Valdrik Nocturne did not look like a villain.
That was the first thing. I had built him in my head as something I could identify on sight, someone whose ideology wore itself on the outside where you could see it and name it. He was not that.
He was tall and silver-eyed and the kind of handsome that had survived eleven centuries intact. He stood at the ward line with his hands at his sides and nothing threatening in his posture, and if you had not known what he was you might have mistaken him for someone reasonable.
Erix had gone very still. The stillness of someone who has just understood something terrible.
Zevran stepped in front of me. A small movement. Not showy. Just placing himself between Valdrik and me.
"Step back," I said to Zevran.
He stepped back. Not far.
"Selene Nocturne-Thornblood," Valdrik said. "I have wanted to meet you for some time."
"I have not wanted to meet you," I said. "So this is already uneven."
Something moved in his expression. Something close to appreciation. As though he had expected something else and was recalibrating.
"You have your father's directness," he said.
"I have never met my father enough to develop his anything," I said. "Thanks to you."
That landed. He took it without flinching, which told me he had thought about it before, which told me that somewhere under the ideology he understood the cost of what he had built.
"I am not here to execute the commission," he said. "I am here to make you an offer."
"Two people have made me offers in the last week," I said. "Neither of them went well."
"Come in, voluntarily," he said. "Present yourself to the Court. Submit to containment assessment. Demonstrate that you are not an uncontrolled threat. And in exchange, I will lift the commission, release Cael from restriction permanently, and formally acknowledge your existence in the Court records."
The silence that followed was a very particular silence. The kind that forms around something that sounds like a fair offer and is not.
"Containment assessment," I said.
"Standard protocol for Class One classifications."
"What does it involve?"
He was quiet for a half second too long.
"Power suppression," he said. "Temporary. For evaluation."
"How temporary."
"Indefinite," he said. "Pending review."
There it was. Indefinite. Pending review that he controlled, from an institution he ran, reviewing a decision he had already made before he arrived at my ward line.
"So the offer is: come in, let you suppress me, and wait for a review board made up of people who issued a kill commission on me to decide whether I am acceptable," I said. "And in exchange you will lift a commission you already know your operative is not completing. That is not an offer. That is a description of losing."
He looked at me.
"You are smarter than the assessment predicted," he said.
"Your assessments are based on what I wanted you to see," I said. "You have been watching me for six months. Everything you watched was a performance."
That was a lie. Most of it was simply my real life. But he did not know that and the doubt was useful.
"No," I said. "To your offer. I will not come in."
He nodded once. As though this had also been a possible outcome he had calculated for.
"Then we proceed to the next stage," he said.
"What is the next stage?"
"The Obsidian Court moves to secure the Orb of Binding before you can reach it," he said. "And we see what happens after that."
He turned and walked away from the ward line.
I watched him go. Silver-haired, unhurried, moving through the borderlands with the ease of someone who believed he had already won.
Erix had not moved. His face was doing something complicated.
"He knows about the Orb," I said.
"He has known for months," Erix said. Quietly. "He has a team positioned three miles from the Rotwood site already. He has been there for two weeks."
Two weeks. He had been there before my grandmother sent her note. He had moved before we had even started moving.
I went inside. My mother was at the kitchen table and she had her divination bowl out again and the water in it was black. Not metaphorically. Literally black, which meant the vision was severe, which meant whatever she was seeing in it was something the water was having difficulty holding. She looked up when I came in and her face was the face she used when she had information she did not want to deliver. She said: Selene. Sit down. I said: how bad. She said: Cael went to the Court this morning to argue against the commission formally. Valdrik was not there because Valdrik was here. The deputy session was presided over by the hardliner faction. They voted while Valdrik was standing at our ward line. She stopped. I said: what did they vote on. She said: they voted to detain him. Your father is in the Obsidian Cells. He has been there for two hours.