He told Chiron everything. As he had told Chiron everything that mattered, across the years — with the appropriate pacing and the appropriate withholding for the appropriate moments, but when the moment was right, completely.
Chiron listened to the full account: the April shimmer at Washington Square, the July activation at the camp's T-junction, the threshold space and its three archways, the right archway opened from the other side, the Sight's reading of a choice/contact branch point two to four months out.
He was quiet for a long time when Kael finished. The specific Chiron quiet that was not absence but deep processing, the kind that took its time because the information required it.
'The threshold space,' Chiron said finally. 'Opened by Céline Moreau's key. Connected to Hecate's domain at the middle archway.' He paused. 'What tradition connects water-sound and threshold work with a crossroads inheritance in the Hecate lineage?'
'I've been thinking about this,' Kael said. 'The Yoruba Osun — the goddess of rivers, of beauty, of the threshold between the living and the divine. Her domain intersects with crossroads tradition in the sense that her waters are threshold points, particularly in Candomblé and Santería as they developed in the Americas.' He paused. 'Madame Moreau's tradition.'
Chiron was very still. 'The Moreau family,' he said.
'Yes. Céline Moreau made the key in 1889, in New Orleans. The Moreau family's Vodou practice is connected to the Loa — the Haitian Vodou tradition, which developed from the Yoruba tradition brought with enslaved people to the Caribbean and the Americas.' He was thinking as he talked, the connections clarifying as he articulated them. 'The right archway is not opening to a Greek domain. It's opening to the Loa's domain. And the entity initiating contact is probably—'
He stopped.
'Baron Samedi,' Chiron said.
'Baron Samedi,' Kael confirmed. He sat with this for a moment. He thought about the Baron's presence at the Moreau house over the years — the warmth at the south corner, the benign attention, the specific interest in Kael's development that Madame Moreau had relayed in pieces across many years. He thought about the instruction passed through Madame Moreau: he told her to give you the gris-gris bag. He thought about the Baron watching from the beginning.
'He has been adjacent to this story since before I was born,' Kael said slowly. 'He was present at the conditions Aurelie Vasquez set when she made the key. He watched the Moreau family and the Vasquez-Alexander family in New Orleans for decades. He has been — paying attention.'
'The Loa are not the Greek gods,' Chiron said. His voice had a quality that was not caution but care — the care of someone who had been dealing with one divine tradition for three thousand years and was fully aware of his own frameworks' limits. 'They operate differently. Their relationship with their practitioners is more intimate, more negotiated. They do not claim demigod children in the way the Olympians do. Their bloodlines work differently.' He looked at Kael. 'I don't fully know what this means. That is something I want you to hear clearly — this is territory I don't have complete knowledge of.'
'I know,' Kael said. 'I'm not expecting you to have the answer.' He thought about Cece, formally practicing now, in direct working relationship with the Baron. He thought: she knows more about this than anyone I have immediate access to. He thought: of course she does. Of course she has always been the most important person in this particular story and I have been slow to fully articulate that.
'Cece Moreau,' he said to Chiron.
'Yes,' Chiron said. 'I think it is time to extend an invitation to Camp Half-Blood that is not just courtesy. I think she should be part of this conversation.'
'She's sixteen,' Kael said. 'Formally practicing for six months.'
'I was training Achilles at sixteen,' Chiron said. 'I think Cece Moreau can handle a camp visit.'