Wrenna asks about you more than she thinks I notice. I'm not going to pretend I don't have my own feelings about that, but I'd rather tell you honestly than let you find out some worse way later. Come back whole, whatever whole ends up meaning after whatever you're actually doing out there. We're both still here. Your friend, Baris.
Corren read it twice through, standing alone on the deck with the letter shielded from the wind by his own body, and felt the ache of a promise made easily at a doorway that felt, now, like it belonged to some earlier and simpler version of himself, a promise that had grown considerably heavier every week he hadn't been able to keep it in person. He wrote back that same night by lamplight, short and careful, telling them nothing true about Blackmere and everything true about how much he missed the ordinary noise of the three of them arguing over bread on an infirmary floor, and gave the letter to the first Order courier bound north the following morning, watching it go with the specific, hollow feeling of having sent the most honest thing he'd written in weeks into a world he currently had no way of following it back into.
The letter from Maravent arrived three days later, sealed with the black phoenix and addressed in the Duke's own economical hand, and Rooke read it aloud to the assembled group with the relish of a man who had, after all, missed the mission he'd claimed not to.
Dearest Corren. My spies have located where the girl called Nyla resided before her acolytes claimed her. Sail for the Isle of Halvern, on the northern coast, and learn everything you can of her before you bring her to the surface. A civil war for the Water Kingdom's throne complicates the matter considerably: the Fire King currently backs a claimant named Emeric, whose mercenaries include a considerable number of former bronze phoenix soldiers now serving a cause of their own choosing. Note that Emeric is a shrewd political creature, and you may find plain threats accomplish what plain argument cannot. Yours, Maravent.
Corren read the letter twice through in his own hand afterward, folding it carefully into the same pocket that still carried Voss's small silver phoenix, two promises now traveling together against his chest, one he'd made honestly and one he'd made as a lie that had somehow, over these past weeks, stopped feeling entirely like one. Torvent's fate still sat unresolved somewhere inside these walls, glimpsed once, briefly, in a hollow-eyed servant Corren had passed in a lower corridor and hadn't been able to look at directly for longer than a heartbeat, the closed eye and broken circle mark on Maravent's own lintel still unanswered, the cult that built two temples a mountain apart still nameless beyond a single word, Vhalkar, that meant considerably more than anyone currently in this castle seemed able or willing to say. Somewhere back at the Academy, Baris was learning to live inside a body that might never hold a sword the way it used to, and Wrenna was waiting on a promise Corren had made without knowing yet what it would cost either of them to keep.
He packed for the Isle of Halvern the following morning, the weight of everything still unresolved pressing into his chest alongside the weight of everything he'd already done, and found, standing at the ship's rail as Blackmere's red stone walls shrank behind him, that he no longer entirely trusted his own certainty about which of those weights he'd chosen and which had simply been handed to him one careful, reasonable step at a time.
Aurelle came to stand beside him at the rail without being asked, watching the same shrinking coastline with an unreadable expression of her own. "My father will send for me eventually too," she said. "Not for this mission. He keeps me close for the ones he doesn't yet trust anyone else to see the whole shape of." She was quiet a moment, the wind pulling at the same loose strands of hair it always did. "I used to think that meant he trusted me most. I'm starting to wonder if it only means he trusts me last, after he's already run out of better options."
"Those aren't the same thing," Corren said, "but I don't think you need me to tell you that anymore."
"No," Aurelle agreed. "I don't think I do." She left him there at the rail without any further ceremony, the way she left most conversations now, precise and unhurried, and Corren watched Blackmere's walls dwindle to a red smear against the grey coastline and thought, not unkindly, that whatever else this Order had cost him so far, it had at least handed him one genuine ally he hadn't expected to find inside it, forged in exactly the kind of friction that made an alliance worth trusting rather than simply worth having.
End of Part Three.
Every language I have ever learned keeps a separate word for the lie you tell a stranger and the lie you tell someone who has already trusted you once. I did not understand, going into that autumn, how much heavier the second kind sits in the mouth of the person telling it. I was about to learn that lesson from both sides of the same sentence, in the same season, from people I had let myself believe were done teaching me anything new.
The crossing to the Isle of Halvern took four days, and Corren spent most of them at the rail with Maravent's letter memorized past the point of needing the paper, watching a grey, restless sea that seemed, out here past sight of any coast, to belong to no kingdom at all.
"You've read it enough times that you no longer need to hold it," Aurelle said, arriving at the rail beside him on the second morning with the quiet economy she brought to everything, as though even the act of walking across a deck could be performed correctly or incorrectly and she intended to manage the correct version. "I noticed you take it out twice yesterday and put it away again without unfolding it."