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. The ones 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.
And something gives way inside me. Not the wounds. Something that has been locked shut for a long time.
She speaks of the oath the way a merchant speaks of a bad deal, and I find myself almost smiling at her practicality.
She stands. Holds out her hand. “Then I'll take my chances.”
I stare at her hand.
When did anyone last reach toward me instead of away? I cannot remember. The years blur together, a gray stretch of isolation and hunting and running from the thing I might become.
Her hand is small. Scarred. Steady. I could close my fist around it entirely and her fingers would not reach past my knuckles.
I take it.
She doesn't say anything. Just shoulders her pack, winces at something I cannot see, and starts walking. I hear her heartbeat now, faintly, layered beneath my own. The bond has done that, threaded her pulse into my awareness so that I carry the rhythm of her even when she is not touching me.
I follow.
Behind us, in the darkening trees, something screams. Not animal. Not human. The sound I have been hunting for eight years, and the sound that has been hunting me.
He's found me again.
And now there is someone between us. Someone small and unafraid who bled into my wounds and does not understand what that means.
I can smell her ahead of me on the road, herbs and sweat and the iron of my blood still on her hands, and every instinct in my body is rearranging itself around her presence, cataloging exit routes and angles of attack and the distance between her and the tree-line.
I walk faster. Put myself between her and the sound without thinking about it, my body already doing what the oath demands and what something older than the oath wants.
Protect her. Keep her alive. Don't let her become another name on the list.
She glances back at the trees, at the sound, at the darkness gathering behind us. Then she looks up at me.
“Friend of yours?”
“No.” The word comes out harsh. “Keep walking.”
She doesn't argue. Doesn't ask questions. Just picks up her pace and keeps moving.