I went up to tell him myself. He deserved to hear it from me, and not from the way the whole city was already saying it — that the old king had come home, that the Grey Crown walked, that the Blood Moon's father had risen out of a burned legend to take his daughter back from the Thorne who'd stolen her.
The world up top never got easier to walk back into. Six weeks of the drowned tunnels, of the smell of wet stone and the sound of the drowning, and then the private elevator opened onto glass and altitude and the pale indifferent gold of a morning a hundred and twenty-eight floors above the people it was built on top of, and every time it did I felt the same thing: that I did not belong here anymore, and that the not-belonging was the truest thing about me.
Alaric was where he always was now, at the window, holding the whole fractured Council off my back with the last of a broken King's leverage, and he turned when I came in and read my face in the time it took the doors to close.
"He came," Alaric said.
"Last night. To the station." I made myself say the rest plainly. "He's my father. His name is Soren. He's the Grey King — the old crown, the real one, from before the Houses. And he came down into the Undercity alone and unarmed and the oldest of the rogues went to their knees, and he didn't threaten anyone or hurt anyone or do a single thing except offer to fix my problems, and I have never in my life been more frightened of a person, and Alaric—" my voice caught "—he told me to tell you the old king came home."
Alaric did not move for a long moment.
"And he said I made you a King," he said. Quietly. Not a question. "Instead of a daughter. Didn't he."
I stared at him. "How did you—"
"Because it's the thing I'd have said, in his place." He turned back to the glass. "Because it's true, and he'd have seen it in the first minute, the way I saw it, the way your mother saw it in me across three days twenty years ago. He's not wrong, Sera. That's what you came up here needing me to argue you out of, and I can't, because he's not wrong. I have stood behind you and lent you my crown and my enemies and my throne, and I have watched you become a thing the whole world will reach for and fight over and break, and some nights I lie awake forty feet under the city and I think: I did that. I am doing that. I set out to keep a girl alive and I am building her a scaffold every single day and calling it love." He said it without flinching, which was worse than if he'd wept. "So no. I won't tell you your father is wrong about me. He's the only person besides your mother who's ever seen me clearly, and I find I can't even hate him for it."
It was not what I'd come for. I'd come to be told he was the enemy. And here was Alaric, handing him half the argument.
"He can stop the Ashcroft war by nightfall," I said. It came out small. "He was right about Ilsa. He was right about all of it — I gave a hundred thousand people the right to choose and no one's catching what they drop and people are dying, Alaric, and he can make it stop, and maybe — maybe order is just the thing that catches people, maybe he's—"
"Do you want to know the difference between his world and the one you're bleeding to build?" Alaric turned, and there was something in his face I had never seen there, something older than the King, something with a valley in it. "You're right. His world had no Ilsa Voss. No girl sold to a House at fourteen and left to rot in a bond she never chose. He'll have told you that, and it'll be true. Do you know why it's true?"
"Because someone stood between the strong and the weak."
"Because in his world," Alaric said, "a girl like Ilsa Voss was decided — long before she was ever born — to be the kind of person whose quiet suffering was the price of everyone else's peace. The old kings didn't end the market in souls, Sera. They were it. One buyer instead of twelve. They kept the strong from eating the weak by choosing, personally, which of the weak could be eaten quietly, in the dark, so that the rest of the world could sleep and call it order." He came toward me, slow. "Your father asked you who catches what the free let drop. Here's the question he will never ask you, because he already knows the answer and it damns him: who catches what the king throws away?"
I didn't answer. I couldn't.
"For a thousand years, under one crown, the answer was no one," Alaric said. "Because there was no one standing above the king to tell him he was wrong. And when the Houses murdered his monarchy they didn't end that — they just cut the one throne into twelve and kept the machine running. Your mother's entire bloodline was a thing men in a room decided did not count. And we burned them in a valley to keep the peace." His voice did not rise. It went to the flattest, most terrible honesty I had ever heard from him. "I helped, Sera. I was the order that did it. I stood in the room where reasonable men decided your family was an acceptable loss, and I let it happen, and forty people died so the world could keep sleeping soundly. So believe me when I tell you this, because I have earned the right to say it in blood: I know exactly what a world run by men who are certain they know who matters costs. I was the knife it used."
