His fingers engulf mine. His palm is hot, rough, scarred in ways I can feel but not see. When he pulls himself upright, I have to brace hard to keep from being dragged off my feet by his weight.
He stands there in the moonlight, swaying, bleeding. Nine feet of wounded Bogatyr, oath-bound and barely upright. Standing, he blots out the tree-line. I have to step back just to see his face without craning my neck to the point of pain. The forest is getting dark around us.
“Maren,” I say. “My name. Since we're stuck with each other.”
“Kovren.” He looks down at me, and there's something in his face I can't quite read. Confusion, maybe. Or wonder.
He takes a step, then another. Limping but moving.
I scramble up after him, shoulder my pack, wince at the blister, and start walking.
He waits at the top, helping me up, then follows.
The road stretches ahead of us, dark and empty.
Behind us, somewhere in the trees, something that isn't an animal makes a sound like breaking.
KOVREN
Ifelt it before I understood what was happening.
A bright spike of pain that wasn’t mine, and then something else underneath. Something old and buried deep, waking up. Her blood falls into the wound she's holding closed, red against the black of mine, and the two mix in the torn flesh of my chest.
The old magic seizes it.
I've heard stories.
Every Bogatyr child hears them, the tales of blood-bonds forged at the death threshold, when someone freely chooses to save a life and their blood mingles in the saving. I thought they were tales. The kind of thing that happened in the old world, before the Shift, when Bogatyr were more than scattered remnants and failed oaths.
But I can feel it. Her blood in my blood. Her life touching mine in a place deeper than skin or bone. The magic that lives in all Bogatyr, dormant in most of us, quiet for years, stirs and reaches and takes hold.
The oath comes out of me before I can stop it.
I hear the words leaving my mouth and every part of me fights to drag them back. The old words. The binding ones. Theones I swore I would never speak again after the stronghold, after Rodvek, after I proved that my oaths mean nothing.
I try to close my jaw. Try to swallow the words. My teeth ache from clenching and still they come, pulled out of me by something stronger than will.
By your blood and mine.Hers until the debt is paid.
The binding settles into my bones, and I want to tear it out of myself because I know what comes after the oath. I know the shape of it, the way a soldier knows the shape of an ambush before it closes.
I am going to get her killed.
She will die too, because of me, because the old magic found her blood in mine and I wasn't strong enough to fight it. Because some broken part of me wanted the bond, and the magic knew.
She heard the words.Your blood is in me. Mine is in you. But she doesn't understand what they mean, what a blood-bond does, what it costs. She thinks this is just an obligation. A debt.
It's more than that. I can feel her pulse, faintly, at the edge of my awareness. A second rhythm where there should only be one.
I should tell her.
I don't.
“That's not necessary,” she says.
I almost laugh. Necessity has nothing to do with it.
“That's inconvenient,” she says.
