Chapter 245: My Blood, My Business

Ren went back to his room after breakfast, sat down on the edge of the bed to answer the summons properly, and the room came apart around him.

He knew what it was this time. The last time General Halvern had pulled him in like this, it had caught him mid-sentence and he’d nearly thrown a strike. Now the walls just went soft and far away, the light changed, and he was standing somewhere else, on grass, under a wide pale sky.

The garden. Ren had only seen it once and he remembered all of it — a whole country of it, ordered in a way nothing in nature was, streams running in straight lines, hedges squared off, hills laid out like someone had drawn them first and grown them second. A peak Stage Seven’s inner world. The most powerful thing Ren had ever been allowed to stand inside, and it was somebody’s private field.

General Osric Halvern stood by one of his straight streams with his hands behind his back. Grey coat, war-cut, plain. He looked like a tired man on a farm. He was the Second Seat of the Alliance High Command and a peak Stage Seven Bloodline Plant Lord, and he did not turn around right away.

"You felt it too, then," Ren said.

"Everyone felt it." Halvern turned. "Sit, stand, whatever you like. This won’t take long."

— • —

He didn’t waste the opening.

"Three nights ago, something in your blood started shouting," Halvern said. "Not humming. Shouting. Every cultivator on this campus at Stage Six or above felt it, whether they knew what they were feeling or not. I felt it from here, in my own garden, with the door shut." He let that sit. "So I’ll ask you once, plainly, like I ask everything. What woke up?"

Ren had known the question was coming from the moment the slip arrived. He’d decided his answer on the walk to nowhere.

"It’s Valis blood," he said. "It’s Valis business. That’s all I’ve got for you."

He said it flat. Not rude. Just a door, closed.

Halvern looked at him for a moment. Then, to Ren’s surprise, he nodded, like a man who’d been handed exactly the receipt he expected.

"Good," he said. "That’s the right answer."

— • —

"Understand what I already know," Halvern went on, "so you don’t spend the hour guarding things I’ve had for longer than you’ve been alive."

He started walking along the stream, slow, and Ren fell in beside him.

"There’s a seal. Old. There’s a thing held behind it that should never come out. And there is a Valis on the other end of it, holding, and has been for a very long time — longer than the version in the public records, longer than most of my own people are cleared to know. The Alliance has watched your family for centuries because of it. Not your talent, boy. Your blood. Your talent is just the loudest thing about you this year."

Ren kept his face still and let him talk. None of it was new. All of it was true. That was the unsettling part — the general laid it out like a man reading a weather report, and every line matched something Ren had put together himself in the dark.

"Here’s the part you’ll want to hear," Halvern said. "I can’t read it. Nobody can. A bloodline seal doesn’t open for a password, or a torturer, or a general with a high enough rank. It opens for the blood. Whatever’s coming through you right now, it’s coming to a Valis, and it will only ever come to a Valis." He stopped at a bend in the stream. "So I’m not here to take it from you. I couldn’t if I wanted to. I’m here because you’re carrying something the whole plane needs kept safe, and you’ve decided to carry it quietly, which means somebody has to keep the knives off your back while you do."

"And that’s you," Ren said.

"That’s me. It’s already been me for a while."

— • —

He raised one hand, and a man stepped out from behind a squared hedge like he’d been standing there the whole time.

Ren knew him. Grey robes, plain face, the kind of quiet that sat heavier than it should. The elder who had judged his duel with Kest, lifted the pressure when it was over, and laughed at Ren’s braid-work all the way up the Terrace hill. I’ll be watching you, Valis, he’d said, and Ren had taken it for a friendly line.

"You’ve met John," Halvern said.

"John," Ren repeated.

"Just John." The elder’s mouth twitched. "I gave up the rest of it a long time ago. Titles get heavy."

"John is peak Stage Six, Plant pathway, and he has been on this campus watching you since before your expedition ended," Halvern said. "On my order. That won’t change. You won’t usually see him. You saw him at the duel because I wanted you to know the face — I don’t like putting a guard on a man without introducing them."

Ren looked at the elder who went by one name and had spent a whole season pretending to be a bored examiner. "The braid paper," Ren said. "The one the healers wanted copies of."

"Real," John said. "I do also actually teach. Watching you is more interesting." He shrugged, and stepped back behind the hedge, and the quiet closed over the spot where he’d been.

— • —

They walked a while without talking. Then Halvern said, without changing his tone at all:

"Your friend lit a channel four days ago. One second of it."

Ren looked at him.

"You heard about that."

"I hear about every second of that boy." Halvern watched the water run straight. "I put my name on him. On my seat and my name, I told you he’d cultivate again, back when your own diagnostics said never. So yes — I hear when a channel of Cassian Rook’s holds light for a second, because that second is mine as much as it’s his. It’s slow. It’s ugly. It’s working." He glanced sideways. "That’s the one promise of the Alliance’s you can weigh in your hand. I know you don’t trust the rest. Don’t. But weigh that one honestly."

It was the closest thing to a soft spot the man had. Ren weighed it honestly, because he’d been asked to. The pipeline had come, free, every shipment on time. His parents were somewhere no database could reach. And a boy the whole world had written off had held light for one second four days ago.

"I weigh it," Ren said.

"Good."

— • —

They reached the top of a low, too-perfect hill, and Halvern stopped.

"One more thing, and then I’ll give you your morning back." He looked out over his ordered country. "Her name is Mei Lanhua. Crimson Empire. She’s one of the twenty-seven, same as you — a Bloodline Plant Lord who woke the year you all woke. The Void Star Alliance took her off her own training ground and out of this plane before anyone could reach her." A pause. "She’s alive. We’re closer to her than we were. That’s all I can tell you, and it’s more than I’m supposed to."

Ren said nothing for a moment. He hadn’t known her name until just now. He knew it now, and it wasn’t going back in the drawer.

"Why tell me?"

"Because you read old memories all night and forget there’s a war running in the daylight," Halvern said. "She’s what happens to one of you when the wrong people get there first. You’re a Valis with a waking bloodline. If they’ll cross a plane for her, don’t make it easy for them to cross a world for you." He turned to face Ren fully. "That’s the whole reason I keep John on you. Not to read your secrets. To make sure you live long enough to answer them."

— • —

The garden began to thin at the edges. Halvern’s hour was ending on his schedule, the same as everything else about him.

"Whatever your blood is saying to you," the general said, "say it back." Something dry crossed his face, almost a smile. "I’ve never met a Valis who left a letter unanswered."

Then the garden folded away, hedges and streams and squared hills all at once, and Ren was on the edge of his own bed in his own dull room, exactly where he’d started, with the whole conversation behind him and no proof it had happened.

"He likes you," Kaia said, warm and quiet, only for him. "He’d deny it worse than your father does."

Ren huffed out a breath through his nose. "He put a peak Stage Six on me and called it manners."

"Yes," Kaia said. "That’s how men like that say it."

— • —

He went to find the others, and got as far as the Terrace path before his blood stirred.

It was daylight. That was the thing — it had always waited for the dark before, for the tree and the quiet and his eyes half-closed. Now the sun was up, the path was warm under his boots, students were crossing the yard below, and the old pressure rose in him anyway, in the open, standing up.

His hand found the low wall along the path and pressed flat against the stone.

Not this stone. The other stone. Dark, old, curved inward at the top.

The second memory had started, and it hadn’t asked him for a good time.