Corren closed his fingers around the ring, feeling its worn, ordinary weight settle into his palm alongside everything else he was already carrying, and found, standing on that porch with the lake going dark and quiet in front of him, that he had no ready words at all for the specific ache of learning a man had lost everything for a loyalty Corren had never actually earned honestly, only borrowed under false pretenses that had somehow, over months, stopped feeling entirely false.
"And Denrick," he said finally, needing something to hold onto besides the ring itself. "Is he safe."
"For now," Aurelle said. "He's still inside the castle, still trusted, at least on the surface. He asked me to tell you one thing as well, considerably shorter than Rooke's message. He said: I contain layers, my lord, and one of those layers has apparently decided to keep watching your back from the inside for as long as that remains useful to you. He didn't ask permission for that. I don't think he intended to give either of us the chance to talk him out of it."
Corren stood a long while on the porch after Aurelle had gone back inside to see to her own exhaustion, turning the small iron ring over and over between his fingers, and thought, not for the first time since arriving at Blackmere Castle a season ago, how thoroughly this particular war had learned to collect its cost from exactly the people who deserved to pay it least.
Wrenna found Celeste alone in the lakehouse's small kitchen two evenings later, scrubbing a pot that didn't especially need scrubbing with a focus that suggested the pot itself wasn't actually the point of the exercise, and the conversation that followed had clearly been building in both of them for longer than either was willing to admit out loud first.
"You've been watching him too," Wrenna said, no preamble at all, setting down the bread she'd been slicing with more force than the task required. "Since he got back with the cure. I've seen you doing it."
Celeste didn't look up from the pot immediately, her hands going still against the worn metal. "I don't know what you want me to say to that."
"I want you to say something honest, for once, instead of the careful diplomat's daughter answer you always give when a question actually lands somewhere real." Wrenna's voice carried none of its usual warmth now, sharp in a way Celeste had clearly never heard directed at her before. "I've spent three months telling myself the feeling I have about him is something small and manageable, something I can set aside because he's out there doing something important and I'm the one who stays home minding the fire. And then he comes back, and it's Nyla who went with him this time, and I have to sit here and watch you watching him too, and I don't have anywhere left to put all of that except at you, apparently, because you're the only other person in this house who might actually understand what it feels like."
Celeste set the pot down slowly, and when she finally looked up, her own careful composure had cracked open in a way that matched Wrenna's more than either of them had expected. "You think I have some claim on him that you don't," she said. "I don't. My father arranged half my life without asking my opinion of it once, and the one time I actually chose something for myself, chose to come here, to risk House Amniel's whole neutrality for a family that isn't mine, I did it knowing full well that my own father would call it foolishness the moment he heard, and he did, in a letter that arrived two days ago that I haven't shown anyone because I'm still deciding how angry to let myself be about it." Her voice caught, and she pushed through it rather than stopping. "I don't know if what I feel for Corren is real or if it's just the first thing in my life I ever got to choose entirely on my own terms, and some days I can't tell those two things apart well enough to trust either answer."
"That's not fair," Wrenna said, quieter now, some of the sharpness draining out of her own voice. "You get to have a reason that complicated. I just get to feel guilty about everything, all the time, because that's apparently the only shape my own feelings know how to take."
"I don't think either of those is more real than the other," Celeste said. "I think we're both just scared of the same thing from opposite directions. You're scared you owe him too much to ever be allowed to want him honestly. I'm scared that wanting him is the first selfish thing I've let myself do, and that my whole family will end up paying for it the way they already paid for the covenant I brought back and never got to use for myself." She let out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh, tired and a little bitter. "I don't know how to fix either of those fears. I don't think tonight is going to fix them. I would like it very much, though, if we stopped pretending in front of each other that we don't both have them."
Wrenna studied her a long moment, something loosening slightly in her own shoulders. "I don't think we stopped being friends over this," she said finally. "I think we just stopped being honest about what was underneath the friendship for a while, and that's not the same thing as it breaking."
"No," Celeste agreed. "It isn't." She picked the pot back up, resumed scrubbing it with rather less force than before, and the silence that came to rest between them afterward wasn't quite peace, not yet, but it wasn't quite the argument's earlier edge either, something more honest than either, an unfinished, wary truce between two people who had, for the first time, actually looked directly at the thing they'd both been circling for months instead of pretending it wasn't there.