Karma lay resting in the house's single proper bed, the newborn girl asleep against her chest, and Wrenna sat beside them both with the exhausted contentment of someone who had, tonight, done something genuinely necessary and done it well.
"What will you name her," Corren asked, sitting on the floor beside the bed, his whole body aching in ways that had nothing to do with mana at all.
"Elara," Karma said, without hesitation, as though she'd already decided it somewhere in the middle of the worst of the labor and simply hadn't had breath left to say it aloud until now. "It means new light, in the old tongue. I thought, given everything that led to her arriving in the middle of a rescue and a war both, she'd earned a name that promised something better than the night she was born into."
Corren sat with that a long moment, the newborn's small, even breathing the only sound in the room besides the lake settling gently against the shore outside, and let himself, for the length of exactly that one quiet hour, simply exist inside the relief of having survived something without immediately reaching for the next crisis waiting behind it. Somewhere south of here, his father and the rest of the Ashvale household were still fighting a fever he couldn't cure with any chant he currently knew, however completely his own borrowed immunity had spared him the same fate. Somewhere further south still, Baris was walking home to Clan Fangmoor with a friendship and an arm both permanently short of what they'd once been, a debt Corren understood, with a clarity that hurt more than the mana drain ever had, he would be carrying without any hope of ever fully repaying it. Somewhere behind all of it sat a symbol, a closed eye ringed by a broken circle, carved into Maravent's lintel and into Ferrow's mountain temple and, he suspected now, into truths still buried considerably deeper than either of those two places, a mystery he had not moved one inch closer to solving despite everything the past month had cost him to learn. He thought, too, of a Duke's army he'd once glimpsed camped outside Ashendell's walls under no banner at all, waiting on some signal Corren still didn't understand, and of a Queen who had vanished from the palace months before he'd ever set foot in Blackmere, and of demons in Cinderholt whose parting words to General Halvard's own scouts had promised a reckoning nobody in this Kingdom seemed in any hurry to prepare for. Not one of those threads had loosened so much as a thread's width tonight, and he made no pretense to himself that they had. He only set them down for the length of this one quiet hour, the way a man sets down a pack he still means to shoulder again come morning, and let the sound of a newborn's breathing fill the space where the worry usually lived.
Nyla found him still sitting on the floor when the others finally drifted toward whatever corners of the small house offered room enough to sleep, and lowered herself down beside him without asking, her presence carrying none of the careful formality she'd worn back at Blackmere. "You're doing the thing again," she said. "Counting every debt you haven't paid yet instead of resting while resting is actually available to you."
"Old habit," Corren said, for the second time that week, and found, saying it to her, that the phrase carried less weight than it had aboard the ship.
"A poor one," Nyla said, unknowingly echoing Aurelle's exact words from days earlier, and the small, strange coincidence of it was enough to pull the first real laugh out of Corren he'd managed since Baris walked out the Academy gate. Nyla smiled at the sound of it, pleased with herself in a way she didn't bother to hide, and did not ask what was funny, content, it seemed, simply to have caused it.
None of it reached the lakehouse that night. For one quiet hour, none of it needed to.
A raven found the window near dawn, tapping insistently at the glass with a small scroll bound to its leg, and Voss crossed the room to receive it with the wary economy of a man who had learned, over decades, never to trust good news arriving this quickly after bad. He read the message twice, his face darkening by visible degrees, and looked up at the small, exhausted circle of faces watching him.
"They know who we are," he said. "All of us, save Celeste, whose family's neutrality has apparently kept her name out of it so far. Every soldier and Duke's man from here to the coast has orders to bring us in, dead or alive, on charges ranging from treason to the kidnapping of an Order operative to the assault on an imperial fort." He set the scroll down carefully, as though the paper itself weighed considerably more than its size suggested. "As of this morning, every one of us is a fugitive of the Kingdom of Fire."
Nobody in the room answered that immediately. Outside, the lake went on lapping gently against its own shore, indifferent to the sentence that had just been passed on everyone sitting inside the small house at its edge, and Corren, looking around at the tired, determined faces still willing to sit there with him despite it, found that the fear he expected to feel had, for now at least, been crowded out entirely by something closer to grim, exhausted resolve.
End of Part Four.
Every language I have ever studied keeps a separate word for the face you show a stranger and the face you were born wearing. I had not expected, disguised under a name I hadn't answered to since my first life, to feel more like myself in it than I had in months of being called by the one I was given at birth. That should have worried me more than it did, going into that particular season. It worried me considerably more, coming out of it.