The name was Ashton's to say and he said it quietly.
"William."
The room shifted in the particular way it shifted when a name arrived that half the people in it recognized and half didn't, the ones who knew it going still and the ones who didn't watching the ones who did to understand what the stillness meant.
Tierney knew it.
Thomas knew it.
Dean looked at the window with the expression he had when something from the world before this one had walked back through the door.
"William Voss," Tierney said. She said the full name the way you said the full name of someone you had a complicated history with, not with hostility, but with the care of someone making sure the room understood exactly who they were talking about.
"William Voss," Ashton confirmed.
"Who is William Voss?" Carlyle asked. He looked between Tierney and Thomas with the particular patience he had, the patience of someone who had learned that the people in this house had layers of history that surfaced gradually and that pushing for them faster than they came rarely helped.
"He's been inside Victor's operation for four years," Ashton said. He was standing at the edge of the table again, not looking at the map now but at the room, his voice carrying the flat even quality it had when he was delivering information he had been carrying alone for a while. "Not working for Victor. Working against him. He went in voluntarily. Went deep enough that almost no one outside knows he's still there by choice."
"Almost no one," Kristen said, catching the word.
Ashton looked at her. "KaSandra knew. I knew. That's the full list."
The room took this in.
"He's been in there four years," Dean said from the window. He turned to look at Ashton with the measured careful eyes he had when he was doing the calculation that mattered. "And he's still intact."
"As far as I can confirm," Ashton said. "The last signal I had from him was three weeks ago. Before Canada." He paused. "It was brief. He doesn't signal often because often isn't safe. But three weeks is longer than the usual gap."
"Meaning he may be in trouble," Thomas said.
"Meaning I don't know," Ashton said. "Which is why I need to go find out."
He said it the way he said things that were already decided, not as a proposal but as a fact he was informing the room of, and there was something in the particular quality of it that made clear this was not the first time he had thought about going and that the conversation in this room was not the thing that had made up his mind.
KaSandra looked at him.
Something passed between them, brief and without words, the specific shorthand of two people who had been working from the same information in the same direction and had arrived at the same conclusion from different starting points.
"You leave today," she said.
"I leave today," Ashton agreed.
"Today," Tierney repeated. Not objecting. Processing.
"The longer the gap in his signals the harder it becomes to find him safely," Ashton said. "Three weeks is already longer than I'm comfortable with. If I wait until after Miralba there may not be a William to find." He looked at Tierney steadily. "And if Victor finishes what he's doing before we understand what that is, Miralba won't matter. We need both. At the same time."
The room held this.
Katherine looked at Ashton across the table. She had been quiet since the name, watching him the way she watched people when she was measuring something she hadn't finished measuring yet. The fire element in her power registered his the way it always did, warm and mutual, the recognition of one element finding another. But there was something else in her expression. Something that was not doubt but was adjacent to it.
"You're going alone," she said.
"Yes."
"Into whatever proximity to Victor is safe enough to reach William without being seen."
"Yes."
"That's not safe," Katherine said.
"No," Ashton agreed. "It's not."
Katherine looked at him for a moment with the expression she had when she had already decided she wasn't going to argue with something and was simply letting herself feel the full weight of not arguing.
"Okay," she said.
Ashton looked at her. Something in his face settled, the particular settling of someone who had expected a longer fight and was quietly grateful it hadn't come, and who was also quietly aware that the lack of a fight was its own kind of weight.
"I'll be careful," he said.
"I know," Katherine said. "Be fast too."
Niall, from the couch, looked between them with the expression he had when he was aware something significant had just happened in front of him and had chosen to let it pass without commentary, which for Niall required visible effort.
Kristen put her hand over her mouth briefly.
"I didn't say anything," Niall said.
"You were about to," Kristen said.
"I decided not to."
"Good decision."
Thomas looked at KaSandra. "When he finds William. What exactly does he need to find out?"
KaSandra moved around the table to stand nearer to the candles, the light catching the gold in her eyes and deepening it.
"Victor's ritual," she said. "The specific shape of it. What stage it is in. What it requires to complete." She paused. "And whether what I believe about the book is correct. Whether William has seen it. Whether he knows where Victor is keeping it."
"Why does the location of the book matter?" Carlyle asked.
KaSandra looked at him.
"Because if we stop the witch hunters and stop Victor but leave the book intact," she said, "then we have not stopped anything. We have only delayed it. Someone else will find it. Someone else will use it. The book is the source." She said the last word with the particular weight she gave to words that were doing more work than they appeared to be doing. "Without the source, none of this is possible. With it, none of it is ever fully over."
The room absorbed this quietly.
Fenix, near the hallway door, looked at the map on the table. His hazel eyes moved across it with the particular focus he had when he was thinking something through and hadn't decided yet whether to say it. He had been in this house long enough now to know that the house held space for whatever he had to say, but that knowing was still something he was practicing acting on.
He said it.
"Victor knows we're coming," Fenix said. "He has to. Miralba, the book, the ritual — he's been building this too long and too carefully to not have thought about people trying to stop it." He looked at the room. "He's going to know the moment Ashton moves toward William. He's going to know the moment we move toward Spain."
The room looked at him.
"Yes," KaSandra said. "He will."
"So he'll be ready for us," Fenix said.
"He will be ready for something," KaSandra said. "He will not be ready for everything." Her golden eyes settled on the group, moving from face to face with the slow deliberate quality of someone counting not numbers but qualities, not people but what each person carried. "Victor has studied witches. He has studied chosen ones in the abstract. He has studied power as a category." She paused. "He has not studied you. Not specifically. Not the particular way that seventeen people who have come through what you have come through move and think and fight together." She looked at Katherine. "That is the advantage. It is small. But it is real."
Katherine held her gaze.
"Then we use it," Katherine said.
Ashton had already moved toward the door.
He stopped with his hand on the frame and looked back at the room, at all of them assembled in the morning light with the map glowing and the candles steady and everything that was coming already set in motion.
He looked at KaSandra.
She looked at him.
"When you find him," she said, "tell him the queen's name has been spoken. He will know what that means."
Ashton nodded once.
He went.
The room listened to the sound of the back door opening and closing, his footsteps across the yard, and then the particular silence that follows when someone leaves a house on something they are not certain they are coming back from.
Thomas looked at the door.
Then he looked at the room.
"Alright," he said. The word carrying everything it needed to carry, which was the understanding that waiting was over, that the thing they had been building toward had declared its direction, and that what came next was the work of moving toward it without flinching. "Let's talk about Spain."