"Then explain to me," Corren said, each word deliberate, "why a man who believes that has spent two years building me a name, a rank, a network, everything a person would need to eventually sit on a throne. That's not dissolving anything, Voss. That's the opposite of everything you just told me you believe."
"That question deserves a better answer than most people who've asked it before you ever got," Voss said, "which is to say, it deserves an answer at all, rather than silence, so I'll give you the honest one and let you decide what to do with it afterward."
Aurelle arrived at the Academy two days later, sent, she explained tersely to the gate guard, on her father's own orders to investigate rumors of a militant cult faction operating with unusual boldness inside the Fire Kingdom's own borders, rumors that had, in the space of one very long night, stopped being rumors and started being an uncomfortable amount of confirmed fact. She found Corren in the infirmary corridor, hollow-eyed from two sleepless nights, and listened without interrupting as he told her everything: the reveal, the ambush, Nyla's collar, the conversation still unfinished in Voss's office.
"I want to hear him say it himself," Aurelle said, when Corren finished. "Not secondhand. Take me to him."
They found Voss at his desk, the same stillness settled over him that Corren had learned, over the past two days, to read as a man perpetually calculating the cost of every sentence before he let it leave him.
"Headmaster," Aurelle said, no preamble, the flat precision she'd once reserved for battlefield orders now aimed squarely at a man twice her age and, by every visible measure, considerably more dangerous than she was. "Your cult's entire stated purpose is dissolving loyalty, national, familial, religious, every tie the rest of us have spent our lives being told matters. And here you sit, having spent two years building this man a rank, a network, a reputation solid enough to eventually carry a crown, and a marriage arrangement besides, if half of what he's told me over these past weeks is accurate. Either your god is lying to the people who've given their eyes and their freedom for it, or you are lying to yourself about what you're actually building, and I would like to know, plainly, which one it is, before I decide whether anything else you've told him is worth believing."
Voss studied her for a long moment before answering, the long-practiced patience of a man who had, evidently, expected this exact question from someone eventually and had simply been waiting to see who would be sharp enough to ask it first. "Neither," he said. "Or, more honestly, both, in a shape you haven't yet considered. Ask yourself what actually dissolves a nation's hold on a person's loyalty faster: a hundred monks preaching dissolution in a marketplace nobody with real power bothers listening to, or a King who has personally seen, from the inside, that the throne underneath him is a story people tell each other, not a truth carved into the world's bones. I am not building Corren a throne despite my beliefs, Lady Aurelle. I am building him a throne because of them. A king who understands his own crown is a fiction, who has watched every institution around him built on convenient lies, is a considerably more effective solvent to the very loyalties I want dissolved than any number of sermons could ever manage from outside the walls. Give the dissolution a crown to wear, and it walks into every room that would otherwise slam its door against it."
"That's not an answer," Corren said, his voice rougher than he intended. "That's a justification. You're using me as a tool for an ideology I never agreed to serve, and calling it a gift because you dressed the tool up as a reward first."
"You're right," Voss said, and the careful composure he wore finally cracked, just slightly, just enough to show the tired weight underneath it. "It is a justification. I've told myself the same one for years, and some days I believe it entirely, and some days, Corren, I look at what it's already cost the people who trusted me with it, and I don't believe it at all. Torvent believed it completely, once, before we asked more of him than belief was ever meant to survive intact. I don't say that as an excuse. I say it because you asked me to answer honestly, and the honest answer includes the version of this where I'm not certain the ends have ever actually justified what the means required, only that I've committed too far to stop and still call myself someone worth trusting by anyone's measure, including my own."
Aurelle said nothing for a long moment, the silence in the office stretching taut enough that Corren could hear the distant sound of students crossing the courtyard below. "That's the most honest thing I've heard a man in power say to me in my entire life," she said finally, "and I don't think it excuses a single thing you've done. I think you know that too."
"I do," Voss said. "I'd be lying if I claimed otherwise."
Nobody moved to soften the silence that followed. Corren left the office first, and Aurelle followed a moment later, and neither of them found, in the corridor outside, anything easy to say to fill the space the conversation had left behind.
Wrenna found him at the infirmary door before he'd fully decided what he intended to say to Baris, her expression carrying a wariness he hadn't seen directed at him before, not fear exactly, something closer to a held breath.
"He's been asking for you," she said. "Every day you were gone. Renwick still won't fully explain the theory he's working, something about the Vaelora clan's regeneration technique needing a caster willing to bind it into another person's flesh directly rather than their own, and I think Baris has decided, in the meantime, that the not knowing is worse than whatever the answer eventually turns out to be."