"I try," Corren said, and meant it, and found, for the length of that one quiet hour beside a fire on the edge of a border he'd nearly died crossing twice in one evening, that nothing at all in either of their two Kingdoms demanded anything further of him. The chalice sat safe in its storage void, his family's fever finally within reach of an actual cure, and for exactly as long as the fire held, that was enough.
Cyril met them at the cabin door before either of them had finished crossing the yard, and the fever's cream on his own bare chest, when Corren pulled the stopper on the chalice and poured a careful measure of stream water inside it, watching the liquid bloom gold and warm in his own hands, seemed almost to answer the sight of it before he'd even finished the pour.
Cyril drank, and the transformation that followed happened fast enough that Vance actually staggered backward a step, watching color flood back into his father's face, sores that had marked his chest for years fading to smooth, unmarked skin within the space of a single held breath, and the old man let out a whoop of laughter that had nothing frail left in it at all, dancing an unsteady, delighted circle around his own kitchen table before either Corren or Vance managed to say a single word.
"It works," Cyril said, breathless, gripping Corren by both shoulders with a strength that hadn't been there five minutes earlier. "Fifteen years, boy, and I'd stopped truly believing, somewhere around year ten, that it was anything more than a story I told myself to keep from admitting the search had failed. You've given me back thirty years I thought I'd already spent."
"Keep some of the water," Corren said, filling three small clay vessels Vance produced without being asked, some part of him already anticipating the request before Cyril made it. "For anyone else this fever finds. I need most of it for my own family, but I won't be the reason you go back to watching people die of something you now have an actual answer to."
Vance, silent through most of the celebration, finally found his voice, rough with an emotion he clearly hadn't expected to be feeling this openly in front of a stranger. "Thank you," he said simply. "For him. For not letting an old man's stubbornness be the last thing that killed him before something worse got the chance to."
"He's earned considerably more credit than stubbornness alone accounts for," Corren said. "Whatever else this cost, it wouldn't have worked at all without thirty years of a man who refused to stop looking. That's not nothing, whatever the years cost him to spend chasing it."
They left the following morning with Cyril's blessing, the last of his dried meat, and a farewell that felt, despite everything, considerably lighter than the arrival three days earlier had been, Cyril and Vance both standing in the cabin's doorway waving until the treeline finally swallowed them from sight.
They found the lakehouse in an uproar that had nothing to do with fever and everything to do with a visitor none of them had expected to see cross that particular threshold again so soon.
Aurelle stood in the main room's center when Corren pushed through the door, travel-worn and wind-chapped, her usual clipped composure fraying visibly at the edges in a way he'd rarely seen from her even at Blackmere's worst moments, and the look she turned on him when he entered carried a relief so unguarded it startled him more than any greeting she'd ever offered before.
"You're alive," she said, and then, catching herself, added with something closer to her old flatness, "which I already knew, technically, but knowing a thing and watching it confirmed in front of you are apparently not the same experience at all."
"How did you find us," Corren asked, setting the storage void down and drawing the chalice free before anything else, urgency for his father overriding every other question for the moment.
"Voss's own courier network," Aurelle said. "I asked, carefully, at the Academy, and someone who owed the Headmaster more than they owed the Duke eventually pointed me the right direction. I won't pretend it was elegant. It worked, which is the part that matters." Her gaze followed the golden vessel in his hands with open curiosity, but she held the question back, some visible discipline keeping it in check against whatever urgency she could read plainly enough on his own face. "Go. Your father first. I'll still be here when you're finished, and what I've brought will keep another hour."
He found his father laid out in the lakehouse's small side room, Aldric's breathing shallow and rasping in a way that had visibly worsened even in the days since the fort's rescue, and poured the golden water past cracked lips with hands that trembled from more than simple fatigue now. The effect took longer than it had with Cyril, minutes rather than seconds, color returning by slow, uneven degrees, but by the time Karma arrived at the doorway with Elara asleep against her shoulder, Aldric's eyes had opened, clear and steady for the first time in what felt like a season, and the sound that came out of Karma at the sight of it was not quite a sob and not quite a laugh but something that needed both words at once to properly describe.
Aldric's hand found Corren's wrist before Corren had finished setting the chalice aside, weaker than it should have been even with the cure already working through him, and held on with a grip that asked for something words hadn't caught up to yet. "You went into demon country for this," he said, voice still rough with disuse. "Alone."
"Not entirely alone," Corren said. "Nyla waited at the border. And I wasn't in as much danger as it probably sounds, once it was actually happening."