Neither of them mentioned, because neither of them yet knew to worry about it, that a third name would soon have real reason to join the two already crowding that particular unfinished conversation.
The war council convened the next evening around the lakehouse's largest table, Doss, Voss, Vaelith, Wrenna, Celeste, Nyla, and Corren himself crowded into a room built for half that number, and the debate that followed carried none of the polite hedging Corren had come to expect from careful people discussing a dangerous plan.
"There's only one sensible move left to us," Doss said, tracing a line across a hand-drawn map with one calloused finger. "We strike Blackmere directly. Maravent's the source of every wound this family's taken in the last three months, and a wound doesn't stop bleeding until you close the artery feeding it."
"That's precisely the reaction he's counting on," Voss said, his own voice carrying the patience of a man who had clearly rehearsed this argument before ever sitting down at the table. "Attacking his castle outright plays directly into the strength he's spent decades building for exactly that scenario. We'd be walking into the one fight he's most prepared to win."
"Then what would you have us do instead," Doss asked. "Sit here and wait for his soldiers to find this lakehouse the way Aurelle managed to."
"Appeal to the Albino Duke," Voss said. "He's Maravent's oldest rival, and he owes Corren a debt already for the Fennmoor tax relief. His support could tip the political balance considerably in our favor."
"And the moment we ask him for it," Corren said, speaking for the first time since the argument had started, "we hand Maravent a perfect excuse to strike his own rival for harboring fugitives, which accomplishes nothing except widening this war to a second Duchy that never asked to be part of it." He let that settle a moment before continuing, aware of every eye in the room turning toward him now. "I've been turning this over the whole ride back from the demon border, and I keep arriving at the same answer neither of you has raised yet. We appeal to someone Maravent genuinely can't touch. Someone who outranks him entirely."
Voss's expression sharpened, understanding arriving a half-second ahead of the words. "The Fire King."
"We're wanted fugitives," Doss said, incredulous. "Walking into Ashendell is walking directly into the one city where every soldier in the Kingdom has our descriptions memorized."
"Not if we're not recognizable," Corren said, and drew the storage void's small dark opening at his hip, retrieving Doss's father's journal and setting it on the table between them. "I have the corrected shapeshifting chant. I tested it on myself already, on the road back from Cyril's cabin. I can wear a different face into that city entirely, and if the healing I've already done for strangers along the way is any indication, I have a way to get an audience with the King that doesn't require announcing who I actually am until I've already earned the room's trust."
"That's an enormous risk to stake on a single working you've cast exactly once," Voss said, though his tone carried more consideration than outright objection now.
"It's the risk I'm choosing," Corren said, "because every other option on this table costs either the Albino Duke's Duchy or a direct assault none of us are actually equipped to win. I'd rather bet on my own grammar than on anyone else's army."
Vaelith, silent through most of the argument, finally spoke, her red eyes moving over the assembled table with the weighing patience of a woman who'd spent decades testing students under considerably less pressure than this. "It's reckless," she said, "and it's also the only plan at this table that doesn't require someone else's blood spent on our behalf first. I'll vote for reckless over that particular alternative, if a vote is what we're actually taking."
The room settled, by slow degrees, into something like consensus, and it was Wrenna who finally asked the question everyone else had apparently been avoiding.
"Who's going with him."
"Voss," Corren said, before anyone else could answer for him. "He knows the palace's politics better than any of us, and he's the one person here Maravent's own network is least likely to be actively watching, given how thoroughly his own cover as Headmaster has held. The rest of you need to stay here. My mother and Elara can't be left undefended, and if this goes wrong in Ashendell, someone needs to still be standing to carry on without me."
Nobody argued that particular point, though Corren caught the specific, careful stillness that dropped over both Wrenna and Celeste at the announcement, two very different silences arriving at the same shape from two entirely different directions.
He found Wrenna alone on the dock again the night before he and Voss left for Ashendell, watching the same still black water she'd watched him leave across once already this season, and settled beside her without either of them needing to say anything first.
"I'm not going to ask you not to go," she said. "I already tried that argument once this week, with Nyla, and I lost it. I don't think I'd win it any better a second time."
"You wouldn't," Corren admitted. "Though I'd rather you tell me anyway than swallow it the way you swallow most things."
"I'm tired of swallowing things," Wrenna said, and there was real fatigue in it now, not simply the argument's leftover edge. "Celeste and I had a real conversation this week. About all of it. Her, me, you, the whole tangled shape of what none of us has actually said out loud yet." She was quiet a moment, the lake murmuring gently against the dock's old wood. "I don't have an ending to tell you about it. I just wanted you to know it happened, before you go put on someone else's face and walk into a palace full of people who'll want things from you too."