Bloodmoon and broken vows

The letter arrived the same day the physician confirmed what Isolde already knew in her bones — the house had six months of coin left, perhaps eight if the harvest held. She read it twice by candlelight, the wax seal already broken, cracked down the middle like something that had given up trying to hold itself together. Lady Vane, In accordance with the Ashgrove-Vane Accord, renewed under duress and sealed in blood thirty years past, I am pleased to inform you that a sworn protector has been assigned to your household, effective the new moon. He comes with full authority to guard your person until the Bloodmoon has passed. You did not ask for this. You will not refuse it either. — Council of the Red Ledger Isolde set the letter down on her writing desk, beside the marriage contract she had not yet signed, beside the ledger of debts she had not yet paid, beside the small carved stone that marked how many days remained until the moon turned the color of a wound. Forty-one days. She had grown up counting backward from something. First it was her father's illness. Then her mother's plans for her. Now it was this — a curse she'd never asked to carry, tallying its due in a currency of broken promises. "You're doing the face again," said Row's voice from the doorway — no, not Row. Row was gone. It was Petra, her maid, standing there instead, arms full of linens, watching Isolde with the particular patience of someone who had learned exactly how much silence her lady required before speaking. "What face?" "The one where you're deciding whether to be angry or afraid, and you haven't picked yet." Isolde almost smiled. Almost. "I'm deciding whether to be angry that a stranger's been sent to guard me, or afraid that I need guarding at all." "Pick angry," Petra said. "It suits you better." He arrived three days early. Isolde was in the east courtyard when she heard the gate groan open, and she told herself the tightness in her chest was irritation at the Council's arrogance — sending a man before his appointed time, as though her house ran on someone else's clock now, as though it hadn't always. She turned, expecting a soldier's swagger, a house crest stitched too proudly into a collar. Instead she found a man dismounting like the horse owed him nothing, travel-worn, dark-haired, a scar through one eyebrow that hadn't quite healed clean. He didn't look at the manor first, the way visitors always did, cataloguing its wealth or its decay. He looked at her first, and something in his face went very still, very careful — the look of a man walking into a room he already knew held a blade. "Lady Vane." He inclined his head. Not quite a bow. "I'm told I'm to keep you alive until the moon turns." "And who," Isolde said, "am I meant to thank for that particular gift?" "Kael." A pause, brief enough that she almost missed it. "Kael Row." It wasn't his name. She would learn that later, when the lie had already cost them both more than either could afford. But in that moment she only noted the small hesitation before it, filed it away the way she filed every debt, every due date, every promise made to her by men who did not intend to keep it. "Well, Kael Row." She turned back toward the manor, not waiting to see if he followed — he would, that was the entire arrangement. "You've arrived three days early to guard a woman who hasn't asked to be guarded, in a house that can't afford to feed one more mouth, ahead of a curse you likely don't understand and a wedding I haven't agreed to. I hope you're prepared to earn your keep." Behind her, she heard him exhale — something that might have been a laugh, if he'd let it all the way out. "I've buried better men for worse reasons, my lady," he said. "I imagine I'll survive you." Isolde didn't answer. But she counted, without meaning to, the forty-one days left until the moon came due — and wondered, for the first time in a long time, what exactly this stranger was going to cost her.