Chapter 24 Aldric
I don't sleep well.
This is not new information about me but tonight it's worse than usual, the message from Aldric sitting on my phone screen every time I close my eyes, those four words doing something persistent and uncomfortable to my chest.
I heard you're registered.
I get up at five-thirty because lying in the dark pretending to sleep stopped being useful approximately three hours ago, and I dress quietly so I don't wake Dara and I sit at my desk and look at my phone and think.
Aldric Valecrest is thirty-nine years old and has been carrying an unresolved stage-three tamer bond for twenty years. Twenty years of managing something that was never meant to be managed alone, never meant to be left unfinished, something that the archive documentation described with the specific clinical language of permanent and bidirectional and cannot be severed without significant cost to both parties.
Twenty years of that.
And he messaged me within hours of the registration filing.
Which means one of two things. Either he has someone inside Corvyn's administrative process who notified him immediately, or he has been watching for exactly this, waiting for the moment a tamer bond registered at Northveil so he could respond before anyone else did.
Both options tell me he's been paying attention for a long time.
The east courtyard at first light is cold and grey and empty except for a single figure standing near the far wall with his hands in his coat pockets, and I stop when I see him because even from across the courtyard the resemblance is immediate and disorienting.
Same jaw. Same stillness. Same quality of taking up space without announcing it.
Except Aldric Valecrest's eyes when he turns and finds me crossing the courtyard toward him are grey like Rhydan's but tired in a way Rhydan's aren't yet, carrying twenty years of something heavy that looked like guilt mixed with regret in them, and when he looks at me his expression does something complicated and quiet that he doesn't fully manage to control.
"You look like her," he says, when I'm close enough. His voice is low and even and careful.
"I've been told," I reply.
We look at each other for a moment, this man who was bonded to my mother twenty years ago and the daughter she had after she ran, and the cold morning air sits between us full of everything that implies.
"You came alone," he says.
"You asked me to," I reply.
"Rhydan doesn't know you're here?" he asks.
"No," I confirm.
Something moves in his expression. "He won't like that."
"Probably not," I agree. "But this conversation is between us first. Not him."
He looks at me with something that might be the beginning of respect. "Your mother would have said exactly that," he says quietly.
I hold his gaze. "Where do you want to start?"
"With an apology," he says simply. "For what my father did to her. For what it cost her. For the fact that you grew up without knowing what you were because she had to hide what she was, and that is a direct consequence of my family's interference in something that was never theirs to interfere with."
I stare at him.
I was not prepared for that to be the first thing out of his mouth.
"Okay," I say carefully.
"I didn't know he was planning it," Aldric says. "The binding. Not until after she was already gone. He told me she left voluntarily. That she decided the bond wasn't what she wanted." He pauses, jaw working. "I believed him for three years before I found the actual documentation."
"What did you do when you found it?" I ask.
"Nothing effective," he says, and the flatness of it carries enormous weight. "I was twenty-two. Inside the pack structure. With a father who had already demonstrated exactly how far he was willing to go." He looks at the forest beyond the courtyard gate. "I made choices I'm not proud of. About what I was willing to fight and what I decided I couldn't win."
"You stayed," I say.
"I stayed," he confirms. "And I have lived with that every day for twenty years."
The courtyard is very quiet.
"Does she know you've contacted me?" I ask.
He shakes his head. "I haven't spoken to your mother since she left this campus." He pauses. "I have wanted to. Many times. The bond makes the distance..." he stops, searching for the word. "Loud," he says finally. "It makes the distance very loud."
I think about the archive documentation. An unresolved stage-three bond carrying for twenty years. Both parties affected permanently.
"You felt it," I say. "When I touched Rhydan in the forest."
He looks at me sharply.
"The bond responding," I say. "Your bond. The original one. Did you feel it activate when ours started?"
He's quiet for a moment. "Yes," he says. "Three weeks ago. Something shifted. I knew immediately what it meant." He meets my eyes. "That's why I'm here. Not to interfere. The opposite."
"You want to help us."
"I want to make sure my father doesn't do to you what he did to your mother," he says. "And I want to make sure Rhydan understands what's at stake before the Elder moves against you both."
"The registration buys us time."
"The registration buys you four months," he says. "My father is already looking for ways around the charter provision. He has lawyers who specialise in supernatural jurisdictional overlap." He pauses. "Four months is not as safe as Corvyn thinks it is."
My stomach tightens.
"What does he have?" I ask.
"A clause," Aldric says. "In the original pack law. Pre-dating the Northveil charter by sixty years. If he can establish that a tamer bond constitutes a threat to pack stability, he can petition the supernatural council for an emergency intervention order that supersedes academic protection."
"Can he establish that?"
Aldric looks at me steadily. "He established it once before," he says. "Twenty years ago. With your mother."
The morning light is coming up over the academy roof now, pale and cold, and somewhere inside the building the first sounds of the day are starting, distant and ordinary.
"What do we do?"
"You need evidence," he says. "Of what he did twenty years ago. Documented. Presented to the supernatural council before he files his petition." He reaches into his coat and produces a folded envelope. "I've been building this file for fifteen years."
He holds it out.
I take it.
It's heavy.
"Show Rhydan," he says. "He deserves to know who his grandfather actually is." He pauses. "And Veyra. Your mother's contact information is on the last page. She doesn't know I've given it to you. That conversation is yours to have on your own terms."
I hold the envelope with both hands.
My right hand burns steadily against it.
"Why now?" I ask quietly. "Why not before? Why wait until we registered?"
He looks at me and the tiredness in his grey eyes is enormous and old.
"Because before now," he says quietly, "there was nothing to protect. And I have spent twenty years learning that you cannot fight him without something worth fighting for."
He looks at me for one more moment, then turns and walks away across the courtyard, and I stand there in the early morning cold with his file in my burning hand and my heart doing something very loud in my chest.
Behind me, a voice says, "How long has he been here?"
I spin around.
Rhydan is standing at the courtyard entrance, jacket not fully zipped, clearly just arrived, and he's watching his father's retreating figure with an expression I can't fully read, something between controlled and completely not.
He looks at the envelope in my hand.
Then at my face.
"How long?" he asks again, quieter.
"Twenty minutes," I say.
His jaw tightens. "You didn't tell me."
"He asked me to come alone."
"And you went," he says. "Alone. To meet a man you don't know, connected to everything that's coming for us, without telling me."
"Rhydan..."
"That was dangerous, Veyra," he says, and his voice has dropped to something low and tight and the control in it is the specific control of someone keeping something much larger very carefully contained.
"He's your father," I say.
"I know who he is," he replies.
"He wants to help us," I say.
Something crosses his face. Raw and complicated and there and gone.
"What's in the envelope?" he asks.
I hold it out to him.
He takes it. Looks at it. Looks at me.
"Come on," I say quietly. "Let's go somewhere warm and read it together."
He holds my gaze for a long moment, the tight jaw and the complicated eyes and the controlled something underneath all of it, and then he nods once, short and decisive.
We walk inside.
His arm brushes mine in the doorway and neither of us moves away from it.