Part V — The Oath of Fire and Shadow
Summary: At dawn, Lord Rorik watches Saviik's measured practice and asks for a vow of restraint. Xala joins them, and together they seal a pact of silence as the lake holds the morning like fire sleeping in water.
As Saviik walked away, the last candle bent once more toward him, just enough to suggest a bow.
He paused at the threshold, turned the iron latch, and let the door ease shut with a sound like folded paper. The corridor beyond the library held the cool of stone kept awake all night. A woven runner lay along the floor—blue with a border of small white diamonds—softening each footfall until his steps felt like edits made to silence.
He did not rush. Lamps in their wall sconces guttered low, glass chimneys milked with soot. At each casement window the black pane reflected a thin, pale self: a boy with cropped fair hair, the line of a pendant cord under his tunic, hands that had learned how to be still before they learned how to be strong.
At the end of the passage, the door to the outer arcade complained gently. A slice of colder air entered—clean, damp, scented faintly with wet limestone and the green hush of morning not yet declared. He let it touch his face and stepped out beneath the row of arches.
House Veyne was a geometry of quiet. Columns took the weight of the upper gallery; ivy braided itself along balustrades as if the stone were a harp. Between the arches, the garden lay in its own breath—furrows beaded with yesterday's rain, cypress trunks dark with it, a single late rose bowed under silver drops wide as coins. Beyond the garden wall, Lake Rumare held the sky like a lesson it had memorized: deep slate at the center, paling at the rim.
Down the steps—one, two, three—the marble still slick from the storm. He crossed to the practice court, a rectangle of tamped sand bordered by a low lip of white stone. The world hadn't chosen dawn yet; it hovered in that gray hour when birds think about singing but haven't decided.
Lord Rorik was already there.
He stood at the far edge of the court with his cloak thrown back, arms folded, eyes narrowed not in suspicion but in measure, the way a mason studies a wall for the places where it will bear. He inclined his head once, the exact depth a Nord gives to another Nord when both remember the same winter.
"You didn't sleep," Rorik said.
"I read," Saviik answered.
"That is one kind of rest," Rorik allowed. His gaze flicked to the boy's hands. "Well then. Show me how morning speaks to you."
Saviik stepped into the center of the court. The sand took his weight without complaint. He raised his right hand, palm down, and let his shoulders find the alignment Ylva had drilled into him: crown lifted, ribs unpinned, the body a straight sentence with no wasted words.
No incantation. Breath only.
Heat answered.
It gathered like a thought growing confident, then became visible—first as a dry shimmer, then as a filament of pale gold. He shaped it shorter than a finger, no wider than a grain of barley. It hovered above his palm and did not burn him; it listened, and it waited. When he rotated his wrist a fraction, the filament curved with the motion, obedient to permission, not command.
Rorik said nothing. The sparrows along the eaves decided to trust the quiet and began to stitch sound into the morning.
Saviik closed his hand. The light folded and was gone. He exhaled and, with that breath, let the urge to do more depart as well.
Rorik nodded once, satisfied. "Again," he said, but gentler.
A second time: the thread of fire drew itself thin and steady, bright enough to write with, if one had a word worth writing in light. Saviik held it, counted three heartbeats, then let it fall back into air as though returning a borrowed object to its shelf.
Rorik walked the length of the court to him, boots scuffing sand with the blunt honesty of leather on grit. He stopped at a careful arm's length—not close enough to crowd, near enough that the boy could feel the warmth of another body in the chill.
"I could tell you what you already know," Rorik said. "That this is remarkable. That I've seen men half my life fail to ground a spark that cleanly. But this is not a morning for praise."
Saviik looked up. There was a question ready in his throat; he let it stay there.
Rorik's eyes were not hard. They were the blue of glacial water—the kind that looks like truth and tastes like it, too. "Listen to me, boy. Cyrodiil loves wonders and despises the moment it cannot explain them. It will drag you to a dais and crown you before lunch, then whisper that you are an insult to order by supper."
Saviik waited.
"You will be asked to perform," Rorik said, "when you should be learning. You will be told you are safe, when you are being measured for a chain made of compliments. And someday a man who smiles while he counts will call your power 'gift' so that he does not have to name it 'fear.'"
The edge of the pendant pressed against Saviik's sternum as if agreeing. He didn't touch it.
"What do I do?" he asked.
"You decide who gets to see you," Rorik said simply. "You choose what you are for. And you promise me—here, now—that you will never let applause teach you how to speak."
