The Vows of Velmarra

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.

They call him the Reformer. She has no intention of being reformed.

They call Donavar Keach the Reformer, and he has never once liked it.

He lost an eye in the war and gained a raven, and he has spent the years since taking apart the kind of men the Courts prefer to call rumours. The one he’s hunting now works Hollow territory, takes children, and has never had his name written down by anybody with the authority to act on it.

Ness Tarn knows the name. She has known it for years. What she doesn’t have is a reason to hand it to a Verdant knight with an Order commission and a habit of deciding what’s best for people — and she says so, at length, before she agrees to anything.

What follows is a hunt through the back-rooms of the Hollow Marches, conducted by two people who each expect the other to break first. She was born to a Hollow house and buried the name it gave her. He is the only person in years to ask what it was.

They get their confession. Under contract-magic, in a room with no doors, the predator gives up more than his own crimes. He names someone above him.

Nobody in that room believes it. A rumour, an old story, a bogeyman that Hollow advocates frighten each other with.

The Veiled Hand.