I sat down.
My legs made the decision before I made it. One moment I was standing and the next I was in the kitchen chair and the chair was the only solid thing.
"How long can they hold him?" I asked. My voice came out level. I did not recognize it.
"Indefinitely," Erix said from behind me. "The Obsidian Cells suppress vampire ability completely. He cannot use his strength or speed or any of his gifts. He is physically safe. Valdrik needs him alive to use as leverage."
"And if I do not respond to the leverage?"
Nobody answered. Because nobody wanted to say what they were all thinking.
I closed my eyes for three seconds. Then I opened them.
This was what it felt like. This was what having a father felt like, the specific and targeted grief of learning someone existed and then immediately learning that he was in danger because of you. I had spent sixteen years being the reason my mother's life was diminished. I was not going to spend the rest of my life being the reason my father's ended.
But I was also not going to walk into a containment cell.
"We do not change the plan," I said.
"Selene," my mother said.
"The commission hunter is not completing his assignment. Valdrik knows about the Orb but his team is at Rotwood, not between us and the Orb. We have a nine-day window before the Ashenmoon. My father is in Obsidian Cells which means he is suppressed but physically safe. If I go to the Court now, Valdrik wins every objective simultaneously. The Orb stays hidden, the Malediction stays intact, I am in containment, and he still has my father." I looked at my mother. "If I break the curse first, Valdrik loses the ideological foundation of everything he has built. The Court cannot sustain a war against people it has just been forced to acknowledge it shares a common origin with. And then we get him back."
She looked at me for a long time.
"You have thought about this very quickly," she said.
"I have been thinking about every version of this since the watcher followed me three months ago," I said. "I just did not have all the pieces until now."
Erix stepped forward.
"I can go back to the Court," he said. "Tell them the commission requires more preparation time. Buy you the window."
"If you go back, Valdrik will watch you closely," I said. "He knows you have been in the borderlands."
"He expected me to come here," Erix said. "He assigned me because he knew I would have difficulty completing the commission and he wanted me to make contact with you. He is hoping I either bring you in or give him enough intelligence to move on the Orb location directly."
"He sent you as bait," I said.
"Yes," he said. "And I am telling you, which means his plan did not work."
I looked at him. Young face, old eyes, carrying two years of silent loyalty to someone who was now in a suppression cell. He had been raised by my father to have a particular kind of integrity and it had turned out to be pointed in a direction Valdrik had not anticipated.
"Do what you think is right," I said. "I am not going to tell you what that is."
He nodded. He walked out the door.
Zevran moved to stand beside me at the window. Not close enough to impose. Close enough to be present.
"We leave at first dark tomorrow," I said.
"Yes," he said.
I picked up the vial Vesra had left. The shifting black-violet liquid. Fourteen years of hidden work. I turned it over in my hands and thought about my father in a suppression cell and my grandmother appearing after sixteen years with apologies and tools and my mother who had chosen all of this before any of it had happened because she saw it in the water and decided the outcome was worth the cost.
I had never been given that choice. I had been born into the outcome.
But I was going to be the one who finished it.
I unstoppered the vial and drank it. It tasted like cold iron and something burning and something sweet underneath both. For thirty seconds nothing happened. Then everything in my blood went quiet. Not the false quiet of suppression. The real quiet. The kind that falls when two things that have been at war with each other for a very long time finally, exhaustedly, stop fighting. I sat in the middle of that quiet and felt, for the first time in seventeen years, like a single thing. Then Mira knocked on my door. Her voice through the wood: Selene. You need to come out here right now. Erix is back. He brought someone with him. I opened the door. She said: he brought your father.