"How do you know that," Corren asked. "About the immunity."
"Because I watched someone I loved die of a fever exactly like this one, decades ago, sitting exactly as close to me as your family will need you to sit to them, and walked away from her deathbed without so much as a cough to show for the exposure," Voss said, quietly, the old grief surfacing fully now, unguarded in a way Corren had never once seen from him. "I have never stopped hating how unfair that particular kind of survival feels, Corren. I don't say that to make this easier. I say it because you're about to learn exactly how it feels, and I'd rather you hear it from someone who's already carried it than discover it entirely alone."
He found the villa surrounded by imperial soldiers, and slipped past them beneath a corrected version of Jo's old stealth chant to find, inside, a scene that emptied him out completely: his father Aldric collapsed against a wall, coughing blood into a cloth already soaked through, his uncle unresponsive on a low cot, the whole household reduced to the hush of people too weak to do anything but wait for whatever came next.
His healing chants failed against the fever entirely, the illness resisting every combination he tried with a stubbornness that made his own uselessness feel like its own separate wound, and Aldric, gathering the last of his strength, pulled his son close enough to whisper words that would sit in Corren's chest for the rest of his life regardless of how everything else eventually resolved.
"Your mother is pregnant," Aldric said. "She's carrying my child, Corren, and she's sitting in that fort right now accused of poisoning her own family to protect a baby that hasn't even been born yet. Save her. Save the baby. Forget the rest of us if you have to. I mean that. I need you to actually mean it too."
Corren left the villa with that instruction sitting like a stone in his chest, and found, gathered at the treeline a mile out, exactly the people he most needed and least expected: Doss, Voss, Vaelith, Wrenna, Celeste, and Nyla, standing together in the failing light with the resolve of people who had already decided, before he arrived, that they intended to help regardless of whether he asked them to.
"We left Renwick in charge of the Academy," Doss said. "Heaven knows what that will do to the students, but our concern tonight is you and your family, not the curriculum."
"You didn't have to come," Corren said, his own throat closing around the words before he could stop it.
"We didn't have to," Voss agreed, "which is precisely why we did."
Celeste's hand found his arm briefly, her voice carrying a warmth tempered by the old, familiar tension he'd come to recognize whenever her own family's expectations pressed up against her feelings for him. "My father would tell me not to risk House Amniel's neutrality for this," she said, "and I've decided, tonight, that some risks are worth taking regardless of what he'd tell me. I'm here, Corren. Whatever that costs later, I'll deal with it later."
Nyla said nothing at all, only reached out and found Corren's hand with the sure, unhesitating accuracy she brought to everything now that her sight had been restored, and held it a moment longer than the gesture strictly required, a wordless promise Corren understood perfectly without needing it translated.
They struck the fort at dusk, Vaelith's fireballs lighting the sky in long, burning arcs while Voss hurled boulders with an inhuman strength that shattered the outer gate in three strikes, Celeste's arrows singing overhead trailing holy fire, Doss and Nyla holding the breach against the fort's scrambling defenders with a combined economy of violence that left Corren, watching from above with Wrenna at his side, in no doubt at all that Nyla's blindness had never once been the disadvantage the rest of the world kept assuming it was.
He and Wrenna found the dungeon entrance at the fort's far end and slipped through unseen, the corrected stealth chant holding steady around them both, and found Karma, Corren's mother, chained to a cold stone wall, her heavily pregnant belly a stark, urgent fact in the flickering torchlight.
"My water broke an hour ago," Karma said, her voice steady despite everything, the calm of a woman who had decided panic would cost her something she could not currently afford to spend. "I have to give birth here, Corren. There isn't time to move me anywhere safer."
Wrenna took charge instantly, sending Corren for warm water he heated with his own breath-fire the moment he found a source, then posting him at the door with an order to let nothing through it, and Corren fought there for what felt like the length of an entire war, fending off soldiers drawn by the sounds of battle above, while behind him his mother's screams tangled with Wrenna's steady, encouraging voice until, finally, a different cry cut through everything else in the room.
"It's a girl," Wrenna announced, breathless, wonder cutting cleanly through the exhaustion in her voice. "Karma, you did it. You have a daughter."
Corren sealed the heavy door behind them with a fire-breathing working that fused the hinges solid, melted the small window's iron bars with the last honest reserves of mana he had left in him, and helped his mother and the newborn and Wrenna through the resulting gap one at a time, his hands shaking now from a drain deeper than he'd ever paid in a single night, before raising a burst of lightning into the sky, the agreed signal for the others to break off and retreat while the retreat was still possible.
They reached the Amniel family's hidden lakehouse well past midnight, exhausted and smoke-stained and, for the first time in what felt like an unbearably long stretch of days, entirely safe, and settled into the quiet of a house Celeste swore existed on no map or record anywhere in the Kingdom.