Ruthless Vows

The novel opens with Enva, a divine who long ago bound Dacre beneath the earth with a year-long song, sensing that her spell is ending. In Oath, Iris Winnow is living with war trauma and grief after losing contact with her husband, Roman Kitt, at Avalon Bluff. Anti-god unrest is spreading through the city, Chancellor Verlice pressures the Inkridden Tribune to soften its reporting, and Roman’s father, Ronald M. Kitt, invades Iris’s flat to demand Roman back. Soon after, Iris learns Roman is alive when the Oath Gazette publishes an article under his name praising Dacre and presenting the enemy’s version of the war.

Roman’s own chapters reveal what happened. Badly wounded at Avalon Bluff, he was found by Dacre, partially healed, and left with fractured memories. Dacre tests him with two magical typewriters, then installs him as an "underling correspondent" and uses him to produce propaganda. Roman senses that his mind has been deliberately walled off, and the typewriter he is given carries an emotional link he cannot explain. Meanwhile, Iris refuses to believe he has willingly changed sides. With help from Sarah Prindle and Attie Attwood, she steals the First Alouette from a museum, hoping its magic will reconnect her to him. The typewriter returns all the old letters she and Roman once exchanged, and when contact is restored Roman answers without remembering her. To protect him, Iris resumes writing under the false name Elizabeth.

Their anonymous correspondence becomes a lifeline. Roman slowly recovers fragments of his identity through dreams of his sister Delaney, his former work at the Gazette, and his first meeting with Iris. Iris and Attie travel west with driver Tobias Bexley, stopping in River Down with Marisol Torres and then continuing toward the front. During this period Roman learns more about Dacre’s underground realm, its ley lines, and its hidden doors into the surface world. When he discovers that Dacre plans to seize Hawk Shire through those routes, he secretly warns Iris by letter. Iris shares the warning with Attie and Tobias, rushes to Hawk Shire, and convinces Brigadier Keegan Torres to evacuate before the assault, saving soldiers and civilians from being trapped.

During Dacre’s attack on Hawk Shire, Iris is stranded in a magical house on a ley line. Roman, forced to enter the town with Dacre’s troops, is sent to search the house and finds her hiding in a wardrobe. Instead of betraying her, he helps her escape. She tells him the truth that he cannot remember: she is his wife. Roman keeps her wedding ring after she flees, and that physical contact begins restoring what Dacre took. Soon afterward he regains all of his memories, including their marriage, and their letters change from cautious feeling into active resistance. Roman now sends intelligence from inside Dacre’s circle while Iris reports on the war and pieces together how the keys, thresholds, and under realm function.

Back in Oath, the political situation worsens. Verlice refuses to admit Enva’s returning forces into the city, unrest deepens, and the masked Graveyard rises in the streets. Iris discovers that Sarah and her brother, Forest Winnow, have grown close during her absence, then follows Dacre’s courier to the Kitt estate and realizes it hides an active door to the under realm. Roman confirms this by secretly studying Dacre’s map. Dacre then sends Roman back to Oath under watch, ordering him to recruit Iris to his cause. Their public meeting at Gould’s Café is cold and formal because Val is likely watching, but Roman slips Iris a secret note. That night she sneaks into his room at the estate, they reunite fully, compare what they have learned, and Roman gives her a rough ley-line map before dawn. By morning Dacre has occupied the Kitt house as a war headquarters, and Lieutenant Gregory Shane discovers Roman’s hidden letters, exposing him as dangerous.

At the same time, Iris and Attie realize that the forbidden string music haunting their dreams may be Alzane’s Lullaby, the song once used to put gods to sleep. Shane blackmails Roman into attending Chancellor Verlice’s private gathering at the Promontory, while Iris receives an invitation as well. The event ends in a bombing meant to kill Dacre, but Dacre survives. Roman is dragged away by Bruce, a Kitt associate tied to the plot, while Iris escapes to the museum. There, the night guard reveals herself as Enva. Enva explains that she killed the other buried divines to keep Dacre from absorbing their power, but a marriage vow prevents her from killing Dacre herself. She gives Iris Draven’s sword, a weapon that can kill a divine, and warns that Dacre wants Enva’s power to make himself unstoppable.

Dacre soon summons Iris to the Kitt estate, where he forces her to type an ultimatum: everyone south of the river must flee by noon or be bombed. Iris turns that coercion into resistance by getting both papers printed with the warning and embedding a covert guide to ley-line shelters that may withstand attack. She and Roman meet again and conclude that Dacre likely commands the eithral bombing raids from the under realm. They plan to steal a key and go below together. Before that can happen, Dacre learns Roman loves Iris and has betrayed him repeatedly. Roman openly defies him, is chained in the under realm, and Dacre orders Iris brought to him. Val attacks Iris’s flat to seize her, but she kills him with Enva’s sword while saving Forest, takes his key and flute, and escapes to the Attwoods’ house.

On the day of Dacre’s ultimatum, Oath erupts into panic. Iris’s shelter list sends civilians toward enchanted buildings. Forest goes to find Sarah, while Attie chooses to leave her family and descend with Iris through a threshold hidden in Gould’s Café. Above them, eithrals begin bombing the city. Roman, chained among sulfur pools and bones below, hears the attack begin and realizes Dacre intends to destroy Oath from underground before sending troops after the survivors. Guided by Enva’s instructions, Iris and Attie reach the heart of the under realm. Attie plays the violin lullaby, Enva appears as an illusion to distract Dacre, and when both Dacre and his eithrals fall asleep, Iris kills him with the sword.

Dacre’s death ends the bombing threat but not the violence. The Graveyard comes into the open, begins executing captured followers of Dacre, and Shane admits he has been its mole all along. He briefly frees Roman from his chains, but Roman is swept into a roundup of prisoners marked for execution. In ruined Oath, Iris finds Helena alive, learns Roman is about to die, and reaches the firing line with one of his warning letters as proof that he was the informant who saved Hawk Shire. Keegan publicly supports her, Roman is spared, and order is partly restored. Even so, a doctor later tells Roman that the gas from Avalon Bluff permanently scarred his lungs and strained his heart. Three days after the battle, Iris and the search crews find Forest and Sarah dead together beneath rubble, a devastating loss that darkens the victory.

In the aftermath, war trials sentence Ronald Kitt and the Littles for their roles in the gas attacks. Roman eventually leaves the hospital and reunites with Iris in the rain. Months later, the two sort through Iris’s old flat, and a final letter from Forest gives her the closure she needs to scatter his ashes. A year after the war, Iris and Roman have built a quieter life together: he writes a novel while living with permanent illness, and she reads and edits his work with the same honesty that once fueled their rivalry. Their marriage becomes a creative partnership shaped by grief but no longer ruled by it. In the epilogue, Enva takes back the key to the under realm, reopens its dormant paths, and leaves Oath seeking a freer purpose and a way to guide the dead once more.