They met at the cathedral.

This had been Valerius's choice of location, which Caelum had accepted without comment — he understood by now that the cathedral was where the important conversations of this particular period of his friend's life happened, and that this was not accidental. The cathedral held things. It was made for holding things.

Caleum arrived at the eighth hour, when the morning was fully light, with the expression of a man who has been carrying a weight over a long distance and has arrived at the place where it can be set down. He looked at Valerius when he came through the gate — the particular assessment of a man who has known someone for twenty-one years and can read the difference between the day-after-ordinary and the day-after-significant.

"She told you," he said.

"Last night. Most of it." Valerius looked at the moon-laurel tree — the silver blossoms in the morning light, ordinary and extraordinary simultaneously. "I want to hear the version you were going to tell me."

They sat on the stone bench and Caelum told it from the beginning.

He described the Promenade bench and the cold morning and the woman who had appeared from a direction he had not anticipated with the specific quality of preparation that indicated she had been thinking about this conversation for longer than the conversation lasted. He described the plan as she had presented it to him — the false pursuit, the access, the reasoning. He described his conditions, and the condition she had not fully met, and the specific morning at the Ashwick Tavern when he had looked at Valerius's face after the performance and understood that his conditions had been overtaken by events.

"You knew from Ashwick," Valerius said.

"I knew from Ashwick that you were falling. Yes." Caelum met his eyes. "I made a decision to continue supporting the arrangement. I believed — I still believe — that what she was doing for you was real. That the music coming back was real. That the color coming back was real." A pause. "I also believed I had made a promise to her that I was going to keep, because the promise was the right thing, and because I thought you would forgive me when you knew the full picture."

"You were wrong to keep it from me," Valerius said.

"Yes." One word. No qualification. "I made a judgment call about what was good for you that I didn't have the right to make alone. That's the error. I'm not going to dress it differently than that."

Valerius received the direct accounting of it — no excess, no defense, no arrangement of the facts into a more comfortable shape. Caelum's honesty, when it arrived, was always in this form: exact, unhurried, prepared to cost him whatever it cost him.

"Tell me about the Seraphine connection," Valerius said.

Caleum was careful here. He described what he knew: the document in the restricted stacks, the authorization stamp, the incomplete record. He described what he had been able to discover independently — the timeline of the Moon-Laurel tribe's suppression and its correspondence with the Inquisitor's office's activities in the period of Seraphine's appointment as Judicial Composer. He was precise about the limits of his knowledge: he knew the authorization existed, he did not know its full content, he did not know the degree of Seraphine's personal investment in the decision.

"She knows," Valerius said. Not a question.

"She knew before she came to Oakhaven. She researched." Caelum looked at him steadily. "She came knowing your mother's name was on something connected to the destruction of her tribe. She chose to come to you anyway."

The specific weight of this landed in the specific location where it needed to land. He sat with it.

"Did she say why?" he asked, after a while. "To you. When she explained herself."

"She said she needed the Aetheris. That was the first reason, the practical one." Caelum paused. "She also said — and this was later, a different conversation — that when she looked at your records, at who you were, she saw someone who had been shaped by the same kind of love that had shaped and damaged her people. Demanding. Imperfect. Real." Another pause. "She said she thought you would understand the Rite better than someone who hadn't been through something similar."

Valerius looked at the courtyard — the stones, the tree, the familiar geometry of the place where he had learned to play again. He thought about his mother's annotations in the margins of the teaching compendium. The note in her late hand: *play for the music.* He thought about the things that shaped people, and about the fact that the things that had shaped him and the things that had shaped her, while they came from different directions, had produced people who could hear each other.

"She chose me," he said, quietly. Working through it. "Not despite the Seraphine connection. Through it."

"That's how I understood it," Caelum said.

They were quiet for a while. The cathedral courtyard held its morning stillness — the specific quiet of a space that has been the site of something large and is now being simply a space again, which is what spaces do.

"Vorne," Valerius said. Back to practical ground, because there was practical ground to cover.

"Moving. I slowed him at the archive level, but he has the rubbing and the direct observation of the Rite. He has a week, maybe ten days, before his documentation is sufficient to file officially." Caelum looked at him. "After that, the legal situation becomes significantly more complicated."

"And she has six weeks." He said it flatly, not for effect — simply to put both numbers in the same sentence and hear what that sentence sounded like. "Vorne has ten days. She has six weeks."

"Yes."

"Can you give me ten days to address the Vorne situation?"

Caleum looked at him. A long moment. Something shifted in his expression — not surprise, recognition. The specific recognition of watching someone decide something important. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking there's a legal argument about performance licensing and archive reclassification that I want to research before I decide how to pursue it." Valerius stood. "I'm also thinking about a conversation I want to have with the Academy archivist."

Caleum stood as well, with the movement of someone who has set down the weight he was carrying and is already preparing to help with the next thing. "Ten days," he said. "I can manage the official channels for ten days."

"That's all I need."

"And after that?"

Valerius looked at the moon-laurel tree. At the courtyard where color had come back to his world. At the space that had been the site of the best and most consequential work of his adult life. At the six weeks they had.

"After that," he said, "I'm going to go back to the cathedral."

Caleum looked at him. Then he did the thing he did when something was right but he wasn't going to say it was right — he simply nodded, with the particular quality of someone who has been watching a thing build for six weeks and is satisfied with where it has arrived, whatever the cost of the arrival.