One farm boy. One rigged war. A hundred and forty very patient women.

Braen Halder was nineteen, broke, and fifty-seventh on his captain's list of problems to make disappear. The Crown had conscripted him under a class they couldn't legally send to a real fight, handed him a scythe and a grain sack, and marched him forward to die quietly. He'd been planning to. He had a letter to his mother written and everything. But the field where they left him wasn't the field they thought it was.

It was the Sworn Ground. A hundred and forty oath-bound women were massacred on that dirt a hundred and ten years ago, when the king's grandfather decided the tradition needed to end. He was wrong about how oaths end. When Braen's blood soaked into the wheat, the conditions matched for the first time in a century, and his peasant class broke open and remade itself into Oath-Cutter. One cut to Call. A hundred and forty women to bring home, one at a time. And every one of them has been waiting.

The first is a towering Shieldmother, scar from temple to jaw, broken chain clinking against her throat with every breath. She has not been touched in a hundred years. She unbuckles her armor for him like she is giving back pieces of herself, one buckle at a time, and she is not in a hurry. The second is a drow dawn-blade with a red ribbon in her white braid and a crooked grin, who decides the day she steps out of the ground that his education has serious gaps and that she is going to enjoy closing every one of them, in every room of the farmhouse, for as long as it takes. The third is a small white-furred catgirl who speaks three words at a stretch, walks barefoot, and curls around him at night like she is finally home, purring into the hollow of his throat while her tail wraps his wrist.

The king wrote them off a century ago.

He should have counted bodies.