He looked at me. Something shifted in his face — not quite a laugh, but the shape of one, reluctant and surprised. Then he sobered. "This could be a trap. A way of luring me to the Shadow Court on the strength of a letter that happens to sound exactly like what I'd want to hear — a brother who rejected Erlik, who's been watching from a distance, who wants to give me answers."
"It could be," I said. "Or Kaan has had over a thousand years to become something entirely different from his father, and this is what that looks like." I looked at the letter again — the precision of the handwriting, the authority in every line even when the words were dry. "He knew about you. He stayed away because he hoped you'd live quietly. That's not the behavior of someone setting a trap. That's someone who's been in this family long enough to know that being found is the worst thing that can happen to you."
Hakan was quiet for a moment. His shadows curled restlessly around his wrists.
"My mother mentioned him once," he said finally. "When she told me about Erlik. Said our father spoke of him with pride and rage in the same breath — a son with real power who walked away from everything." He looked at the letter. "The only family I have besides her. And he writes likethis."
"He's had thousand of years of practice ruling alone," I said. "Maybe this is just what that sounds like when it relaxes."
Hakan stared at the parchment for another long moment. Then he folded it carefully and set it on the table with the deliberate movement of someone making a decision.
"I want to meet him."
"Then let's go." I reached for his hand. "I'll speak to my father. He'll want to know."
Hakan pulled me toward him before I could move — one hand at my waist, the other tilting my face up, his shadows warm rather than cold for once, curling around us both like something content.
"You're very calm about riding into the Shadow Court," he said.
"I'm terrified," I said honestly. "But I'm more curious than I am terrified, which is either wisdom or a character flaw I've had since childhood."
"Both," he said, and kissed me, and I felt his smile against my mouth.
* * *
I found my father in his private study that evening.
He was at the window when I arrived, standing rather than sitting, which was more than the healers had permitted him yesterday. The golden light that always moved beneath his skin — that warm, constant glow I had felt my entire life the way you feel the sun through closed eyes — was quieter than it should have been. Still there. But quieter.
"Ada." He turned when I entered, and his face did what it always did when he saw me — warmed, opened, became the face I had known since childhood before it was the face of a god. "Come in. Sit."
"You're standing."
"I'm allowed to stand in my own study." He lowered himself into the chair by the window with the careful movements of someone managing pain, then gestured at the chair across from him. "Sit. You're making me anxious."
I sat. I told him everything — Kaan's letter, Hakan's heritage confirmed, the Shadow Court, our plan to travel. I watched him listen the way he always listened, with his full attention and that slight tilt of his head that meant he was thinking three conversations ahead.
When I finished, he was quiet for a long moment.
"You want my blessing."
"I want your honest opinion. The blessing would be nice too."
He almost smiled. "Kaan is not his father. That much I can tell you with certainty — I have watched them both for a very long time, and whatever Kaan became across those centuries, he became it in spite of Erlik, not because of him." His golden eyes studied me with that particular look I'd learned to read only recently — the look that said he was measuring not what I could handle now but what I would need later. "Go. Learn what he knows. Pay attention to what he doesn't say as much as what he does."
"That's not particularly comforting advice."
"No." He reached out and took my hand, and his grip was stronger than I expected, than it had any right to be given how pale he'd been this morning. "There's something I want to say to you before you go. Something I've been meaning to say for some time and have been — as you would put it — being very Gün Ata about."
I waited.
"The bond between light and shadow is older than the war between them," he said. He wasn't looking at me anymore — his gaze had gone somewhere past my shoulder, the distant look of someone reading from something written a very long time ago. "Older than courts and treaties and the careful story we tell ourselves about which magic is clean and which is dangerous. There was a time before the division. Before any of us decided the two things couldn't share the same space." He paused. "What comes from both — genuinely from both, not one overwhelming the other but both at once — cannot be unmade. Cannot be claimed. Cannot be turned against itself." His eyes came back to mine. "Remember that."
"I don't entirely know what that means."
"You will." He squeezed my hand once. "Go see the Shadow Court. Come back and tell me what you find."
"I'll be back before?—"