Chapter Four
The Binding Oath
The opening ceremony of the Tally was held nine days after registration closed, and in the space between the two, Calla learned more about the shape of her own fear than she had learned in the four years since her family's fall.
Maren worked her mercilessly through those nine days, in the way Calla suspected only a woman who genuinely loved her could afford to be merciless, waking her before the grey light had properly found its way down the cliff face and keeping her bent over the brittle old book until her eyes ached and the strange, angular script of the founding tongue had begun, disconcertingly, to make a kind of instinctive sense rather than requiring the slow, deliberate translation it had demanded on the first day.
"You will not master it in nine days," Maren told her, on the fourth morning, when Calla's frustration had finally boiled over into a muttered curse at a passage that refused to resolve into anything coherent.
"No one masters this in nine days, or nine years, if we are honest about it.
What you can do, if you work hard enough and complain considerably less, is learn to recognize the shape of a properly bound vow well enough that you are not standing in that arena guessing at something the other contestants have known since before they could walk. "
"They've been training for this their whole lives."
"Most of them have been training to win," Maren said.
"Which is not entirely the same discipline as training to survive it, though the temple schools like to pretend otherwise.
The Blood Houses raise their children to understand the mechanics of vow magic the way a soldier understands the mechanics of a blade, competently, thoroughly, and almost entirely without any real understanding of what it costs to actually use one on another living person.
You have a different kind of knowledge available to you, if you're willing to use it. "
"What kind?"
Maren's expression had gone unusually serious then, the particular gravity she reserved for the things she considered genuinely important rather than merely urgent.
"You know what it costs a family to lose.
Not in the abstract, not as a lesson recited by a tutor who has never once gone hungry, but in your own body, in your brother's hand, in your father's shoulders.
That knowledge will not help you parse a vow's grammar any faster.
But it will help you understand, in a way most of your rivals never will, exactly what is actually at stake every time someone in that arena opens their mouth to speak a binding oath, and that understanding is worth more than any amount of rote training, if you let it be. "
Calla had turned the words over in her mind more than once in the days since, through the long hours of practice and the shorter, precious hours she spent each evening sitting with Bryn, whose grey had not visibly spread further but had not receded either, a stubborn stalemate that neither of them dared name aloud for fear of jinxing it.
She thought of Maren's words again now, standing in the vast open courtyard atop High Reach where the opening ceremony had gathered every registered contestant of the current Tally beneath a sky so wide and blue and uninterrupted by cave stone that it still, after nine days, made something in her chest catch unexpectedly whenever she looked up at it.
There were, by her count, walking the loose clusters of contestants and their attendants who filled the courtyard, perhaps forty souls who had registered for this cycle's Tally, though only a fraction of them would still be standing by the time the final trial concluded twelve years of governance would rest on.
Some wore their house colors with the easy confidence of people who had grown up expecting to be exactly where they now stood.
Others, fewer, wore the plainer clothes of houses whose standing had slipped in recent years but not yet collapsed entirely, families gambling everything on this single chance to reverse a decline before it became permanent.
Calla wore the plainest clothes of anyone present, because House Duskane no longer had colors to display even if she had wanted to, and she felt the weight of that absence keenly as she took her place near the courtyard's edge, aware of the glances that slid toward her and away again, curious and careful in equal measure.
"You're staring at your own feet," a voice said, close enough beside her that Calla startled, and turned to find a young woman perhaps two or three years her senior watching her with an expression of frank, unembarrassed appraisal.
"It's a common mistake. Everyone thinks looking small makes them less of a target.
It doesn't. It just means the people who were already going to underestimate you get to feel smug about it early. "
"I wasn't aware I had an audience."
"You always have an audience here," the woman said, with a short laugh that held no particular warmth but no cruelty either, simply the flat practicality of someone stating an obvious fact.
"Odalys Windmere. Everyone calls me Oda, mostly because Odalys takes too long to say when you're trying to warn someone about an incoming trial with three seconds to spare. "
"Calla Duskane."
Something flickered across Oda's face at the name, quick and unreadable, gone before Calla could properly interpret it.
"The Duskane," Oda said, not quite a question.
"I heard someone registered under that name and half the council nearly choked on their morning wine.
Didn't expect you to actually show up looking like you belong here. "
"I'm not entirely certain I do."
"Good," Oda said, with a decisiveness that seemed to surprise even her.
"Neither do I, if we're being honest, and I've decided that's precisely the sort of company worth keeping in a place like this.
Everyone else here has spent their whole life being told they were born for this arena.
Makes them predictable. You and I, at least, still have to actually think about it. "
Before Calla could respond, a ripple of attention moved through the assembled contestants, heads turning in near unison toward the raised dais at the courtyard's far end, and Calla followed the collective gaze to find the ceremony's principals taking their places above the crowd.
Empress Isadora Ashvane occupied the central seat, a woman whose bearing conveyed authority with an economy of movement Calla found almost unsettling to witness, every gesture precise and unhurried in the particular way of someone who had never once in her life needed to raise her voice to be heard.
Beside her, a step lower and slightly to the left, stood a man Calla had not seen closely before, tall and silver haired despite a face that did not otherwise suggest advanced age, dressed in the deep blue robes of the temple's highest office.
"The High Warden," Oda murmured, following Calla's gaze.
"Cassian Thorne. Keeper of the Concord's vows, presides over every trial, certifies every binding.
If you remember nothing else from today, remember his face, because you'll be seeing considerably more of it than you'll enjoy over the coming months. "
Calla studied the Warden as discreetly as she could manage, and found something in his composed, watchful stillness that unsettled her in a way she could not immediately name, a quality less like calm and more like carefully maintained control, the particular stillness of a man perpetually listening for something the rest of the room could not hear.
And then, a final figure stepped up onto the dais, and Calla's attention, despite every effort to keep it otherwise occupied, moved to him entirely of its own accord.
Ademar Ashvane wore his house colors with none of the easy confidence Calla had noted in other contestants, his posture correct but somehow tighter than it needed to be, a man performing comfort rather than feeling it.
He was taller than she remembered from their brief, distant childhood acquaintance, broader through the shoulders in the way that years of whatever training a crown prince underwent tended to produce, and when his gaze swept the assembled contestants and found her, however briefly, something crossed his expression that Calla could not quite name before he looked away again, deliberately, toward some fixed point in the middle distance that required, apparently, his full attention.
"Careful," Oda said, low enough that only Calla could hear it. "Whatever that look was, I'd think twice before deciding it means what you're hoping it means."
"I'm not hoping for anything."
"Your face disagrees rather strongly with your mouth just now, but we can revisit that particular conversation another time," Oda said, with a dryness that suggested she had already filed the observation away for later use.
The Empress raised one hand, and the courtyard's murmur fell away into a silence so complete Calla could hear, faintly, the distant sound of water moving far below the cliffs, a sound that had followed her every waking hour of her life and had never, until this moment, felt quite so much like a countdown.
"Contestants of the current Tally," Isadora said, her voice carrying without apparent effort across the full breadth of the courtyard, "you stand today at the beginning of a cycle that has governed this Empire's relationship with the Concord for four centuries, unbroken, since the founding bargain that spared us all from the fate the Black Tide still waits, patiently, to deliver.
You have each sworn a blood bond to see this Tally through to its conclusion.
Understand, before the first trial begins, precisely what that bond requires of you. "