Maren
“Idon't want an oath-bound giant following me across the wilderness.”
He doesn't blink. “What you want is irrelevant. The oath is made.”
We'd made it to an abandoned barn sometime after midnight, him leaning on me so heavily I thought my bones might simply compact under the pressure. He refused to stop until we had walls around us. Kept looking back at the trees, at the darkness, at something I couldn't see but he clearly could.
The something that screamed. The something he's been hunting.
Now it’s morning and he's standing, which shouldn't be possible.
The wounds I stitched last night are still angry and red, infection still threatening at the edges despite everything I threw at it.
But he's upright. One hand braced against the barn's weathered support beam, knuckles bone-white with the effort, swaying but refusing to fall.
“So what's the range on this thing?” I'm packing my supplies harder than necessary, shoving things into my bag with more force than the threadbare fabric deserves. “If I walk east and you walk west, does the oath just stretch? Does it snap? Do we both drop dead?”
“It doesn't work that way.” His voice is steady, but I can hear the strain underneath. “The binding is not a leash. It's a debt. Distance won't dissolve it.”
“Right. It dissolves when you save my life or one of us dies. You mentioned.” I stuff my last roll of bandage into the bag and yank the drawstring.
“What I'm asking is whether I have to be standing next to you for it to work. Can you protect me from, say, three towns over? Very protected. Very far away.”
“The oath would pull me to you. If you were in danger, I would know. I would come.”
“From three towns over.”
“From anywhere.”
I stop packing. That lands differently than I expected. Not a leash, he said. But not freedom either. Something with teeth that works both ways.
“And if I just don't get into danger? If I'm very careful and boring and nothing ever tries to eat me? Does the oath just... wait? Forever?”
His expression shifts. Not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, gone before it fully forms. “You climbed into a ditch full of blood to save a stranger twice your size. I don't think careful and boring is available to you.”
I cinch my pack closed and stand. The blister on my heel has evolved from screaming to a sort of wet, grinding agony, and my back has locked solid overnight.
Every muscle aches. I slept maybe two hours, curled against the far wall while he sat in the opposite corner, still as stone, watching the door.
He didn't sleep. I know because every time I stirred, those amber eyes were open. Fixed on the darkness. Waiting for something that never came.
I have to crane my neck back to meet his gaze. The angle sends a spike of pain down my shoulders. “So I'm stuck with you.”
“Until you need saving.” That half-expression again, barely visible. “Given your complete absence of survival instincts, I expect that won't take long.”
“That's rude.”
“It's accurate.”
I want to argue. Can't, really. I did climb into a ditch to save a dying monster I'd never met, in open defiance of every rule that's kept me breathing on these roads.
He pushes off from the beam and takes a step toward the door. His leg buckles. Not completely, but enough. I see the way his weight shifts, the way his body betrays him, and I'm moving before I can think better of it.
I duck under his arm. Shoulder against his side, bracing, trying to take as much of his weight as my frame can manage.
Which isn't much. He's heavy in a way that defies the normal rules of mass, dense with muscle and bone and whatever makes a Bogatyr something other than human.
The pressure drives my boots into the packed dirt floor and forces the air from my lungs in a sharp huff.
He goes rigid.
Every muscle in his body turns to iron. I feel it happen under my hands, and for a heartbeat I think he's going to throw me off. Shove me away. Rebuild that careful distance he's been maintaining since the moment he woke up in the ditch.
“Don't.” The word sounds like it's being dragged out of him through broken glass.
“You'll fall.”
“I'll heal.”
“Not if you tear those stitches open. Not if you land wrong and drive a broken rib into your lung.” I adjust my grip, trying to find a position that doesn't feel like being slowly compressed into the earth.
“I didn't spend all those hours putting you back together to watch you undo my work in three seconds.”
“You should keep your distance.” His voice has gone tight. Controlled in a way that speaks of effort, of something being actively held back. “I'm not safe.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it's true.”
His skin is hot against mine, even through the leather of his armor. The fever hasn't broken. Might be getting worse. Some clinical part of my brain is calculating how high his temperature must be running, whether this is normal for his kind or a sign of something going badly wrong.
