POV: VIVIAN
Helena's answer arrives through a call that she makes to both of us separately, which is how she delivers important things now, separately, so that the receiving happens without the other person's reaction influencing the first person's, and she calls me on a Sunday morning from wherever she is with the research.
"Only love freely chosen can save them," she says. Not the counter-spell. The counter-spell burned. What the burning produced is different from the counter-spell, which is the burning's answer, the specific way that old magic sometimes answers a question by destroying the question's premise and revealing what the premise was hiding, and what was hiding behind the counter-spell is this: there is no technical solution. There is only the choice.
