"That's not an answer that reassures a father," Aldric said, something almost like his old dry humor surfacing through the exhaustion, "though I notice you gave it anyway, the same way you give most answers now, technically true and carefully aimed at whatever will worry me least." He was quiet a moment, studying his own son's face with an attention that felt, to Corren, considerably more searching than a simple recovery should have required. "I asked you, at the villa, to save your mother and the baby and forget the rest of us if you had to. I meant it. I want you to know I meant it, and that I understand you didn't listen, and that I am not currently capable of being anything other than glad you didn't."
"I couldn't have chosen between you," Corren said. "I didn't try to. I just kept going until there wasn't anyone left to save."
"That's going to cost you something, someday," Aldric said, "trying to hold every person you love with the same two hands at once. I don't say that as a warning to stop. I don't think you could stop even if I asked you to. I only want it said once, out loud, by someone who's watched you do it since you were small enough that the stakes were only ever a skinned knee." His grip loosened, some of the old wariness of a father who never fully understood his son's gift finally easing into something closer to plain trust. "Rest, when you can. I mean to be here long enough to see you actually take that advice at least once before I die of something ordinary instead of something Maravent arranged."
Aurelle waited until the household had settled somewhat, Aldric resting easier than he had in days, the remaining sick clanfolk each given their own careful measure of the cure, before she found Corren alone on the lakehouse porch and delivered, without preamble, the news she'd clearly been carrying the entire journey like a stone in her own chest.
"Rooke is no longer with the Order," she said. "Neither, in any capacity my father would recognize as loyal, is Denrick. I thought you should hear both of those things from me directly, rather than piece them together later from rumor."
Corren felt something go cold and still in his chest, the specific dread of a man who has learned, over three months, exactly how thoroughly Maravent's disappointments tended to cost the people closest to them. "What happened."
"My father learned what all of you had become within a day of the raven reaching Blackmere," Aurelle said. "He called Rooke and Denrick in separately, the same evening, and asked each of them, plainly, how long they'd known. I wasn't in the room for either interview. I know only what I've pieced together since, from servants who were close enough to the doors to hear raised voices, and from Denrick himself, briefly, before I left."
"Tell me."
"Denrick lied," Aurelle said, "cleanly, completely, the way he lies about everything, with just enough plausible deniability laid in advance that my father couldn't prove complicity even if he suspected it entirely. He claimed he'd trusted your loyalty precisely as far as the Order had instructed him to and no further, that any personal fondness he'd developed for you during the Valonia mission was exactly that, personal, and had never once bled into his professional judgment of where your true allegiance lay. My father believed him, or decided believing him cost less than not believing him. Denrick kept his post."
"And Rooke."
Aurelle's expression tightened, genuine grief moving behind the careful precision she otherwise kept wrapped around every word. "Rooke didn't lie," she said. "When my father asked him whether he'd suspected you were playing a longer game than the Order's, Rooke told him the truth. That he'd suspected something, for weeks, and had chosen not to look at it too closely, because he'd decided somewhere along the way that he trusted you as a person more than he trusted the Order's own account of what loyalty was supposed to mean. He told my father that outright, Corren. To his face. I don't think he'd fully decided to say it until the words were already out of his mouth, and I don't think he regretted it afterward either, whatever it cost him."
"What did it cost him."
"Everything he'd built for himself over six years," Aurelle said. "My father stripped him of rank on the spot, publicly, in front of the very soldiers Rooke had trained personally, and exiled him from the Order's service with a warning that anywhere he settled afterward would be watched, indefinitely, for exactly the kind of loyalty that had just gotten him thrown out." She was quiet a moment, the lake beyond the porch stirring against its own shore in the gathering dark. "He didn't fight it. I watched that part myself, from the gallery above the hall. He simply took off the black phoenix pendant he'd worn for six years, set it on the table in front of my father without a word, and walked out of that castle a free man for the first time since he was younger than either of us currently are."
"Where did he go."
"I don't know yet," Aurelle admitted. "He asked me, before he left the grounds entirely, to find you eventually and tell you something specific, word for word, if I ever managed it." She reached into an inner pocket and drew out a small, plain iron ring, worn smooth with years of handling, and pressed it into Corren's palm with a care that told him she understood exactly how much weight the small object was carrying even without being told directly. "He said: tell the rookie I'm not sorry, and tell him I finally figured out how to sit still for longer than an hour, because it turns out all it took was having absolutely nothing left to be restless about. Tell him I hope whatever he's building is worth what it's already cost the rest of us, and that I mean that as a genuine hope, not a complaint."