"Please. I know why you're here. I swear I'll never tell anyone the spy's identity."
"Your father's the spy," Corren said, understanding arriving a half-second ahead of the question forming it.
The boy's nod came trembling and small. "He's a General here. During the war he passed information to the Fire Kingdom. I don't think he ever stopped believing it was the right thing to do. I think it cost him more than he ever let either of us see."
Corren sheathed his blade, told the boy to wait, and slipped back out into the dark to set a fire loud enough to draw every guard in the fort toward a section of wall that mattered considerably less than the one he actually needed clear. He returned in the chaos, shattered the cell's iron door with a corrected lightning chant that left his arm numb to the elbow with the cost of it, and led the boy out into the night with the fort's alarms still ringing uselessly behind them.
General Halvard woke the same night bound to a chair in his own bedroom, dagger already relieved from beneath his pillow, and met Corren's gaze with the resignation of a man who had long ago made peace with the shape his own death would eventually take.
"The Duke sent you. I understand why."
"Will you stay quiet if I take the gag off?"
Halvard nodded, and once his voice came back to him, hoarse and rough, the only thing he asked for was news of his son, whether the boy had suffered for his father's choices. Corren cut his bonds instead of answering directly, pressed the dagger back into the General's own trembling hands, and told him the truth plainly: his son was alive, waiting, and Corren intended to burn this house thoroughly enough that the world would believe Halvard dead along with it, provided the General had some plan of escape already in mind from however many years he'd spent expecting exactly this night to come.
"I have a boat," Halvard started, and Corren cut him off before the details could finish forming, insisting he didn't need to know, that the General should simply go, now, while the going was still possible.
He set the house alight himself once Halvard had vanished into the dark, working the flame chant room by room with a methodical patience that felt, uncomfortably, like the same patience he'd once brought to grading a stack of student essays, thorough because thoroughness was the job and not because any part of him relished it. The dagger he'd returned to Halvard's hand sat, he noticed, exactly where the General had left his own pillow that morning, an ordinary domestic detail that would read, to whatever investigator eventually sifted these ashes, as a man who had died in his sleep without ever knowing what was coming for him. Corren stood a long moment in the heat and the smoke afterward, the specific, hollow guilt of a man who had just helped fake another man's death for reasons he was no longer entirely certain he believed in, sinking into him slower than any mana drain ever had, and harder to name a recovery time for.
It wasn't cruelty, what he'd just done. He knew that, clearly, the way he knew most facts clearly: a father reunited with a son who thought he might never see him again, a village spared the show trial Maravent would otherwise have staged out of him. It didn't feel like mercy either, standing this close to flames he'd lit with his own hand over a man's entire life, erasing thirty years of a person's existence so thoroughly that even his grief would have to be performed by strangers who'd never met him. The space between those two certainties felt, for the first time since arriving at Blackmere, considerably larger than he was comfortable admitting out loud, and he found himself wondering, walking back toward the waiting ship with smoke still clinging to his coat, how many more times he could stand in a space that size before it stopped feeling like a space at all and started feeling like simply where he lived now.
They returned to Blackmere Castle a week later, salt-worn and travel-thin, and found the Duke waiting in his opulent quarters with the impatience of a man who had already grown tired of a mystery he couldn't yet solve himself.
"Her name is Nyla," Denrick reported, his voice carrying its usual measured precision even now. "We drew it from the mind of one of their own during our approach. She and her fellow acolytes call themselves the followers of Vhalkar, the Magus Ascendant. Their doctrine is a variant of the greater good, dismantling national and religious and familial ties in service of some unified whole they believe waits on the far side of that dissolution."
"Ideological nonsense," Maravent said, stifling a yawn with real disinterest. "Why are they specifically hunting my spies?"
"Under their new leader, a man they call Kestrel, the order has shifted from harmless devotion into something considerably more militant. They've swayed the Earth King toward their cause. The Fire Kingdom stands as their last real obstacle."
"The monks have gone rogue," Corren said, more to himself than to anyone in the room, filing the name Kestrel away next to the closed eye ringed by a broken circle he still hadn't found an answer for.
Maravent waved the whole report off with visible impatience, already reaching for a folded letter on his desk. "I have considerably more urgent uses for my attention. Corren, stay a moment. The rest of you may go."
Once the room had emptied, the Duke's posture eased by some small, almost imperceptible degree, the first genuine softening Corren had seen in him since arriving. "I won't pry further than this," he said, "but my daughter has thrived under your missions in ways I hadn't managed to draw out of her myself. I'd even considered, before this last rebellion, sending her to the Fyre Academy properly. Since Fennmoor, though, she's kept mostly to her own rooms." Something flickered behind the stillness of his expression, gone again almost before Corren could name it. "I only hope whatever's shifted in her settles back into something closer to what it was."