Ibriya and Shappi sat opposite me, the tension apparent in their posture and faces.“So. You wanted to talk?”Ibriya cleared his throat. “Well. We’ve given it a lot of thought, and… Shappi and I have decided to Blood Bond.”A smile grew on my face. About time, I thought.The pair had only barely managed to avoid coupling during the last mating season, to the point where Ibriya and I had taken a boys trip pretty far outside of the village. In the time since we started this crazy project, they had both matured into excellent smiths and capable adults, and I had expected this to come for some time.“That’s incredible news. I’m so happy for you two.”“And…” Shappi said, slightly nervous. “We wanted to ask you to join us in the Bond.”“Oh,” I said, blinking in surprise.When I first arrived in the Sheowon village a couple of years prior, I would have jumped at the chance. I hadn’t been ready, and probably didn’t care deeply enough about any Sheowon to successfully Bond at the time. Now, the problem was more or less the inverse; I deeply cared about Ibriya and Shappi, but I couldn’t honestly say that Bonding with me wouldn’t hurt them, in the long run. If we Bonded, Ibriya and Shappi would surely demand to come back with me to the Uli homeland, and that wasn’t safe. Not for them, and not for me.There was another factor, something I hadn’t learned until the Sheowon stopped seeing me as a threat. This turned out to be one of the reasons that I so rarely saw Bonded groups larger than four people. Once Bonded, it was for life—and that was very literal. If one member of a Bonded family died, the others followed. If they died while the Bond was active, that was immediate; they were connected, and so the full Blood energy of the Bonded family was ripped from them in retaliation for any member’s death. That wasn’t common, both because the Sheowon were quite peaceful and also because the Bonded family’s total (...)