"They told me you'd died in Valonia," she said. "I felt, even through this collar, that it wasn't true. I'm glad my sense hasn't gone entirely dull yet."
He cut her free and lifted her before the sentence had fully finished, and turned toward the corridor's mouth to find Aurelle standing in the doorway, tears tracking silently down a face that had gone pale with something closer to shock than grief.
"They said you were dead," Aurelle said, voice unsteady in a register Corren had never once heard from her. "I told myself I felt something else entirely, that I was imagining it, that grief does strange things to a person's certainty. You're alive."
"Your father tried to have me killed," Corren said, low and urgent, watching the words land like a physical blow. "The pendant he gave me was a beacon. I need you to say nothing about this, Aurelle, not to protect me from him exactly, but because if he learns I survived before I want him to know it, he'll simply try again with better information."
"I would never," Aurelle started, and then stopped herself, some visible battle playing out behind her eyes before she finished the thought in a considerably steadier voice. "I won't tell him. I promise you that. But I need a way to find you again, Corren. I refuse to spend the rest of this arrangement not knowing whether you're alive."
"The Fyre Academy," he said. "Ask for me there, carefully, and someone will get word to me eventually." He hesitated a moment longer than the urgency of the situation strictly allowed, and added, quieter, "Thank you. For not screaming. For not telling him already, before I even had the chance to ask you not to."
Aurelle nodded once, wiped her face with the back of one hand, and was gone back down the corridor before he could say anything further, leaving him alone with Nyla in his arms and the castle's alarms still ringing somewhere above them.
He carried her up to the ramparts and launched them both into the night sky on a corrected version of the flight chant Baris had taught him back at the Academy, an old gift from an old friend doing exactly the work Baris had once promised it would, and did not yet know, soaring north with Nyla's weight settled against his chest and the wind stripping the last of the smoke from his coat, how thoroughly that particular gift's giver was about to make the memory hurt.
They landed in the Academy's courtyard under a sky just beginning to grey toward morning, and Corren set Nyla down gently on solid ground for the first time in what she told him, smiling faintly, felt like a very long month.
"Thank you," she said. "I never lost faith that you'd come. Not once."
"You have some kind of gift for seeing the future, then," Corren said, half joking, still catching his breath.
"No," Nyla said. "Only a gift for reading what's already true in a person before they've finished deciding to act on it. I read something true in you in that cell, and I simply waited for the rest of you to catch up to it." She tilted her head slightly, the gesture he was already learning to recognize as her version of a request. "Could you remove this collar now. I would very much like to feel the world again properly."
He broke it with a careful burst of focused energy, correcting the crude binding chant etched into the metal into something that would release cleanly rather than simply shatter and risk hurting her, and the moment it fell away, Nyla's whole body went rigid, her unseeing face turning sharply toward the courtyard's far entrance.
"Kestrel," she said, and there was no mistaking the recognition in her voice, immediate and certain.
Corren followed her gaze to find Voss himself crossing the courtyard toward them, expression calm, entirely unhurried, and something cold dropped into Corren's chest a full second before Voss spoke, some part of him already assembling the pieces even as he refused, for that one last heartbeat, to let himself finish the shape they were forming into.
"I owe you both an apology for the theater," Voss said. "Though I'd rather explain it properly than let you spend another minute assuming the worst version of what you're currently thinking."
"You're Kestrel," Corren said, and heard how flat his own voice had gone, the numbness of a man watching a familiar face rearrange itself into someone he'd never actually met.
"I am," Voss said. "Meridian Voss and Kestrel have been the same person for longer than you've been alive, Corren. I would have told you eventually, on my own terms, in a setting considerably less abrupt than this one. Nyla's gift rather took that choice away from me tonight, which I don't hold against her, only against the timing."
They gathered in Voss's office an hour later, once the courtyard had emptied and Nyla had been settled, still blinking in the low lamplight like someone relearning a sense she'd feared permanently lost, into a small room adjoining Wrenna's own quarters, and Corren stood across the desk from a man he had trusted, in some careful, provisional way, for two full years.
"Start from the beginning," Corren said. "All of it. I've earned that much, I think, after tonight."
Voss folded his hands and did not look away. "The Vhalkarites believe the self is a false border," he said, "one that keeps people small, afraid, and loyal to things that don't deserve the loyalty they're given: a flag, a bloodline, a god carved to look like whoever's currently in power. Vhalkar's teaching is that the true good lies past the dissolving of those borders, all of them, nation and family and faith alike, into something shared and considerably larger than any single self was ever built to hold alone. I believe that teaching. I have believed it since before you were born in this world or the last one."