Chapter 46 The Honest Conversation With Lyse
SERAPHINE
She found Lyse in the practice room at six in the morning.
This was where Lyse went when she was thinking: the same room where she had run Seraphine through training for six days. She was sitting in the center of the empty floor, cross-legged, and she looked up when Seraphine came in without giving any indication of surprise.
"I've been expecting this," Lyse said.
"I know," Seraphine said. She sat down across from her. Directly across, the way they had sat for training. "All of it. From the beginning."
"All of it is a long story."
"I have time."
Lyse looked at her for a moment.
"I was born in a small pack sixty miles north of what is now Ironspire's territory," she said. "The pack has been gone for eighty years. I was twenty-three when the Bloodmoon ceremony selected me as a fated mate to the pack's Alpha. He was a good man." She paused. "He rejected me."
Seraphine went still.
"Not publicly. Privately. He came to me afterward and told me he couldn't take an omega with no wolf as his Luna. That the pack wouldn't accept it." Lyse's voice was even. "He was right about the pack. He was not right about what I was. But the marks were faint then and I didn't know what they meant."
"The rejection activated the gift," Seraphine said.
"Yes. Exactly as yours did. I spent the following years learning what I was without any guide, without Lyse, because I was Lyse and there was no one before me who had survived long enough to build what I eventually built."
"The Omega Conclave."
"Yes." She looked at her hands. "I spent sixty years understanding my gift. I spent forty of those years trying to find a way to address the Conclave of Ash's architecture and failing. And then I understood the limiting factor."
"The chosen bond," Seraphine said.
"Yes. My activation had stalled because I had never completed it." She paused. "I was one hundred and twenty-three years old when I understood what was missing."
"And the man who rejected you."
"Was long dead. Yes."
Seraphine breathed.
"So you built the Omega Conclave," she said. "Set it dormant. Made it able to find the next Hollow and prepare them."
"Yes."
"And you stayed. Because Hollows live a very long time."
"Yes."
"And when you found me at the midnight market, you knew."
"I knew the rejection had happened six months before. I felt the activation at range. I found you." She looked at Seraphine. "I was careful to give you only what you needed when you needed it. I thought that was the right approach."
"It was the wrong approach," Seraphine said.
"Yes," Lyse said. "I understand that now. I spent a hundred years making decisions alone and I brought that habit into our relationship and it was wrong."
"Tell me what you want," Seraphine said.
"I want the correction to hold," Lyse said. "I want what you did to mean something." She paused. "And I want to understand what the first Hollow wants, because I have been afraid of her since I understood she might have survived in the traces."
"You knew she might have survived."
"I suspected. The first Hollow's story has gaps. Her architecture lasted forty years and then collapsed. Architectures don't collapse cleanly without something directing the collapse. I suspected something remained."
"And you didn't tell me."
"No," Lyse said. "I didn't tell you because I thought that if you knew, you might act on the traces before you understood them, and acting on them wrong could have woken her in an uncontrolled way."
"You were protecting me again."
"Yes."
Seraphine looked at her.
"Lyse," she said. "I need you to understand something. I cannot work with you if I have to assume I am missing information. I cannot make good decisions if the person who has the most relevant historical knowledge is filtering what I receive."
"I know," Lyse said.
"From this point forward, everything. Suspicions as well as certainties. Possibilities as well as actualities."
"Yes," Lyse said.
"Can you do that?"
A pause. A real one, the kind that indicated someone was checking their answer against themselves before giving it.
"I'm going to find it difficult," Lyse said. "I've been operating alone for a very long time. The habit of filtering is deep."
"I know," Seraphine said. "I'm not asking you to be different immediately. I'm asking you to tell me when you're filtering so I can ask the questions you're deciding not to answer."
Another pause.
"Yes," Lyse said. "That I can do."
Seraphine looked at her.
She thought about a woman who had been rejected at twenty-three and had spent the following century learning to work alone. Who had built a structure designed to guide someone she had never met. Who had found her at a midnight market and said: there you are, with the specific relief of someone who has been carrying something for a very long time.
She thought about what it cost to be a hundred and nineteen years old and wrong.
"Lyse," she said.
"Yes."
"The man who rejected you. A hundred years ago."
Lyse looked at her.
"I'm sorry," Seraphine said. "That it cost you what it cost."
A very long pause.
"Thank you," Lyse said. Very quietly.
Seraphine stood.
"Now tell me everything you know about the first Hollow and what she actually built."
Lyse stood too.
"That," she said, "is going to take more than one morning."
"We have time."
"Less than you think," Lyse said. "She has been patient. But she is watching what the three Alphas do with the treaty draft. When she sees them engaging with it genuinely, she is going to understand that her coalition is dissolving."
"And then."
"Then she is going to decide that patience has run out," Lyse said. "And the conversation becomes something different."
"How different."
Lyse looked at her.
"I don't know," she said. "She was not gentle the last time she decided patience had run out. And that was two hundred years ago when she was much less experienced."
Seraphine thought about that.
"How long do we have."
"A week," Lyse said. "Maybe ten days."
"Then we start now."