"Old habit," Corren said. "A man in my first life once told me that if you memorize a text badly enough times, eventually you stop needing to check whether you memorized it right. I never fully trusted the advice. I still check."
"That sounds like a poor way to run a scholarly discipline."
"It's a worse way to run a life," Corren admitted, "but I've found it keeps me honest about what I actually know versus what I've simply decided to believe I know. Your father's letter says almost nothing, Aurelle. A location. A warning about Emeric. Nothing about why finding Nyla's family matters enough to send us across an entire sea for it."
"My father doesn't waste ink explaining himself to people he expects to simply do the thing." Aurelle's gaze stayed fixed on the horizon, the wind pulling loose strands of dark hair across a face that had, in the weeks since Fennmoor, learned to let a little more of its actual weather show through the composure. "But I've been turning it over since we left port, and I think I know part of it. He wants leverage on the girl before he ever has to negotiate with her directly. A hostage he can hold isn't nearly as useful as a history he can use, and a girl raised in a cult that teaches its acolytes to feel what others feel is exactly the kind of person you'd want to already understand before you ever put her in a room with someone she might be able to read."
"That's a colder read of your own father than I expected you to volunteer out loud."
"I'm not volunteering it as a complaint," Aurelle said. "I'm volunteering it because it's accurate, and because I've decided, somewhere around Fennmoor, that noticing the accurate thing out loud is worth more to me now than pretending I hadn't noticed it, even when the accurate thing is unflattering to someone I love." She let that sit a moment, the ship's rigging groaning overhead in a gust strong enough to taste of salt at the back of the throat. "You're doing the same thing with the letters from your friend at the Academy, I think. Reading them for what they don't say instead of only what they do."
Corren didn't answer that directly, though the accuracy of it landed somewhere just under his ribs, the same place the mana drain always landed. Baris's last letter still lived in the inside pocket of his coat, worn soft at the folds from three weeks of being taken out and put away exactly as often as Maravent's, and he had not yet found a way to write back honestly about a version of himself that spent his days learning to lie for a living and his nights wondering how much of that lying had already stopped feeling like a cost.
He found himself, that same night, lying awake in a narrow bunk that smelled of tar and old rope, turning over a memory he hadn't gone looking for: an infirmary floor at the Academy, a lifetime and a continent away from this ship, Baris arguing with Wrenna over the last heel of bread while Celeste laughed at both of them from the doorway, and Corren himself saying nothing at all, simply glad, in a way he hadn't examined too closely at the time, to be sitting in a room where nobody expected anything more complicated of him than passing the bread along. He hadn't known, sitting on that floor, how much he would eventually miss the specific, unremarkable ease of it, four people who owed each other nothing yet beyond ordinary friendship, before any of them had learned what it cost to owe each other something real instead. He fell asleep still turning the memory over, and dreamed, for the first time in weeks, of nothing at all worth remembering by morning.
Halvern announced itself first as a smell rather than a sight, cold salt and pine resin carried out past the point where the coastline itself became visible, and the ship put in at a harbor crowded with fishing boats flying no flag Corren recognized and every flag, it seemed, that the ongoing war for the Water Kingdom's throne had managed to produce in the past two years. Aurelle's murmured chant ran once under her breath as they came down the gangplank, the same private, rhythmic phrase Corren still hadn't identified, and he filed the familiar cadence away again without asking, patient the way he'd learned to be patient with any grammar he hadn't yet earned the right to hear explained.
They found Emeric's command tent a half-day's ride inland, pitched at the edge of a muddy field that had, judging by the churned ground and the crows working the tree line, hosted a battle within the last week. The man himself was smaller than either of them by a full head, a neat, sharp-featured claimant to a throne he did not yet sit on, bent over a map table with the concentration of someone who had learned to treat his own smallness as a weapon rather than a liability, using it to make every larger man in the room misjudge how much of the room he actually controlled.
"You're not on my schedule," Emeric said, without looking up, "and the Fire Kingdom's Duke is a distant concern of mine on a good day. I have a war to finish winning."
"I didn't come to discuss your war," Corren said. "I came for information about a girl named Nyla. Your mercenaries fought under the bronze phoenix once. I'm told you're the kind of man who remembers what he's owed and collects on it eventually."
Emeric's eyes flicked up at that, sharp and assessing, one eyebrow lifting in a way that suggested the observation had landed closer to a genuine compliment than Corren had intended it as. "Careful," he said. "Flattery from a stranger usually means the stranger wants something expensive."