Quote Originally Posted by stveje View Post
"Why don't we swear a formal oath?" he muttered, instead, from the corner of the room where he was hunched, thumbing idly at the screen of a (probably stolen) phone for some news or distractions to satisfy his ennui.
"No man may serve two masters." Isaac's tone is distant, for all that is a rolling thing out of the deep places of the sea. (The sea, where we shall carve out the heart of a decaying tyrant. We shall be heroes. And none of us are Summer, after all, and yet the words are burnt into his flesh.) "For either he shall hate the one and love the other." This comes from the scorched and bloody bone of him, not the part that just today has worried about the web of trust that lies all the tighter about him. The part that needs no thought. It is wound into a spot as tight as a bruise beside his knee. "Or else. He shall hold to the one, and despise the other. ei de mē, eipon an hymin!"

His terrible nails drum a executioner's beat on his knee. He sits packed into a corner, looking outwards at the assembled Changelings. His friends. His freedom. The familiar yoke. "The price of staying. Crowns and secrets. Are we worth such?" Or, in other words, is everyone here aware of what it means to be an inter-court motley? He's already beginning to feel the strain, and it will pull at all of them in different directions (save perhaps Edmund, but his sails are down and his anchor is moored). If our protagonists are to swear an oath of eternal fraternity, they must- they must be willing to uphold that oath above all others, or else why even bother? The oaths of fealty to the Courts were, at the time, full of fear and tumbling out, something fallen into, but if these five swear loyalty unto each other, it must be deliberate and worth the speaking.

And though it might be hard to tell- except to your discerning eye, bonny Lily white-fingers- Isaac will swear that oath in a heartbeat. But only if everyone's thought the words through.