, and the beast will return to its full strength.”
The room goes cold.
I look at Maren. She's watching Mother Sanque with that clinical focus, the healer processing a diagnosis. But her shoulders have drawn tight, and her hands have gone still in her lap.
“There's a way to stabilize it,” I say. Not a question. Mother Sanque wouldn't have stayed up all night just to deliver bad news.
“There is.” She reaches for a different book. This one is older than the others, the binding cracked, the pages yellowed to the color of old bone. “In Korsmot, there is an artifact. A binding stone. It's ancient. Older than the Bride Market that grew up around it, older than any record I can find. No one knows who made it or why. But what it does is documented thoroughly.”
“What does it do?” Maren asks.
“It reads intent. During the marriage ceremony at the Bride Market, both parties stand before the stone. The bride makes her choice. The stone reads whether the choice is freely given, whether the intent is genuine. It cannot be coerced or deceived. And when it confirms a true choosing, it formalizes the bond.”
She pauses. Let’s the words breathe.
“A formalized bond is permanent. It doesn't decay. It doesn't weaken. And it supersedes all prior bonds of lesser standing.”
