Chương 83: An Uninvited Answer

The envoy arrived at Baskerville's gates six days after we'd crossed back out of Blood Moon territory, and the first anyone knew of it was the low, uneasy murmur that swept the courtyard the moment the gate wardens actually got a look at the crest stitched into her travel cloak. I recognized it before Dororo had to explain — a crescent moon rendered in dark red thread, half-eclipsed, the same mark I'd carried a quiet, wordless flinch away from since I was old enough to understand what it meant.

"She's alone," Kalio said, watching from the colonnade beside me, something careful in his voice.

"No guard escort. That's either a very good sign or a very calculated one."

"With Blood Moon," Dororo said, joining us with his usual unhurried economy of movement that somehow still managed to arrive exactly when needed, "I've learned it's rarely worth guessing which, until they've finished telling you themselves." Ellia arrived a moment later, having clearly heard the courtyard's murmur from wherever she'd been training, blade still in hand though she made no move to draw it further.

"Should we be worried?"

"Worry rarely helps before you know what you're actually facing," Dororo said.

"Curiosity, cautiously applied, tends to serve considerably better." He watched the envoy dismount, unhurried, entirely composed under the weight of a courtyard's worth of wary attention.

"Whatever she's brought us, I doubt it's a blade disguised as a letter. Blood Moon has never needed subtlety when a direct approach would serve their purposes just as well." The gate wardens escorted her forward at last, and I made myself walk out to meet her rather than wait to be summoned, some old, stubborn instinct insisting that whatever came next, I'd rather face it standing than seated.

She gave her name as Serel, no house name offered alongside it, and asked for exactly one thing once shown into Baskerville's receiving hall — a private audience with "the vessel who walked our old road," phrased carefully enough that I understood, immediately, she'd chosen every syllable of it in advance.

"I'll hear it with Dororo and my companions present," I said.

"Whatever this is, I don't intend to carry it alone."

"That wasn't a demand," Serel said, something almost like approval flickering across an otherwise carefully unreadable face.

"Sect Master Rethven anticipated you'd say exactly that. He said, if you did, to tell you it speaks well of you, and that he'd have been disappointed by anything less." That name meant nothing to me. It clearly meant something to Dororo, whose posture shifted, subtle but unmistakable, the way it always did when a piece of old, half-buried history surfaced somewhere he hadn't expected to find it.

"Rethven," he said slowly.

"The same Rethven who took the Blood Moon seat three years past, under circumstances no one outside that sect has ever properly explained?"

"The same," Serel confirmed.

"He asked me to tell you, specifically, Archmage Dororo — since you're clearly the one who'll have already guessed the shape of it before I finish saying it aloud — that the manner of his ascension and the manner of your own fifty-year absence from the world share considerably more in common than either sect has ever publicly admitted." Dororo went very still.

"He wants to see it explained plainly," Serel continued, into the silence that followed.

"Not through envoys, not through carefully worded letters passed back and forth across a border neither sect trusts the other to read honestly. He extends an invitation — to you, Len Fan, and whoever you choose to bring — to visit Blood Moon's inner sanctum properly, under formal truce, and hear directly from him why an old, dead shrine road matters considerably more than either of our two sects has ever let the other believe." The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Why now?" I asked.

"Why not before we ever set foot on that road at all, if it mattered this much?"

"Because before, it was simply an old story he'd inherited along with a seat he never expected to hold," Serel said.

"Now, it's a story someone outside Blood Moon has finally walked into on their own, entirely unprompted, and come back out the other side asking exactly the right questions about it. He said that changes what's worth risking to explain." She studied me a long moment, something almost sympathetic beneath the careful diplomat's mask.

"I understand your sect lost someone to ours, years ago. I won't pretend that debt is settled simply because I've been sent to deliver an invitation instead of another blade. But Sect Master Rethven asked me to tell you, plainly, that he did not inherit that particular decision, and he has spent three years trying to become the kind of leader who'd never have made it in the first place."

The room was quiet a long moment after that, the old scar Blood Moon's name had always pressed against without my consent aching in a way I hadn't fully braced myself for.

"I'll need time to consider it," I finally said.

"This isn't a small thing to simply agree to on the spot."

"He expected that too," Serel said, something that might have been the faintest ghost of a genuine smile crossing her face for the first time since she'd arrived.

"He said, and these were his exact words — 'good. I'd trust the answer considerably less if it came too easily.'" Dororo found me alone in the archive that evening, long after Serel had been given proper guest quarters and the rest of Baskerville had settled back into its ordinary evening rhythms around the strange interruption.

"Fifty years and considerably more in common than either sect has ever admitted," I said, before he'd fully sat down across from me.

"You know something."

"I suspect something," Dororo corrected gently.

"There's a difference, and I intend to respect it until I've actually confirmed which one I'm dealing with." He removed his glasses, turning them slowly in his hands, something old and careful behind his usual composure.

"I was not simply lost for fifty years, child. I disappeared. Deliberately, from every record anyone's ever managed to find, in a manner nobody — including myself, if I'm being fully honest with you — has ever satisfactorily explained. I assumed, for most of that gap, that the explanation was mine alone to eventually recover." He looked up, something unusually uncertain in his expression.

"If Rethven's ascension shares real shape with whatever happened to me, then perhaps it never was mine alone in the first place."

"Will you come with me? To Blood Moon?"

"I wouldn't miss it," Dororo said, "for anything short of the sky itself falling in. Whatever Rethven intends to tell you, child, I suspect I have at least as much reason to hear it as you do." He allowed himself a small, tired smile.

"It appears the world isn't finished handing us questions faster than we've finished earning the answers to the old ones. I confess, somewhat against my better judgment, that I've stopped minding that quite as much as I probably should."

I sat with that a long while after he'd gone, Ember dozing warm against my collar, Kromitos settled quiet beneath my ribs, and understood, watching the last of the evening light fade properly out over Trigatia's spires, that whatever waited inside Blood Moon's inner sanctum, it had just become considerably harder to keep calling this year's growing list of mysteries someone else's problem to eventually solve.

Ellia found me still sitting there when the archive's lamps had burned low enough that Dororo's absence had stretched into something closer to genuine solitude. She didn't ask what he'd said — she'd clearly already gathered enough from the careful, thoughtful quiet I hadn't managed to shake since he'd left.

"You're going," she said. Not a question.

"I'm going," I confirmed.

"I don't think I could talk myself out of it even if I wanted to. Not after hearing that name land the way it did on Dororo's face."

"Then I'm coming too," she said, settling onto the bench beside me the way she always did now, without needing to ask permission first.

"Blood Moon or not. Old grudge or not. I told you already — whatever this eventually asks of you, I intend to still be standing beside you when it does. I don't plan on making that promise conditional on which sect happens to be doing the asking."

"It could be dangerous."

"Most things worth doing lately have been," she said, something wry and fond beneath the words.

"I've made my peace with that considerably faster than you seem to have, if I'm honest." I let myself lean into her shoulder, the ache Blood Moon's crest had pressed against earlier finally easing into something more manageable, something closer to resolve than old grief.

Whatever Rethven intended to show us behind those walls, I found myself, cautiously, more curious than afraid of it — a small, hard-won shift I didn't think the boy who'd first heard that sect's name spoken over his father's grave would have believed possible, even a year ago.