The Sheltering Vow

It protects a household. Not a child.

Mae Davaran has never broken a law in her life.

She’s twenty-eight, mageless, a matron at a Karsthold children’s-house. Four weeks ago her sister died on a staircase in her husband’s manor. The Iron Court magistrate ruled it a fall. The city patrol heard Mae out and wrote down hysteric.

So Mae takes her sister’s children — Calenna, seven, and Anders, five, who hasn’t spoken a word since the morning his mother died — and runs west with two days of food and her father’s knife.

Darien Vossarin is a Verdant Recon-Knight, and a forge-lord has paid the Order twice the going rate to have two small children brought home. It takes him three days to find them. It takes considerably less than that to know he isn’t going to give them back.

In all of Velmarra there is one instrument that outranks a father’s blood claim: a Sheltering Vow, fae law, older than the three Courts and beyond the reach of any of them. It doesn’t protect children. It protects a household — a hearth with two adults standing over it.

It would bind him to Mae. For a year and a day, and then in law, or not at all.

And he won’t offer it.