"Whatever you are deciding," I said, "stop."
He turned. He was at the far edge of the property, past the ward line, and his expression was the complicated one I had been cataloguing. Not threat. Not calculation. The version I had not yet fully named.
"I was not going to report," he said.
"Mira thinks you were."
"Mira watches me like I am a puzzle she needs to solve."
"She is not wrong."
He looked at me for a moment. Then:
"No," he said. "She is not."
We walked. Not back to the cottage, not anywhere specific. Just into the borderland dark where the forest thinned and you could see the sky. I had learned, over the past weeks, that Zevran thought better when he was moving. So did I. This was one of the things about him that I had not expected. How many small alignments there were.
"The routing pipeline that sent my report to Blackwood," he said. "It is not just me. There are at least four other operatives whose reports have been forwarded to the Ashen Faction over the past two years. Court intelligence has been funding Blackwood indirectly without knowing it. When I bring this to the right people, it will detonate half the intelligence division."
"You are going to bring it to the right people," I said.
"When this is over. Yes."
"That is the opposite of reporting to the Court now."
"I know," he said. "That is the point."
I looked at him. The four weeks of training sessions in the black-water caverns. The way he adjusted my form with patient precision. The way he said interesting instead of recoiling when he first saw my eyes properly in good light. The way he had told me about Blackwood's three discarded hybrids with his voice very flat and his hands very still.
"You are done with the Court," I said. Not a question.
"I have been done for a while," he said. "I just needed the right reason to stop pretending otherwise."
"I am not going to be your reason," I said.
"No," he said immediately. "You are not. The three hybrids Blackwood discarded are my reason. What I found when I traced the routing is my reason. You are something else."
"What am I?" I asked.
He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that is not avoidance but consideration.
"The thing that made me look," he said finally. "Not the reason. The direction."
I did not know what to do with that. I noted it and moved past it.
"Tell me what you know about the Ashenmoon," I said.
He told me. Every three centuries, a cosmological event called the Ashenmoon occurred when the physical moon turned the color of old wounds and both curses that made up the Dual Malediction went dormant. Not forever. For an hour. The old Court texts described it as a footnote. The old coven texts described it in similar terms. Both sets of records had been written by people who wanted the phenomenon minimized.
But there was something else. Something neither set of records mentioned that Zevran had found in a private archive during his intelligence work. The Ashenmoon did not just suppress the Dual Malediction.
In the presence of the Orb of Binding, during the Ashenmoon, the curse could be unmade entirely. But only if activated by someone who carried both sides of the curse simultaneously in their blood.
Both sides. At once. In one body.
There was only one person who had ever done that.
"How many days until the Ashenmoon?" I asked.
"Eleven," he said.
Eleven days. We had eleven days to get through Blackwood's territory, retrieve the Orb, and get to the Rotwood site before the Court found it, before the commission hunter found me, and before anyone else decided to use this window for their own purposes.
"We leave in two days," I said. "Whatever we need to prepare, we prepare by then."
"Yes," he said.
We walked back toward the cottage. The ward pulsed once when we crossed the line. Home, it said. Or the closest thing to it.
My mother was in the kitchen with her divination bowl when we got back. She did not look up. She was staring into pooled water and the expression on her face was the one she used when a vision had already arrived and she was deciding what to do about it. She looked like that for five minutes. Then she said, to the water rather than to either of us: he is already here. I said: who is here. And she said: the man they sent to kill you. He has been watching this cottage for six days. He is in the forest right now. I turned toward the door. She said: Selene, wait. There is something you need to know about him before you go out there. He is not here to complete the commission.