"Thank you for telling me," Corren said, and meant it plainly, aware even as he said it how inadequate the phrase felt against the size of what she'd actually handed him.
"Come back as yourself, eventually," Wrenna said. "Whatever face you're wearing when you walk into that city. I'd like my turn with the real one again, someday, even if I still don't know exactly what I'm going to do with it when it arrives."
The road south to Ashendell took the better part of three weeks, Corren and Voss both wearing borrowed faces that changed twice more along the way whenever word of a checkpoint reached them ahead of schedule, sleeping in barns and hollowed-out roadside shrines and, twice, the spare rooms of strangers too kind or too indifferent to ask questions about two travelers who moved with considerably more urgency than their claimed business as itinerant healers should have required.
They spoke little during the longest stretches, both of them conserving breath and attention for the road itself, but Voss broke one long silence somewhere past the halfway mark with a question that had clearly been sitting behind his usual composure for longer than a single day's ride.
"Do you still think of me as Kestrel first, or Voss first," he asked, "when you're not actively angry with either version."
Corren considered the question honestly before answering, aware of how much weight the answer carried for a man who rarely asked anything this plainly. "I don't think I've fully separated the two yet," he admitted. "Some days you're simply the Headmaster who's kept his promises to me since the day I arrived at that Academy. Other days I remember exactly how long you let me believe an incomplete version of you, and the anger comes back fresh enough that it doesn't feel like old news at all." He was quiet a moment, watching the road unspool ahead of them under a sky gone the flat white of an early winter. "I don't think that's going away soon. I also don't think it's stopping me from trusting you with this particular plan, which is probably its own kind of answer, even if it's not the tidy one you were hoping for."
"It's a more honest one than I expected," Voss said, "which I've learned to value considerably more than tidiness, at my age." He said nothing further on the subject for the rest of that day's ride, and Corren understood, without needing it spelled out, that the answer had landed somewhere real enough that neither of them needed to press it further tonight.
They fell in, a week outside Ashendell, with a small column of refugees moving the same direction along a road too narrow for the whole group to pass a mounted patrol comfortably, and Corren spent the better part of an afternoon walking alongside a woman carrying a child on each hip who introduced herself only as a farmer's widow from somewhere near the Fennmoor border, her home burned in the same rebellion Corren himself had once ridden out to negotiate the end of.
"They said a Duke's man put the torch to it," she told him, not knowing, behind his borrowed face, precisely whose service that Duke's man had once answered to, "though nobody's ever explained to me why a Duke would bother burning a farm that never once refused him its taxes." She adjusted the older child's weight against her hip without breaking stride, the economy of a woman who had carried this exact burden for long enough that adjusting it no longer registered as effort. "You look like a healer, the way you're carrying that satchel. Have you got anything for a cough that won't leave a child's chest alone through two full winters running."
He gave her what he could from his own dwindling stock of ordinary remedies, unwilling to spend a working of real magic on a stranger this far from Ashendell's walls with an audience already too widely traveled to keep quiet about a miracle, and felt, walking on afterward beside Voss's silent, watchful presence, the specific discomfort of a man who had spent three months learning to withhold exactly the kind of help he most wanted to give freely, because giving it too visibly, too soon, cost more than the single act of mercy was worth. Voss said nothing about the exchange until well after the refugee column had turned off toward a different road entirely, and when he finally spoke, his voice carried none of its usual careful calculation.
"You'll spend the rest of your life doing that," he said. "Weighing which mercy is safe to show and which one has to wait for a better moment. I did, once I understood what I actually was. I'm not certain it gets easier with practice. I am certain it becomes more familiar, which some days is the only kindness available."
"That's not much comfort," Corren said.
"No," Voss agreed. "It rarely is."
Ashendell announced itself first as a smudge of grey smoke against the horizon, then as a spire catching what little sun the day offered, then, finally, as an entire city spread across both banks of a wide, slow river, bridges strung with lanterns even in daylight, streets crowded with a diversity of faces and trades that made the Academy's own courtyard feel, in retrospect, like a single small room by comparison. The gate itself swallowed them into a wall of sound Corren hadn't braced for after three weeks of empty roads: a fishmonger arguing over weight with a customer twice her size, a boy hawking broadsheets in a singsong chant that had nothing to do with any grammar Corren recognized and everything to do with simple volume, the low, constant rumble of cart wheels on cobblestone that seemed to run underneath every other noise in the city like a second heartbeat. Woodsmoke and river damp and roasting chestnuts tangled together in the cold air, and somewhere above it all a bell tolled the hour from a tower Corren couldn't yet see, its note carrying out over the rooftops with a resonance that told him, before he'd seen a single wall of the palace itself, exactly how much wealth this city had poured into the simple business of sounding important.