"It is," Corren said, quiet. "Thank you, Nyla."
Karma found her son the following morning in a small courtyard garden he'd wandered into without any particular destination in mind, Elara balanced on her hip and babbling at a fountain's spray with the single minded delight of a child too young yet to understand that anything in the world she'd been born into could ever be frightening, and Aldric a step behind them both, his color still good, the chalice's cure holding steady even under the strain of the last two days.
"You look like a man who hasn't slept," Karma said, settling onto the bench beside him, shifting Elara onto her own lap so the girl could reach for a loose curl of her mother's hair instead. "I remember that look. Your father wore it for most of a year once, back at the villa, before either of us understood yet what we were actually facing."
"I haven't slept much," Corren admitted. "There's a great deal happening that I haven't told either of you the full shape of yet. I didn't want to frighten Elara with it, and I didn't entirely want to frighten myself further by saying it out loud twice in the same day."
"You don't have to tell us the shape of it," Aldric said, settling onto the fountain's low stone rim across from them, "if telling it costs you more than it helps either of us. I spent twenty years learning that a father doesn't always need the whole truth to know his son is carrying something heavy. I only need to know you're not carrying it entirely alone."
"I'm not," Corren said, and found, saying it, that it was more true than he'd let himself feel clearly until this exact moment. "Wrenna knows. Elandrie and Voss are helping me look for an answer. Nyla's helping in her own way. Vaelith's watching everything else that might come at us while we look." He watched Elara reach a small, determined fist toward the fountain's spray and miss it entirely, laughing anyway at the miss as though the missing had been the actual point all along. "I think that's the part I keep forgetting, some days, in the middle of everything else. That I don't have to solve it by myself just because I'm the one it's asking the question of."
Karma reached over and set her free hand against his cheek, the same gesture she'd used on him as a boy back at the villa, before any of this, before fevers and cults and a crown that asked questions with no answer he currently owned. "Then don't forget it again," she said, simple, and let her hand fall, and the three of them sat together a while longer in the courtyard's mild morning light, saying nothing further, letting Elara's delighted, unbothered laughter do whatever work none of the rest of them currently had language left to do instead.
Celeste found Wrenna in the same guest wing sitting room where the four of them had once settled the shape of Corren's own household weeks earlier, a letter of her own half written on the table in front of her, the ink still wet enough that she covered it with one careful hand when Wrenna entered.
"I was going to leave for House Amniel two days from now," Celeste said, before Wrenna could ask. "I've decided to write my father instead and tell him I'm staying another fortnight. I don't imagine he'll be pleased about it. I've decided I don't currently care as much about his pleasure as I usually make myself care."
"You don't have to stay on our account," Wrenna said, careful, some old instinct to spare Celeste any further cost on Corren's behalf still alive in her despite everything the sitting room conversation had already settled between them.
"I know I don't have to," Celeste said. "I'm choosing to anyway, the same way I chose to leave in the first place. A kingdom whose King collapsed in front of the entire court two days before I was meant to walk out its front gates doesn't strike me as a kingdom I can leave with an easy conscience, whatever my father's letter says about diplomatic distance. I gave my reasons for going home once, honestly, and I still believe every word of them. I only think honesty also means staying long enough to see whether the people I love are safe before I go, and I don't think those two positions actually contradict each other the way my father's letter is going to insist they do." She folded her own half finished letter closed, the ink dry enough now not to smear. "Tell me honestly, Wrenna. How is he. Really."
"Frightened," Wrenna said, "in a way I don't think he's let himself be in front of anyone but me and Elandrie yet. But he's still asking the right questions. He hasn't stopped being the man who does that, whatever the crown decided to do to him. I keep telling myself that's the part that matters most, some nights more successfully than others."
Celeste reached across the table and took her hand, the old friendship that had nearly frayed apart weeks earlier holding steady now, considerably steadier than either of them would have predicted back in that lakehouse kitchen. "Then we keep telling ourselves that," she said, "together, for as long as it takes to become true again instead of just something we're saying to get through the night."
Voss found the reference he'd been half remembering for two days near dusk, in a slim, water-damaged volume that had clearly been shelved in the wrong section of the royal library for decades, its spine cracked and its title long since worn away, filed among a run of agricultural almanacs that plainly hadn't been disturbed by anyone in a generation.
He read the relevant passage three times before he trusted himself to have read it correctly the first time, and then a fourth time, slower, his own pulse climbing steadily with each pass through the cramped, archaic script.