Erix had broken him out.
That was what had happened. Erix had walked back into the Obsidian Court, had used his active operative status to access the lower detention level, and had walked my father out of a suppression cell in broad daylight while Valdrik was still in the borderlands dealing with the aftermath of our conversation.
It was the bravest and most reckless thing I had ever heard of.
It was also, from Erix's perspective, probably the most straightforward decision he had made in months.
Cael Nocturne was standing in my kitchen.
Not at the property line. Not at the door. In the kitchen. My mother was across from him with her hands flat on the table and her expression doing something I had no reference for because I had never seen it before. It was not the careful controlled thing she wore for hard information. It was something she was not managing. Something she had stopped trying to manage.
He looked like he had been in a suppression cell for six hours. Which meant he looked like himself but stripped of the particular quality that very old vampires had, the sense of compressed power underneath the surface. Without it he looked almost human. Almost approachable. Almost like a man instead of a seven-century institution.
He looked at me when I came in.
I looked at him.
This was the third time in my life I had been in the same room as my father. The first time I had been too young to understand it. The second time I had been too angry to let it be anything else. This time I was neither young nor purely angry and I had nothing to hide behind.
"You should sit down," I said. "Suppression cell residue takes a few hours to clear."
He sat down. He watched me move around the kitchen with an expression I could not read and eventually stopped trying to.
"Erix told me about the Orb," he said. "About the plan."
"Yes," I said.
"I want to come with you."
The kitchen went quiet.
"You just broke out of an Obsidian Cell," I said. "Valdrik will have every operative in the territories looking for you."
"Yes," he said.
"You would be a liability in the field."
"Possibly," he said. "For the first few hours while the residue clears. After that, I am a former general with seven centuries of field experience and a very specific motivation."
I looked at Erix, who was standing in the doorway with the expression of someone who had made a catastrophic decision and had no regrets about it and was waiting to see whether everyone else was going to catch up.
I looked at Zevran, who was by the window and had the careful neutral expression he used when he was letting me make a decision without influence.
I looked at my mother. She was looking at Cael. She had not stopped looking at him since he came through the door.
I looked at my father.
Seven centuries old. Former general of the army that would like me dead. Under restriction for seventeen years because of me. In a suppression cell this morning because of me. Sitting in my kitchen with suppression residue in his blood and the particular expression of someone who has spent a long time wanting to say something and has finally run out of reasons not to.
"I owe you a conversation," he said. "You asked for it. When this is over, you get it. Every question."
"Every question," I said.
"Every answer," he said. "I promise."
I had spent seventeen years wanting that promise. I had not known, until this moment, that getting it would feel so much smaller than the wanting of it. Not because it was not real. But because it could not reach the distance that had already been built. The promises you make retroactively cannot undo the years in which they were not made. They can only be the beginning of something different.
I understood that. I was not sure I had the capacity to act on it yet.
"Fine," I said. "You come. But you follow my lead on approach and you do not freelance in Blackwood's territory."
"Understood," he said.
We left at first dark.
Six of us. Me, Mira, Zevran, Erix, my mother, my father. Moving through the borderlands in the dark. The strangest possible company for the strangest possible mission. A half-trained blood-crafter, a former Court spy, an assassin who had not completed his assignment, an exiled witch, a broken-out general, and me.
The Ashen Faction's territory started three miles east. Blackwood already knew we were coming. He had said as much.
The forest was quiet. The borderlands-quiet I had learned to read since I was a child. The quiet before.
And then Mira grabbed my arm.
She grabbed my arm and pulled me to a stop and pointed at the tree line ahead. At first I saw nothing. Then I saw it. A figure standing in the dark between the trees. Not Blackwood, not one of his faction, not anything I had ever seen. It was robed and it was very still and it was looking directly at me with the particular quality of something that had been waiting for a very long time. Zevran said, very quietly: what is that. My mother made a sound I had never heard from her. A sharp single breath. Like recognition. She said: that is not possible. She said: she has been dead for a thousand years. She said: that is Seraphyne. I stared at the figure in the trees. The original architect of the Dual Malediction. The woman who had written the curse into both bloodlines a thousand years ago. Looking at me. And she was smiling