He crossed the last stretch of muddy field to Isabel Arathor's camp under a sky gone the flat white of a coming storm, and found her command tent mid-briefing, a lean, hard-eyed woman surrounded by officers who scattered back half a step the instant Corren pushed through the tent flap uninvited.
"Milady, an army wielding fire and lightning has cut straight for the camp," a messenger was shouting even as Corren entered, breathless, and Isabel's hand had already gone to the hilt at her belt before her eyes finished tracking to the source of the disturbance and finding, instead of an army, one man standing calmly in her tent's entrance.
"I don't have an army," Corren said. "I have questions about a girl named Nyla. I'd rather ask them than fight you for the answers, but I've noticed that option rarely gets offered to me first around here, so I thought I'd try offering it myself for once."
"You cut through my forward line to ask about Nyla." Isabel's voice carried the disbelief of someone recalibrating an entire threat assessment in real time. "She left to join a cult almost a decade ago. She is not a strategic asset. She is barely a memory."
"She's a person your rivals are using as leverage against people who are, in turn, using her as leverage against me," Corren said. "I'd like to actually understand her, rather than simply trade her back and forth like a coin nobody's bothered to look at closely. Tell me what she was like. Before the cult."
Isabel's face shifted at that, the hard readiness draining out of it by degrees into something closer to grief carefully stored away for later use. "Guards," she said, though with none of the earlier conviction behind it, and when the guards themselves hesitated, exchanging the same uncertain glance Emeric's mercenaries had exchanged an hour earlier, she let the order die unenforced rather than repeat it. "She's my sister," Isabel said instead, quietly. "Our parents died when she was young. I was supposed to look after her. I didn't do it well. She was born without eyes and I let the other children's cruelty about it go unanswered more times than I want to count now, and when the Vhalkarites came offering her a place where that cruelty simply wouldn't exist anymore, I understood exactly why she went, and I have never once forgiven myself for understanding it."
"Why join if it costs you nothing," Corren asked, more to himself than to her, and Isabel answered after a long pause, her voice stripped of the earlier hostility entirely.
"Because the doctrine promised her a family that couldn't hurt her the way her real one already had," she said. "I don't excuse the cult for what it's become since. I only understand, better than most people ever will, why a girl with no eyes and one exhausted sister found the offer of belonging worth almost any price they eventually asked her to pay for it."
He returned to the villa with Isabel in tow to find the courtyard already in chaos, Rooke's absence keenly felt in a scene that could have used his particular gift for herding disorder, and Aurelle's face, when she found him, carried a controlled fury that told him everything before her voice did.
"Emeric took Iliana," she said. "By force, while you were gone. We couldn't hold the villa without killing half his men outright, and I didn't think you'd thank me for starting a second war on top of the one already burning across this island."
Corren found Emeric's camp a second time with rage doing most of the work his patience usually handled alone, and this time the small man's composure did not survive even the opening exchange, his guard already stepping aside the moment Corren's blade cleared its sheath, the same shifted loyalty Corren had watched twice already today, mercenaries who had decided, with the flat, practical clarity soldiers reach only once they've watched a man prove himself dangerous enough times, that Emeric's coin wasn't worth dying to protect any longer.
"Guard me," Emeric said, backing behind the very soldier who had just abandoned him, and the plea died unanswered in the mud of his own command tent a moment later, the end of it quick and, by the standards of everything else Corren had already done in this Order's name, almost merciful.
Lady Iliana emerged from Halvern's brief, bloody civil war as its uncontested Duchess within the week, a political fact Corren noted without much satisfaction, another loose end tied off in a way that felt less like justice than like paperwork, and he and Aurelle boarded the return ship to Blackmere Castle with Isabel Arathor's account of her sister filed away carefully alongside everything else he still hadn't decided what to do with.
Nyla arrived at Blackmere's gates on foot three days after their return, exactly as Maravent had apparently predicted she would, a dark cloth bound over her eyes and a small silver-and-black pendant visible at her throat that Corren recognized instantly as a mirror of the one the laundry woman had once pressed into his own palm in a Blackmere corridor. She walked with the deliberate, unhurried steadiness of someone who had decided, somewhere along the road, that arriving as a captive on her own terms cost her less than being dragged in as one, and the castle guards seized her the moment she cleared the gatehouse regardless, binding her wrists with a rope that scraped audibly against skin already marked by older, half-healed rope burns Corren didn't like the look of at all.
She found him with an accuracy that startled him more than it should have, given everything Denrick had already reported about the Vhalkarites' collective sense, turning her bound head toward him even before the guards had finished marching her past.
"Stay back," she said, her voice low and urgent, cutting through the courtyard's noise with an intensity Corren hadn't expected from someone being marched in chains toward an uncertain fate. "There is something asleep in that blade at your hip. Something old, and hungry, and it is not fully yours yet whatever the inscription tells you."