"You're right," Corren said, no argument left in him to offer against a fact stated that plainly. "I didn't know I'd need permission until the ceiling started falling in around me, and by then it felt considerably too late to walk back out and start the conversation over properly. I'm not going to pretend that's a clean excuse. It's the honest one."
Something that might, on a face built differently, have been the ghost of real amusement moved across Rhaskar's expression. "An honest thief," he said. "That is, at least, a rarer thing than a thief who is merely sorry once he's caught." He was quiet a long moment, weighing something Corren couldn't read behind eyes that gave away nothing they didn't intend to. "The chalice's water cures. It does not create life where none remains, and it does not undo what has already been fully taken. If your family still lives, it will save them. If any of them have already died of this fever, no amount of that water will bring them back, and I would rather you know that now than discover it standing over a grave with false hope still curdling in your chest."
"I understand," Corren said, and found, saying it aloud, that some part of him had already quietly feared exactly that limit without letting himself name it until now.
"Then take it," Rhaskar said, "and know that you take it because you asked, imperfectly and late, rather than because you were strong enough to simply keep what you'd already grabbed. That distinction matters to us, even if it costs you nothing today to hear it stated." He stepped back, and the others with him, the tense readiness of the whole group draining by visible degrees into something closer to weary tolerance. "But you have crossed a border tonight that we do not open lightly for anyone, human or otherwise. Word will travel, from us to others who watch this same ground, that a man calling himself Corren walked into Cinderholt and walked back out again with something that belonged to the dead. Some of what watches this valley will not extend you the same patience we just did. You have made yourself known here tonight, for better and for worse both, and we will not forget that you were the one who did the asking, even if the asking came late."
"Thank you," Corren said, meaning it fully, and turned to go before either side could find a reason to reconsider the moment's fragile grace.
"Corren." Rhaskar's voice stopped him at the treeline's edge, and when Corren turned back the demon's expression had gone unreadable, neither warning nor blessing but some third thing with no clean word in any language Corren currently carried. "Learn our tongue properly, someday, if the years ever grant you the leisure for it. You are the first of your kind curious enough to try guessing at it instead of simply fearing it. That curiosity is worth more to creatures like us than any coin you could have offered instead."
Nyla found him at the treeline within minutes of his own crossing back into it, and did not ask a single question before simply reaching out and finding his hand, holding it a long moment with the same wordless, sure accuracy she brought to everything now that her sight had been restored.
"Your heart's still hammering," she said. "And something underneath the fear feels almost like wonder. That's an unusual combination to be carrying out of a demon's territory at this hour."
"They let me leave with it," Corren said, still faintly disbelieving of his own good fortune even as he said it aloud. "Because I asked instead of just taking. I don't think that would have worked a year ago. I don't think I would have known to try it."
"Then whatever this last season cost you," Nyla said, "it appears to have also taught you something worth keeping." She didn't let go of his hand as they walked back toward the treeline's edge and the small fire she'd kept burning low and careful through the whole of his absence, and for the length of that short walk, chalice clutched safe against his chest and the demon lands finally shrinking behind them, Corren let himself simply exist inside the relief of having survived something without immediately reaching for the next crisis waiting behind it.
They spent that night at the fire's edge rather than pushing straight back to Cyril's cabin in the dark, both of them too drained, honestly, to trust their own footing on unfamiliar ground after a day that had already asked enough of both of them, and Nyla produced, from some inner pocket of her traveling coat, a small paper twist of dried honeyed ginger she'd apparently been saving for exactly this occasion.
"For the mana sickness," she said, pressing half of it into his palm. "I don't have your gift for chants, but I've spent a decade learning what a body needs after it's been asked for more than it wanted to give. Eat it slowly. It helps more than people expect it to."
Corren ate it slowly, and found, to his mild surprise, that it did in fact help, the faint nausea that had been sitting behind his ribs since the cave settling by degrees into something closer to ordinary tiredness. "You keep surprising me," he said. "I keep expecting the cult upbringing to have left you strange in ways that make you harder to know. Instead you're just. Considerate. In ways I don't think I've fully earned yet."
"You're comparing me to an idea of me instead of to the actual me standing in front of you," Nyla said, without any real edge in it, only the same flat, unhurried honesty she brought to everything. "That happens to people who grow up the way I did. Everyone arrives already having decided what a blind girl raised by a cult must be like, before they've bothered listening to a single thing she actually says." She was quiet a moment, the fire popping softly between them. "I don't mind it from you the way I minded it from most people, for what it's worth. You at least seem willing to keep updating the guess once it turns out to be wrong."