The rest of me is noticing other things. The way his arm feels across my shoulders, heavy and hard. The way I fit under it. The way his chest moves against my side with each careful breath, the expansion and contraction of something massive trying very hard to be still.
I look up at him. His jaw is clenched so tight that I can see every tendon in his neck standing out. His eyes are amber, not gold, but something moves in their depths. Fear, not anger.
“You had a chance to hurt me on the road. And again while I slept last night,” I say. “When you woke up. Your hand was right there.” I gesture at my throat. “You didn't.”
“I almost did.”
“Almost doesn't count.”
“It should.” He's looking down at me now, really looking, and I can see the weight behind his eyes. Years of it. More than I can guess. “You don't understand what I am. What I can do. What I've done.”
“Then tell me.”
He doesn't answer. Just stands there, rigid as iron, letting me take a fraction of his weight while the rest of him stays carefully, deliberately separate. I feel his pulse where my hand presses against his side. Too fast. A heart that size shouldn't beat that fast.
I decide not to push. Not yet. There's time. We have miles ahead of us and nothing but road to fill them.
“Come on.” I shift my grip, guiding him toward the barn door. “One step at a time. You can brood about your tragic backstory while we walk.”
The sound he makes isn't quite a laugh. But it's closer than anything I've heard from him yet.
We make three miles before he admits we need to stop.
He's gray beneath the bronze of his skin, a sick undertone that speaks of blood loss and fever and a body running on nothing but stubbornness.
His breathing has gone shallow, each inhale shorter than the last. The tremor in his hands has spread to his arms, to his shoulders, to the muscles in his back that I can feel jumping under my palm.
An old farmhouse sits at the edge of a fallow field, roof partially collapsed but walls mostly solid. It'll do. It has to.
I steer us through the overgrown yard, through a doorway that he has to duck to enter. One room still has most of its ceiling, and there's a fireplace built into the far wall, blackened with old soot but intact.
He lowers himself against the wall furthest from the door while I set about building a fire. I gather what dry wood I can find from the collapsed section, breaking apart an old chair that's more rot than furniture, arrange it all in the fireplace with hands that know the work by heart.
I can feel him watching me.
It's not uncomfortable, exactly. Just present. That steady amber gaze tracking my movements the way it tracked my hands last night, in the ditch, while I stitched him back together.
“You should rest too,” he says.
“After.”
“After what?”
“After I check your wounds. After I make sure the infection isn't winning.
After I do the job I'm apparently oath-bound to keep doing until something tries to eat me.” I strike flint against steel, catch a spark, nurse it into flame.
“You're very demanding for someone who claims he doesn't want me around.”
“I never said I didn't want you around.”
I look up from the growing fire. He's watching me, and the flames catch, grow, throw dancing shadows across his face and turn his eyes to something closer to gold. My hands stop moving on the flint.
“I said I wasn't safe,” he continues. “That's different.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.” He shifts against the wall, winces as the movement pulls at something, settles back with a careful exhale. The wound on his side has started seeping again, a dark stain spreading through the bandage. “Wanting and having are different things. For my kind, they have to be.”
The words land somewhere under my ribs. I don't look at his face.
So I do what I always do. I work.
I cross to him, kneel at his side, start unwrapping the bandage.
Even kneeling upright, the wound on his side is at my eye level.
The one on his shoulder is above my head.
I have to reach up and work with my arms raised, fingers going numb from the angle.
The heat radiates off him even before I touch the skin.
I keep my touch clinical. Professional. The fact that my patient is an oath-bound Bogatyr who just implied something about wanting shouldn't change anything.
It doesn't change anything.
His hand twitches when I peel back the last layer of bandage.
I glance up. He's not looking at my face anymore. He's looking at my hands. Watching them move across his wound, tracking every motion of my fingers.
“Something wrong?”
“No.” His voice has dropped lower. Rougher. “Your hands.”
“What about them?”
“They don't shake.” He sounds almost confused. “You're touching me and they don't shake.”
“Should they?”
“Everyone's hands shake when they touch me. Fear response. The body knows what the mind won't accept.”