He stopped in front of me. Up close I could see he hadn't slept either — the grey coming in at his temples, the collar he hadn't bothered to fix, a man six weeks into holding a broken Council together with nothing but nerve. He looked, for once, exactly as old as he was.
"Freedom has a body," he said. "I won't lie to you about that; you've held it, you'll hold more. But order has a valley. Every man who ever offered to carry the choosing for you — your father, the Council, me, twenty years ago — did it standing on one and calling it a floor. Don't let anyone tell you his ground is cleaner than mine. Not him. Not me."
The glass room was very quiet, a hundred and twenty-eight floors above the sleeping city, and I understood that I had come up here looking for the villain and found instead the one thing worse than a villain: two men I could not choose between, who were each, in their own graveyard, right.
"Then what do I do," I whispered. "If you're both right. If every road has bodies on it."
"I don't know." He said it the way he'd said it once in a burning car, and it undid me the same way. "I spent forty years certain I did, and it cost me the only other woman I ever loved, and it nearly cost me you. So I've stopped selling certainty." He reached up and touched my face, and for a moment he was not the King or the knife or the guardian, just a tired man who'd learned the truth too late to be saved by it. "But I can tell you the one thing your father and I will never, ever agree on. He looks at the weight of the choosing and sees a cruelty — a thing to be lifted off you so you can finally rest. And I look at it and I see the only thing that makes you you. He wants to carry it so you don't have to. I want to stand next to you while you carry it yourself, for as long as it takes, even if it breaks us both — because the day someone lifts it off you is the day you stop being the woman I fell in love with and start being the throne he's already decided you are." His thumb moved along my cheekbone. "That's the whole war, Sera. That's all Book Two of your life is ever going to be about. Not who's strong enough to rule you. Who loves you enough to let you rule yourself."
I kissed him, because there was nothing else in the world large enough to answer that with, and for one moment the war and the weight and the two graveyards all waited.
They did not wait long.
Mara came through the doors at a dead run, and she was white, and she had a phone in her hand, and I knew before she said it, the way you always know.
"It's the eastern tunnels," she gasped. "House Ashcroft didn't wait for you to decide. Their war party went in an hour ago, looking for Ilsa Voss, and Marrow's people are trying to hold them, and Sera — people are dying down there right now, our people, and there's only two ways this stops." She swallowed. "You go down there and find a way to end it that no one's ever managed before. Or you send word up to your father, and let the old king do the thing he came here to do."
And then she said the part she wasn't supposed to say, the part that had been building behind her eyes for six weeks of carrying me bad news every morning. "Send for him." Quiet. Steady. Not a slip — a stance. "I've buried four of ours since the Cathedral, Sera. Four. I helped you free this city and I would do it again, but I am tired of washing them, and there is a man upstairs who can stop it by nightfall, and I don't understand — I have never understood — why that's the harder thing to say yes to." She wiped her face with the back of her hand, furious at herself, and didn't take it back. "You wanted us to have opinions. That's mine. Send for your father."
The choice. Already. Six weeks of drowning and now the water was over all our heads at once.
I crossed to Mara first, because she was crying and pretending she wasn't, and I took the phone out of her hand and held her wrist a moment — the four she'd buried, the fifth she was afraid was being made right now. "I know," I told her, and meant it, and let her see that I meant it. "You're not wrong to want it. That's what makes it hard."
Then I looked at Alaric, who would not tell me which grave to stand beside, and I understood that if I sent for my father today I would send for him tomorrow, and every day after, one drowned morning at a time, until there was nothing of the choosing left in my hands at all.
"Not yet," I said.
That was all. Mara opened her mouth and shut it. Alaric didn't try to stop me. The elevator doors opened on the long way down to a war no one had ever found a move for, and I stepped into it, and went to find out — the way you only ever find out, with the bodies already falling — whether there was one in me.
