"For telling my people this, I owe you more than life, and I beg that you will be taking me as your charkanahd, in the ancient way of our folk."
Someone drew a hissing breath. The oath of charkanahd was the most solemn any hradani could swear. Some foreign scholars, who thought the ancient word was purely hradani, translated it simply as "armsman," but they were wrong. Other scholars, more familiar with the dead languages of fallen Kontovar, could have told them that it meant literally "death sworn," but only the hradani still remembered what it had once implied. What it still implied and meant to them.
Hurthang had just offered Bahzell all he was—all he could ever be. Not simply his service, and not even simply his sword in battle. Those things came with the oath of charkanahd, but they were the easy part, the reason "scholars" who knew no better used "armsman" as its equivalent. True charkanahd cut far deeper, for it superseded all other oaths, all other loyalties. It renounced any other claim upon the loyalty of the man who swore it, and he gave his liege lord his very life. More than that, he gave his lord