Corren filed the answer away, unresolved, the same careful, deliberate patience he gave every piece of grammar he hadn't yet earned the right to fully translate, and did not yet know how soon he would hear a version of that exact question asked again, of someone considerably less honest about the answer.
"You should go now," Nyla said, into the silence that followed, "before whatever mission brought you down here in the first place gets more dangerous for the waiting. I trust you, Corren. I don't say that easily, and I don't say it because I can sense some guarantee that you'll do the right thing. I say it because I've felt enough hearts in my life to recognize the shape of one that's still deciding what it's willing to become, and I would rather bet on a heart still deciding than one that's already decided something cruel."
He left the cell with that assessment sitting uncomfortably alongside everything else, and did not, walking back up into the castle's cold stone corridors, manage to convince himself she was wrong to withhold her trust as carefully as she'd apparently decided to grant it.
Valonia's harbor district had draped itself in black by the time Corren's ship made port, mourners lining the procession route toward the cathedral in numbers that suggested General Halvard's staged death had landed exactly as convincingly as the fire and the returned dagger had been meant to. Corren walked the edge of the crowd with his hood low and the black phoenix pendant tucked, against Maravent's own instruction, out of sight beneath his collar, some instinct he hadn't fully examined yet already distrusting a gift that had arrived wrapped in so much ceremony.
The cathedral swallowed the procession in cool, incense-heavy dark, stained glass throwing colored light across pews crowded with dignitaries in mourning black, and Corren found the five generals seated together near the front exactly where Maravent's intelligence had promised they'd be, close enough now that he could have crossed the remaining distance in under a minute if the aisle had stayed clear.
It didn't stay clear. Soldiers came out of the transept doors on both sides at once, armor gleaming under the stained light, and Corren understood, drawing the Morning Star a half-second before the first blade reached him, that he had walked directly into the ambush his own borrowed pendant had apparently been broadcasting for days.
He fought his way clear of the pews with the fire chant burning through the last of a mana reserve already thinned by two weeks of near-constant use, shattered a stained glass window with the tail end of the working, and dropped into the alley beyond gasping, his hands trembling with a drain deeper than any single chant should have cost him, an honest bill for a working done in genuine panic rather than careful preparation.
The soldiers found his trail within minutes, one of them holding a compass whose needle swung, unmistakably, toward Corren's own chest. He tore the pendant free and pressed it into a passing mourner's coat pocket without slowing, watching from a doorway's shadow a moment later as the pursuit peeled off after an innocent man wearing Maravent's gift instead of the man who'd actually earned it, a small, ugly relief pooling in his stomach at having survived his own reward.
A hand closed on his shoulder from behind before he'd finished processing the trick's success, and he spun with his blade half raised to find, instead of a soldier, a familiar grinning face.
"You're jumpier than I remember," Jo said, delighted, holding both palms up in mock surrender. "I've traded thieving for an honest living, by the way. Shoe shining. Very respectable. I overheard some soldiers describing a wanted assassin who matched your description almost exactly, and I thought, well, small world."
"You have a gift for showing up exactly when I need someone to," Corren said, lowering the blade, the tightness in his chest finally unclenching. "Thank you. Again."
"Come on," Jo said, already moving. "I know somewhere they won't think to look."
The boy led him to the harbor's edge, to a boat crowded with migrants returning toward the Kingdom of Sand, and pressed a coin purse into Corren's palm without being asked, the same easy generosity Corren remembered from their first meeting aboard a very different ship. "This'll get you passage the rest of the way," Jo said. "Go home, Corren. Whatever's chasing you, it sounds like it's bigger than one grateful thief can help with from here."
He reached the Fyre Academy three days later beneath a hood that had failed to keep the sea salt or the exhaustion off his face, slipped into Voss's office through a side entrance he'd used exactly once before, and told the Headmaster everything in a single unbroken rush: the pendant, the ambush, Nyla's blinding, the guilt sitting in his chest like a stone he hadn't found anywhere to set down.
Voss listened with the stillness Corren had learned, over two years, meant the man was thinking rather than merely waiting for his turn to speak, and when he finally answered, his voice carried a conviction that felt, for the first time in a long while, entirely uncomplicated.
"We break her out," Voss said. "Tonight, if the timing allows it. I know that castle's schedule better than Maravent would like anyone to."
They struck Blackmere's eastern wall with a controlled explosion timed to draw every guard on the ramparts toward a section that mattered considerably less than the one Corren actually needed clear, and slipped through the resulting chaos toward the lower levels where Nyla's cell sat waiting, its heavy door yielding to a corrected lightning chant that left Corren's whole arm numb to the shoulder with the cost of it.
"It's me," he said into the dark, and Nyla's head came up instantly, relief flooding a face that had, he suspected, spent the last several days convinced this particular rescue wasn't coming.