"I remember," he said slowly. "I remember it not feeling like anything I've felt before. Not the healing chant's drain. Not a poison, I don't think, though I'm no physician. It felt like being asked something. I know that sounds like nonsense."
"It doesn't sound like nonsense to the people who've spent the last several hours arguing about you in every corridor of this palace," Wrenna said, dry, though something in her face stayed carefully guarded even through the attempted lightness. "Voss has a theory. He hasn't shared the whole of it with me yet, only enough to tell me he doesn't like the shape of it. Elandrie's had to stand in front of half the nobility twice now and tell them, with a straight face, that you're recovering from the strain of a lengthy ceremonial rite and will address the court personally within the week. I don't think she believed a single word of it while she was saying it. I don't think anyone in that hall believed it either, honestly, but belief wasn't really the point of the sentence. Buying time was."
"How long do we have," Corren asked, "before buying time stops working."
Wrenna was quiet a moment, and when she answered, her voice had dropped into something considerably more honest than the careful, managed tone she'd used for everything else so far. "I don't know. I know Aldous doubled the palace guard again the moment you were carried out of that hall, on top of the doubling he'd already ordered after Maravent's people breached the western wall two nights ago. I know Vaelith's already been through twice since this afternoon, and both times she left looking like a woman who'd rather be telling you this in person than passing it through me." She reached over and took his hand, the old careful hesitation she usually kept wrapped around every gesture toward him entirely absent for once, replaced by something plainer and more frightened than Corren had seen from her since the lakehouse. "I'm not asking you to be strong right now. I've spent three months watching you be strong for everyone else in this family and I've decided, somewhere in the last several hours sitting beside this bed, that I'm considerably more tired of that arrangement than I've ever let myself admit. You can just be frightened, if you are. I'd rather know the truth of how you're actually doing than another careful performance of how well you're managing."
Corren was quiet a long moment, feeling the honesty of the offer settle somewhere in his chest that the headache hadn't quite reached yet. "I'm frightened," he admitted, and the word came out easier than he'd expected it to, some relief in simply being allowed to say it plainly to someone who wasn't asking him to immediately follow it with reassurance. "Not of dying. I don't think it was trying to kill me, whatever it was. I'm frightened that it asked me something and I don't know the answer, and I've never once in my whole life been the kind of person who doesn't know the answer to a question that mattered this much."
"Then we find the answer," Wrenna said, simply, her grip on his hand tightening. "The way we've found every other answer these last several months. Together, and slowly, and without pretending any of it's easy while we're doing it."
Elandrie found Voss in the small library off the royal apartments an hour after that, a room she hadn't set foot in more than a handful of times in her whole life, her father's own private collection of ledgers and correspondence gathering a dust that told her plainly how little he'd used the space himself in his final years. Voss sat at the single reading table with three books open in front of him and a fourth balanced on his knee, his gauntlets finally set aside on the table's edge, and he didn't look up immediately when she entered, absorbed in a page dense enough with cramped, archaic script that she couldn't have made sense of a single line of it from across the room.
"You've had that particular look on your face since the throne room," Elandrie said, closing the door behind her with the same care she'd once used closing Kael's guest chamber door a month earlier, an instinct for controlling exactly how much of a conversation the rest of the palace got to overhear. "The look of a man who suspects something he'd rather not say out loud yet."
"I have several suspicions," Voss said, finally looking up, and the tiredness in his face went considerably deeper than the day's grief alone accounted for. "None of them are far enough along to be worth frightening you with yet. I'd rather bring you something closer to an answer than a half formed guess dressed up to look like one."
"I've buried my father today and stood twice in front of a hall full of nobles lying to their faces about my own husband's health," Elandrie said, crossing to the table and sitting across from him without waiting to be invited. "I find I have considerably less patience left for being protected from an unfinished guess than I might have had yesterday. Tell me what you suspect, Voss. I'll decide for myself how frightened to be."
Voss studied her a moment, something in his own careful composure weighing the request honestly rather than simply deflecting it, and set the book on his knee down flat on the table between them. "I trained, before I ever came to Blackmere, under a man who styled himself a historian of the soul," he said slowly. "It is not a title most scholars would claim seriously, and I confess I did not entirely understand, at nineteen, exactly how seriously he meant it. He kept a private collection, considerably more restricted than anything a public archive would have shelved, dealing with the specific question of what a soul actually is, as distinct from the body that happens to be carrying it, and what happens on the rare, poorly documented occasions when the two come apart from each other, or were never quite matched to begin with." He tapped the open book in front of him once, a gesture that looked, to Elandrie's eye, like a man touching something he'd rather not be touching at all. "I have spent the last several hours trying to remember everything he ever taught me about wards built to test exactly that question. Continuity wards, he called them. Objects built by people frightened enough, or paranoid enough, or simply careful enough, to want some mechanism beyond a person's own claim that could confirm whether the self standing in front of them was actually the same self that had always occupied that particular body."