Swear It On Your Secrets

“You swear it?”

“I swear it.”

Slowly, she turned look at me. Her eyes were still bright with hurt. “Swear it on your secrets,” she said.

“What?”

“Do it the Glavian way. Swear it on your secrets.” I remembered this now. The Glavian custom. They considered an oath most binding if it was sworn against private, personal secrets. In the old days, I suppose, that meant one Glavian pilot swearing to exchange valuable technical or navigational secrets with another as an act of faith and honour. Midas had made me do it once, years before. He’d made me swear to a three-month sabbatical at a time when I was working too hard. It hadn’t been possible, because of one case or another, and I’d ended up having to tell him that I adored Alizebeth and wished with every scrap of my being that we could be together.

That was the deepest, darkest secret I had been carrying at the time. How things change.

“I swear it on my secrets,” I told her.

“On your gravest secret.”

“On my gravest secret.”

She spat on the ground and then quickly licked her palm and held out her hand. I mirrored her gestures and clasped her hand.

— Hereticus, Chapter 3