Chapter 7: Corvain's Bargain
The old warden's quarter was not empty, and it was not a trap either, not exactly, which somehow felt worse, because Corvain was sitting on the edge of a dust covered writing desk with the air of someone who had been waiting for a very long time and was pleased his patience had finally paid off.
"I did wonder how long the shard would take to lead you here," he said, not bothering to look surprised. "Congratulations again, Miss Ashworth. Your trial mirror is more thorough than most."
"You knew this room existed," Mira said. "You let the mirror give me a piece that would find it."
"I let the mirror give you the truth you asked it for," Corvain corrected. "I never said the truth would be convenient." He gestured at the room around them, shelves of old letters and a single faded portrait of two young men standing at the amber door, both of them smiling in a way Mira had never once seen on the Kade she knew. "This was my quarter, once. Before I traded my years away for someone I loved and the Ledger decided that made me unfit to remain simply a warden."
"Kade told us," Mira said quietly. "About your wish. About what it cost you."
Something flickered across Corvain's face, old grief wearing thin under decades of careful composure. "Did he. How generous of him, considering how little he actually remembers of it firsthand."
Kade went very still. "What does that mean."
Corvain studied him for a long moment, and for the first time all night, the spider's smile was entirely absent from his face. "It means, Warden, that you have never once asked me who the boy in that portrait is. The one standing beside me, at the door, the year everything changed."
Mira looked between the faded painting and Kade's face and felt the shape of the truth before anyone said it out loud.
"That's you," she said. "That's Kade. You two knew each other before he was bound to the Threshold."
"He was my apprentice," Corvain said softly. "Before the fragments started disappearing. Before the memory of me went with them. I trained him myself, the same way I was trained, and when the Ledger folded me into itself, I made certain the position passed to someone I trusted, someone with the right reasons, exactly as he told you. What he does not remember, because it was among the very first fragments the bond took from him, is that he volunteered for the warden's bond in the first place because he was trying to save me from having to watch someone else take my place. He thought if it was him, at least he could visit."
The silence in the room had a weight to it that Mira felt in her teeth.
"That's not true," Kade said, but his voice had lost its certainty.
"Isn't it," Corvain said, not unkindly. "Think, Warden. Why does the warden's rope always come to your hand faster than any tool the Ledger has actually issued you. Why do you still flinch, very slightly, every time someone raises their voice near this desk, though nothing here has ever hurt you. Fragments leave traces even after the memory itself is gone. You've been living around the edges of a story you can't read for a long time now."
Mira watched Kade's face, watched him search for a rebuttal and fail to find one, and felt something protective and fierce rise up in her chest on his behalf.
"That's not fair," she said to Corvain. "Telling him this now, after everything, when there's nothing he can do with it except hurt over it."
"Fair is not a resource I have had much use for in a hundred years, Miss Ashworth," Corvain said, though something in his face suggested her words had landed anyway. "But I am not telling him to be cruel. I am telling him because I think he deserves to know why he chose what he chose, even if the choosing itself is gone. Some truths are worth the ache of hearing them."
"I have no reason to lie to you tonight, of all nights," Corvain said, and for once, terribly, he sounded like he meant it. "I have spent a hundred years watching you forget me piece by piece, watching my own apprentice look at me like a stranger, and telling myself it didn't matter because at least you were safe behind that door instead of dissolving into the Ledger's ink the way I nearly did. I am not the villain in your story, Warden. I am simply the version of you that this place is capable of making, if it's allowed to run its course to the end."
Mira's stomach twisted. "That's why you push wishers toward the trials instead of helping them unmake their wishes quickly. You're not trying to hurt anyone. You're trying to buy enough time and power to reverse what happened to you, so Kade doesn't end up exactly like you."
Corvain's composed mask finally cracked, just slightly, just enough to show something raw underneath it. "I am trying to buy back a life I threw away with both hands for love, and yes, along the way, I am trying to make sure the boy I trained does not throw away his in exactly the same fashion. Which is precisely why I am going to make you both an offer neither of you will like."
"Here it comes," Priya muttered.
"I can unmake both linked wishes myself," Corvain said, ignoring her, "tonight, without a trial, without waiting three moons, without any risk of backlash to either of you. I have that authority as Keeper. I have simply never been permitted to use it freely, because the Ledger requires payment for anything done outside its ordinary rules."
"What payment," Mira asked, already dreading the answer.
"Kade's remaining fragments," Corvain said quietly. "All of them. The bond releases him entirely, the moment I do this, which means he keeps his life, his freedom, his ability to age and leave the Threshold and exist somewhere other than this doorway. But everything he remembers of being a person before the bond, every fragment he's clung to, gone, permanently, the instant I unmake your wishes. He would wake up tomorrow as someone entirely new, with no memory that either of you, or I, ever existed."
Mira looked at Kade, who had gone pale and silent, staring at the faded portrait of the boy he used to be.
"No," she said immediately, fierce and certain. "Absolutely not. We already told Old Maren no to a smaller version of this exact trade. I am not letting you erase him just to send Priya and me home a few weeks early."
"It is his choice to make, not yours," Corvain said, not unkindly. "And I would remind you both, the alternative is three moons of trials, danger, and uncertainty, at the end of which the bond may still take those fragments from him anyway, slowly, the ordinary way, the way it's already been taking them for a hundred years."
Kade finally spoke, his voice rough. "You get a say in this too," Mira said quietly, turning to look at him properly, ignoring Corvain and the portrait and everything else in the dusty little room. "Whatever you decide, I meant what I said before. I am not going to be the reason you lose the last pieces of yourself, not without a fight."
"I know," Kade said, and something in the simple certainty of it steadied her more than she expected. "That's precisely why I'm not deciding anything tonight. I'd rather we exhaust every option we actually have before I let anyone, including him, tell me what the only option is."
"Give us until the second moon to decide."
Something in Corvain's expression softened, old affection bleeding briefly through decades of careful distance. "You always did like doing things the hard way. Very well. Until the second moon. But Warden." His voice dropped, quieter, almost gentle, almost like the apprentice master he must once have been. "Don't let stubborn pride cost you a life you might actually get to keep, simply because it also costs you the memory of how you got there."
He turned and walked out of the old quarter without waiting for a response, leaving the three of them alone with a faded portrait, a rising sense of dread, and considerably less time than any of them had thought they had.
"Nine days," Priya said, once his footsteps had faded down the corridor. "We have nine days to find a version of this that doesn't end with either of you losing something huge."
"Nine days," Mira agreed, staring at the faded portrait of two smiling boys who no longer existed in quite the same way. "We'll find one."
"You say that like the last few hours have given us a single reason to be confident about our odds."
"I say it because the alternative is letting Corvain be right," Mira said, "and I have decided, as a personal policy, that I am never going to let a man with a spider smile be right about anything if I can possibly help it."
Kade, still quiet, still staring at the portrait, allowed himself the smallest ghost of a smile at that, and Mira decided to count it as a victory, however small, on a night that badly needed one.