The Knight's Vow

The oath every knight of the order swears before the crest is placed on their shoulder. Noel speaks it in ch. 223 with a hole in his side, weeks after giving the crest back, and it works anyway.

The text

Four lines, in order, exactly as ch. 223 gives them:

I swear upon blood and breath, that my body is a wall between harm and the innocent.

I swear upon bone and will, that my fall is acceptable if it buys another's standing.

Thus my words turn to strength, for that is all we have from this point onward.

Death before dishonor. The strong are destined to protect the weak.

When it is spoken

Noel has not said it aloud since the ceremony that first gave him the right to wear the crest. He says it here from the ground, then standing, in a burning market square, in front of a dozen rogue ability users and two former colleagues who go to one knee when they hear it.

The words arrived from somewhere old in him, somewhere that predated the title he had relinquished and the doubt that had followed its absence.

What it does

The barrier comes back on the third line.

Line one and line two are declarations. Line three is "Thus my words turn to strength", and it is at exactly that point in the chapter that the drill is fired at him and

a shimmering barrier erupted from Noel's outstretched palm, faint blue light crackling along its surface, and the drill struck it and shattered into a hundred scattering fragments of useless metal.

He had not summoned it once in ch. 218, ch. 219, or the first half of ch. 222.

The sequence is the whole point of the arc. He does not get the barrier back by recovering the title, or by being given permission, or by being fast enough. He gets it back by saying what he is for, out loud, while it is costing him.

Why the title did not matter

Ch. 217 has him hand back a rank the court says cannot be returned. Ch. 218 and ch. 219 have him hesitate twice and conclude that the hesitation is what he is now. Ch. 223's bracket answers it:

[ He had spent weeks asking what remained beneath the title. The answer, it turned out, had never needed the crest to be true. ]

The crest is on Maeve's grave for all of this (ch. 191). He never goes back for it.

The line that is not part of the vow

Asked how he is still upright after losing half his blood:

NOL: Pride takes its place in my veins.

That is his own, not the order's.

Where the order comes from

The Council of Souls creates it six months after the First Human-Monster War ends, and Nilah is its first Knight. See the-order-of-knighthood.md.

So the vow Noel speaks in ch. 223 is one generation old at most. It is not ancient. It was written by people whose names are on the statues Act 6 spends its time criticising.

Open questions

• Whether every knight's barrier works this way, or whether Noel's soul ability happens to be barriers and the vow is coincidence. Nothing else in the saga shows a knight's power responding to the oath.
• Whether the vow is what ch. 181, "The Oath", refers to. That chapter is about Noel refusing vengeance, and the archive has not yet found its text.