"I know," Voss said, something breaking open behind his own composure now, raw and unguarded in a way Corren had never once seen from him. "I know, Torvent. I'm sorry. I should have found you sooner. I should have tried harder to undo what I let them do to you in the first place."
Torvent's blade dropped from a hand that no longer seemed to remember how to hold it, his whole body sagging as whatever last reserve of the binding's control had been fueling him finally gave way entirely, and Voss caught him before he hit the stone floor, lowering him down with a care that had nothing tactical left in it at all.
"I don't think I want to go back to being what they made me," Torvent said, quiet now, his breath coming shallow and uneven, some deep, structural cost of the binding's sudden release spreading through him with a finality Corren recognized, distantly, as the same shape mana debt took when a caster had drawn past what their own well could survive giving back. "I think I would rather this be the last thing I remember being. Myself. However briefly."
"Then it will be," Voss said, holding him, and said nothing further, and Torvent's breathing slowed, and stopped, somewhere in the space of the next several seconds, with an ease that felt, to Corren, considerably more like mercy finally arriving than like violence taking anything.
Voss knelt there a long moment after, Wrenna's hand finding his shoulder without either of them speaking, and when he finally rose, his whole face had sunk into a grief he didn't try to hide from either of them.
"We don't have time to grieve him properly tonight," he said, low. "I intend to, later, at length, and I would ask that neither of you try to talk me out of it when I do. For now, the King needs us more than a dead man does."
Corren stood over the two of them a moment longer than the fighting elsewhere strictly allowed him to spare, looking down at a face he'd once hated cleanly and simply, back when hating him had still felt like the easiest thing in the world, and found that whatever satisfaction he'd once imagined feeling at seeing Torvent finally undone had never once arrived, not tonight, not like this. There was no triumph in a man dying free of a cult that had hollowed him out for a use he'd never consented to serving. There was only the plain, unglamorous waste of it, a life spent being someone else's instrument right up until the very last handful of seconds he'd been given to be anything else.
They left Torvent where he'd fallen, someone's cloak drawn over him by a guard already moving past toward the fighting still raging deeper in the palace, and ran.
They found the private study's door standing open, its lock burned through rather than picked, and Corren's chest went hollow at what waited inside it.
King Ignacius lay on the floor beside his own desk, a blade wound opening dark across his chest, his eyes already fixed on nothing at all, and standing over him, still and unhurried in a way that made the whole scene feel considerably worse than any amount of frantic violence could have, was Duke Maravent himself, his own blade unwiped, his expression carrying the same flat, appraising calm Corren remembered from a chamber in Blackmere three months and a lifetime ago.
Prince Aldous stood a few paces off, blood running from a shallow cut along one arm, his own sword raised and shaking with a fury that hadn't yet found anywhere useful to spend itself, and Elandrie knelt beside her father's body, her hands pressed uselessly against a wound already past any healing chant's reach, sobs tearing out of her that carried no performance in them at all, only raw, ungovernable grief.
"Corren of Clan Ashvale," Maravent said, and the use of Corren's true name, spoken calmly in a room that still smelled of smoke and blood, landed considerably colder than any threat shouted would have. "I confess I underestimated exactly how thoroughly you'd manage to complicate my timeline. A stolen confession, marked the moment its seal broke, was never meant to reach me this late. I would have preferred a cleaner exit than this one. I don't especially enjoy improvising."
"You knew," Corren said, the Morning Star already rising in his own grip, mana still thin in his chest from the corridor fighting behind him. "The mark on the wax. You've had eyes on the Queen's own letters this whole time."
"I have eyes on considerably more than the Queen's letters," Maravent said, unbothered, "though I don't intend to explain the particulars to a boy who's about to spend the last of his own reserves trying to stop me from leaving this room regardless. You've spent three months inside my own Order, Corren, and you still believe you've seen the whole shape of what I actually command. I find that almost touching, in a boy who's fought his way this far on cleverness alone." His gaze flicked, briefly, dismissively, to the body at his feet. "A kingdom's secrets are not a currency the people who hold them get to spend carelessly. Your Queen tried to spend hers in front of a room full of witnesses. Kings tend to die when the people around them forget that discretion was ever the actual price of their own safety."
"Where's Solara," Elandrie's voice cracked out, raw and furious, rising up off her knees with a grief that had already started curdling into something considerably harder. "What did you do with her."
"Nothing, Princess," Maravent said, something almost like genuine amusement moving behind his stillness. "She ran the moment my men breached the western wall, considerably faster than I expected a woman of her breeding to move. I couldn't tell you where she's gone. I find I don't especially care to spend the effort finding out tonight."