The morning seemed to choose its light then—gray lifting to pearl near the lake, the water beginning to admit color. From the upper gallery a shutter clicked open, then another. The house woke by increments.
Saviik considered the shape of a vow. He imagined it like a small stone in the mouth—heavy enough to flavor every word that came after. He turned to the lake, because oaths ought to have witnesses larger than the man who asks for them, and lifted his chin to meet the day that had finally arrived.
"I promise," he said, each syllable held like glass. "I will hide what must be hidden. I will show what needs showing. I will not let their love make me smaller or their fear make me loud."
Rorik's breath left him in a quiet huff that had nothing to do with age. "Good," he said. He opened his hand. A simple knife lay on his palm—no ornament, just a workman's edge. "Steel remembers touch. Rest your hand on it."
Saviik set two fingers lightly against the flat. The metal felt colder than the air, then warmer, as if it had been waiting for a pulse to tell it what to be.
"By steel and by silence," Rorik said, "you are ward to House Veyne and son to the North. You will grow here and return there. Until then, your fire belongs to your will."
Saviik nodded. "By steel and by silence," he echoed.
A footfall sounded on the arcade. Xala approached, hair half-braided, the tie forgotten, cheeks freckled brighter in the cool. She had a folded shawl in her arms and the expression of someone who had run halfway and walked the rest so she could arrive breathing like a lady.
"You started without me," she said, but there was no accusation in it; only the satisfaction of finding the thing she'd been hurrying toward.
"We finished just now," Rorik said. He placed the knife back in his belt. "Come, stand with us."
She stepped to Saviik's side so their shoulders nearly met but did not. The shawl smelled of rosewater and clean wool. She looked at the court, at the faint fingerprint he'd left in the air, at the sand that kept his steps honest.
"What did you promise?" she asked.
He turned the words once more in his mind to be sure they were the same shape. "That I'll choose who sees me."
"Good," she said. "Then choose us."
"I already did," he said, and the truth of it sat easily between them.
Rorik faced the lake. "There's one more thing," he said, voice lower. "I'll not put it in a letter. I'll say it here where the water can keep it safe. You are not just a clever boy, Saviik. You are the future of something that frightens lesser men. That is why we teach you not to frighten yourself."
Xala's hand, still holding the shawl, brushed his knuckles as if by accident. He did not pull away. She didn't either.
"Then let the lake hear it," she said. "If we're making oaths, it should have something to do."
Rorik nodded once, approving the jest for the truth inside it. He lifted his chin toward the low light. "Lake Rumare," he said, as if greeting a lord and a friend, "we three ask you to remember: this boy is ours to protect until he remembers himself. Keep his reflection when we cannot, and return it when the north calls his name."
The water took the words without rippling, which is how you know a body is listening.
Silence widened, the good kind. Far out, a fisherman's skiff cut a small black line across the pale. Nearer, a heron lifted, jerk-legged, then found its grace and became a script written by air.
Saviik let his breath lengthen. He raised his palm one last time and invited a flame the size of a seed to appear. It did, obedient and content. He lowered it toward the lake until the light touched the water's skin.
Fire on water usually dies with a hiss. This one didn't. It lay there as a coin of gold on blue glass, unburning, unquenched, a sign without argument. Only when he drew his hand back did it sink, as if satisfied to rest inside, and the place where it had been became a brighter circle of morning.
Xala's voice was barely more than air. "It looks like it's sleeping."
"Good," Saviik said. "Then I'll learn to sleep with it."
Rorik exhaled the last of his tension and put a hand on the boy's shoulder, the weight careful. "Breakfast," he said, which in his mouth meant: live now; greatness can wait until after bread.
They stood another beat to be sure the oath had settled. The sun broke cleanly over the far ridge, laid a long blade of light across the lake, and turned the terrace columns into pale fires. The estate began its day—the clink of buckets, a muffled laugh from the kitchens, the faraway clatter of a dropped pan and the curse quickly smothered after it.
Saviik turned from the water at last. The pendant lay warm against his chest. He did not touch it. He did not need to.
As they climbed the stairs—Rorik steady, Saviik measured, Xala barefoot and pretending not to be—Lake Rumare held the small circle of brightness where fire had lain, keeping it as requested: not a blaze, not a boast, only a memory.
And if memory is the first kind of power, then the lake had taken its share and would keep it until the north came to claim the rest.