The guards didn't slow. Corren stood a long moment in the courtyard afterward with his hand resting, unthinking, on the Morning Star's hilt, and felt nothing at all through the leather, no hum, no warning, nothing but cold black metal that had never once, in every fight he'd used it in, behaved as anything but a well-earned weapon.
Maravent summoned him that same evening to a chamber crowded with more people than Corren had ever seen the Duke tolerate at once, satisfaction sitting on the man's stillness like a coat he rarely bothered wearing. A servant fastened a black phoenix pendant around Corren's neck at the Duke's own gesture, the metal cold against his collarbone, and Maravent's voice carried the warmth of a man distributing a reward he considered generous.
"For your loyalty, and for a usefulness that has already exceeded what I expected of you," Maravent said. "Wear this openly wherever you travel on the Order's business. Any ally of mine will treat you as they would treat a Prince."
Corren took the pendant with a courteous word of thanks and felt, closing his fingers around it, a hollowness that had nothing to do with mana and everything to do with a discomfort he couldn't yet name properly.
Once the chamber had emptied of everyone but the two of them, Maravent's tone shifted into something graver, the economy of a man who'd been saving the real reason for this audience until the audience itself had thinned. "One final mission," he said. "Five generals of the Earth Kingdom conspire to build a weapon capable of leveling a city. They gather for General Halvard's funeral in Valonia within the week, all five in one place, in mourning for a man they believe you personally assassinated. I need them stopped before that weapon leaves the drawing board."
"Killed," Corren said. "You mean killed."
"I mean stopped," Maravent said, "and I am not naive enough to pretend those words mean anything different in this particular case. Do this alone. Anyone accompanying you only widens the net that eventually catches you."
Corren agreed, because the alternative he'd already privately settled on required Maravent to believe he had agreed honestly, and he left the audience chamber turning over, for the first time with real discomfort, how thoroughly that particular grammar of deception had become fluent in his own mouth.
He found Nyla's cell in the castle's lower levels before he left for Valonia, a narrow stone room lit by one guttering lamp, a heavy collar fixed around her throat that hummed faintly with the specific cold pressure of a working actively suppressing something rather than merely restraining a body. She sat upright on a thin cot, hands folded, waiting with a stillness that made the small room feel considerably larger than its walls.
"Hello," Corren said. "I'm Corren."
"I know," Nyla said. "You're the one carrying the dark sword. Amongst everyone I passed in that courtyard, your heart was the loudest thing in the room, though I couldn't have told you why until just now."
"How did you know it was me specifically, if the collar's already cutting you off."
"It hadn't yet, at the gate." She lifted her chin slightly, and Corren understood the gesture wasn't performative, only practical, the economy of a person who had learned to communicate clearly with a body that couldn't rely on expressions no one could see returned to her. "I perceive the world through the shared sense my faith gives its members. It has always told me the truth about people faster and more honestly than eyes ever managed to, before I lost mine, and considerably faster than most people's own words manage even now. Your heart, when I first felt it, was already carrying more guilt than a man your age should have accumulated this quickly. I found that interesting enough to remember."
"You said something's asleep in my sword."
"I did, and I still feel it, though weaker now that this collar's cutting the sense down to almost nothing." Nyla's expression didn't shift, flat and unhurried in a way Corren was already starting to recognize as simply how she spoke, rather than any deliberate withholding. "I don't know what it is. Only that it isn't fully finished sleeping, and that whatever wakes it eventually will not ask your permission first."
"Why did you let them take you," Corren asked, the question arriving before he'd fully decided to ask it. "Denrick's report said you gave yourself up. Deliberately."
"To protect someone who cannot protect herself from what's coming," Nyla said, simply, and would not be moved past that single sentence no matter how Corren pressed at the edges of it.
"Your order teaches that no one owes anyone else a particular loyalty," Corren said, trying a different angle. "Not family, not nation, nothing smaller than the whole. That's what Denrick's report said, anyway. But you just told me you gave yourself up to protect one specific person. That sounds like exactly the kind of loyalty your own doctrine says shouldn't matter more than any other."
Nyla considered that with the same unhurried stillness she brought to everything, her sightless face tilted slightly toward him as though the question itself had a texture worth examining before she answered it. "The doctrine says no border should be treated as more sacred than the whole it's drawn inside of," she said. "It does not say the people standing closest to you stop being real while you're waiting for the whole to arrive. I love my sister. I have never once been taught that loving her was the same thing as believing the Kingdom she was born into matters more than the Kingdom next to it. Perhaps that's a contradiction. I've lived inside it long enough that it doesn't feel like one to me anymore, only like the ordinary shape of trying to believe something large while still being, myself, someone small enough to love particular people more than others. I don't know if that answer will satisfy you. It's the only honest one I have."