Nobody at the lakehouse slept much the first full night of being fugitives, and by the grey hour before dawn most of them had stopped pretending otherwise, gathering instead around the cold hearth in twos and threes with blankets pulled around their shoulders, talking in the low, careful voices of people who had decided, without discussing it, that whispering was simply what this house asked of them now.
Corren found Karma awake before anyone, propped against the headboard with Elara asleep against her chest, and something in the stillness of the room told him she'd been waiting for him specifically.
"Your father is dying," she said, no preamble, no softening. "I felt it the last time I touched his forehead through the cell wall, before all of this. Fever doesn't wait politely for us to finish being wanted men, Corren."
"I know." He sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to jostle the baby, and found that the careful stillness he'd learned to keep around Duke Maravent for three months came apart entirely in front of his own mother, leaving him with nothing to hide behind at all. "I don't have a cure. Every healing chant I know bounces off that fever like water off oiled cloth. I need something I don't currently have, and I don't know where to find it."
"Then you'll find where to look," Karma said, with the specific, unhurried certainty of a woman who had never once doubted her son's ability to solve a problem, only occasionally doubted whether solving it would cost him something she'd rather he didn't pay. "You always have. I only ask that you not go alone into whatever you find."
Master Doss found him an hour later on the lakehouse's narrow dock, watching grey light spread slowly across water gone still as poured glass, and settled beside him without asking permission, the old blademaster's knees creaking audibly enough that Corren almost smiled despite everything.
"Voss mentioned a book," Doss said. "My father's journal. You still have it."
"In storage." Corren summoned the small dark void at his hip and drew the worn leather volume out of it, offering it across without comment. "Why does it matter now?"
"Because my father spent the last twenty years of his life chasing cures nobody else believed existed, and because I've never once let anyone actually finish reading the whole thing," Doss said, taking the journal with a care that looked, for the first time since Corren had known him, almost tender. "He wrote down every rumor he ever chased, whether he proved it or not. Somewhere in the back third, if I remember rightly, there's an entry about a hermit alchemist near the demon border who claimed to be close to curing something exactly like this. My father dismissed it as an old man's fantasy. I'd like you to read it before you dismiss it too."
Corren took the journal back and found the entry within the hour, three pages of cramped, aging handwriting describing a man named Cyril, a devotion to Scarlet Fever bordering on obsession, and a scrawled marginal note in a different, later hand, Doss's own, added sometime after his father's death: Still alive, last I heard. Still chasing it. Some men never learn when to stop, and I have decided, watching him, that this is not always a flaw worth correcting.
"He's real," Corren said, something unclenching in his chest for the first time since the raven's message had landed. "And he might still be alive."
Nyla found him packing an hour after that, kneeling beside a saddlebag with the efficient economy of a man who had learned, over three months of Order missions, exactly how little he actually needed to carry versus how much he'd once assumed he did.
"You're not taking Wrenna," she said. Not a question.
"She's better at protecting my mother and Elara than she is at surviving a demon border crossing, and I need someone here who can hold this house together if something goes wrong while I'm gone." He kept his voice level, aware even as he said it how much the explanation sounded like something he'd rehearsed to convince himself as much as anyone listening. "You said something to me once, at Blackmere, about hearts. I could use that gift where I'm going more than I could use another sword arm."
"You could use my sword arm too," Nyla said, dry enough that it took Corren a half-second to register she'd made a joke. "But I understand the actual reason, and I don't think it's a bad one. I would like to come with you regardless of the reasoning. I am tired of being the person who waits in the safe house while everyone else decides what danger looks like on my behalf."
"Then come," Corren said, and meant it plainly, no argument left in him to offer against a request that specific.
Wrenna found them both in the doorway a few minutes later, arms already full of a bundle of dried meat and hard bread she'd clearly assembled before either of them had finished the conversation that decided who was going, and something in the deliberate, businesslike briskness of the gesture told Corren she'd already worked out the shape of the decision before anyone told her, and had decided, just as deliberately, not to make either of them say it out loud.
"Eat something on the road," she said, pressing the bundle into Corren's hands. "Both of you. I know what it does to you when you skip meals and then start throwing chants around like they're free."
"Wrenna."
"Don't." Her voice caught only slightly on the word, and she covered it fast, the same practiced discipline she brought to bandaging a wound she didn't want seen minding. "I know why it's her and not me. I even agree with the reasoning, mostly. I would just also like it noted, once, out loud, that agreeing with a reason doesn't automatically stop it from hurting to hear." She met his eyes squarely, no tears in them, only a kind of raw, deliberate honesty that felt, somehow, harder to sit inside than crying would have been. "Come back. Both of you. I've already lost one person I love to a road he chose over staying, and I find I have very little patience left for losing a second one the same way."