Isbeau Colwrath has kept the same secret since she was eleven years old: a single hedge in the truce garden, and the boy from the family she was raised to hate. Once a year, at the truce ball that is the only civil meeting House Colwrath and House Aeriven permit themselves, Isbeau slips away to the same overgrown corner of the garden, to the same boy who found her there when they were children too young to understand why their houses despised each other. Thane Aeriven has grown into the last person Isbeau is supposed to want, and the only person she has ever fully trusted. For thirteen years, that has been enough. A stolen half hour. A hedge. A friendship neither house is permitted to know the shape of. Then Thane's formal courtship to another family arrives by letter, and the hedge is no longer enough for either of them. On the same night, Isbeau's grandmother's oldest steward finally breaks a decades-long silence: the hedge was never chosen by chance, and the eighty-year feud both houses call the Sundering was never quite the story either side was told. Somewhere in the Colwrath family's own archive, a name has been erased so thoroughly it was written out of the house's memory entirely, no birth record, no death record, nothing. And in the locked Aeriven archive his mother once warned him about with her dying breath, Thane finds the dust disturbed by someone who didn't want their visit noticed. The deeper Isbeau and Thane dig, the clearer it becomes that they are not the first Colwrath and Aeriven to fall in love beneath that hedge, and that the last pair to try paid a price neither house has ever admitted to. Someone in both houses has spent eighty years making sure that story stayed buried. And with Thane's courtship deadline bearing down on them both, Isbeau and Thane must decide, faster than either of them is ready for, whether to repeat their families' oldest mistake or finally finish the story an entire generation was never permitted to complete. The Sundering Vow is a slow-burn, dual-timeline fantasy romance about the particular cruelty of inherited grudges, the family secrets old houses bury to protect their own comfort, and two people who have to choose, deliberately and without any of the excuses their parents had, between the safety of an old silence and the risk of finally telling the truth. For readers who love childhood-friends-to-lovers slow burn, forbidden romance between rival families, a mystery that unspools one buried record at a time