Jasper found the last two generals before anyone else did, because he had stopped looking for a way back to the group and started, instead, following the specific pull of wherever the castle seemed most determined to keep him from going.
He had not spoken since William told him about Kristen. Courtney, walking beside him through corridor after black-stone corridor, had stopped trying to make him — she understood, the way the whole house understood by now, that some grief needed room to simply exist unspoken before it could be handled any other way, and Jasper's blink-light-adjacent tracking sense, the specific gift that let him follow Kristen's own power through a crowded room without ever needing to look, had turned itself instead, grimly, toward finding whatever had taken her.
"You don't have to lead," Courtney said, quietly, at one turning. "We can wait for the others. Nobody would think less of you for it."
"I would think less of me," Jasper said. It was the first full sentence he'd managed in over an hour. "Kristen didn't wait for anyone when it mattered. I'm not going to start waiting now, of all times."
Courtney fell into step beside him without another word, matching his pace through corridor after identical black-stone corridor, until the two of them reached a set of doors carved with the same violet symbols they'd learned, by now, to associate with a general waiting on the other side.
They found Preston Avaritia in a chamber lined with mirrors that showed not their own reflections but something else entirely — Courtney saw, for one disorienting instant, a version of a life she had never lived, a house full of people who had never once needed to fight for survival, and understood, with the particular clarity of someone whose blood magic read truth for a living, exactly what kind of trap the chamber had been built to be.
"It isn't real," she said. "Whatever you're showing us. It's a lie built out of what we actually want, which makes it worse than an ordinary lie, but it doesn't make it true."
"Knowing it's a lie has never once stopped anyone from wanting it anyway," Preston said, stepping out from among the mirrors, richer and sadder than any of them had expected the fifth-ranked general to sound. "That was always the design. I don't need you to believe the image is real. I only need you to want it enough to reach for it instead of me."
"What do you see, when you look at us," Courtney asked, genuinely curious despite everything. "You must see something. That's the gift, isn't it. Seeing what people secretly want."
"I see a man beside you who has stopped speaking," Preston said, his eyes moving to Jasper. "And underneath the silence, I see exactly what he wants, more clearly than I've seen anything in three hundred years. He wants to go back six hours and be standing in a different corridor. He wants it so completely I could show it to him right now, vivid as anything real, and watch him walk toward it the way every other person I've ever met has walked toward the thing I show them."
"Don't," Courtney said, sharp, stepping half in front of Jasper.
"I won't," Preston said, and something in his weary voice suggested the refusal cost him something to make. "Not because I've suddenly grown a conscience. Because I understand, better than anyone in this castle, exactly what showing him that would do, and I find, after three hundred years, that I am tired of being the reason people destroy themselves reaching for what they can't have back."
"You could stop," Courtney said. "If you're truly tired of it. You could simply refuse."
"I've tried," Preston said, and something in his composed face flickered with a weariness that felt, for a moment, older than three hundred years. "The gift doesn't ask my permission before it shows me what a room wants. It only asks my permission before I choose to reveal it. That's a smaller freedom than you'd think, but it is the only one I have left, and I've decided to spend it, today, on not hurting the two of you the way I've hurt everyone else who's stood in this chamber."
Jasper was not looking at the mirrors.
He had not looked at a single reflected image since the chamber's illusions began, some stubborn grief-hardened part of him refusing to let anything, even his own deepest want, distract him from the specific tracking work his gift had been doing since the moment he and Courtney crossed the threshold — following, thread-thin and precise, the exact place in the room where a man's power that showed everyone else's wanting had never once, in three hundred years, been asked to reveal his own.
"You never found out what you wanted," Jasper said, and it was the first thing he'd said to Preston directly, his voice rough with disuse and grief both. "Isn't that it. You've spent three hundred years showing the whole world their hidden hearts and you've never once gotten to see your own reflected back."
Something in Preston's composed, weary face cracked.
"How—"
"I track things," Jasper said. "That's my whole gift. And I've been tracking the shape of you since we walked in, and there's a hollow place at the center of it where your own want should be, and I think, General, that hollow place is the only true thing in this entire chamber."
"You're wrong," Preston said, though his voice had gone unsteady. "I know exactly what I want. I've always known."
"Then say it," Jasper said. "Out loud. Right now. If you know it that clearly, it should cost you nothing to say."
Preston opened his mouth, and closed it again, and for a long moment the mirrored chamber held nothing but silence and a man who had spent three centuries showing everyone else the truth of themselves discovering, in real time, that he had no answer of his own to give.
Courtney's blood magic caught the opening before Preston could recover it — reaching not for illusion, which she couldn't touch, but for the specific truth Jasper had just named, the one honest thread in a chamber built entirely of lies, and pulled.
Preston Avaritia did not fight the way the other generals had fought. He simply stood, in the last moment, looking at something none of the rest of them could see, an expression on his face that was almost, finally, wonder — as though whatever Courtney's magic had shown him, in the half-second before it ended him, had been the first true reflection of his own hidden want he had ever been permitted to see.
"Oh," he said, softly, and then he was gone.
The mirrors, for the first time since they'd entered, showed only Jasper and Courtney, standing in an empty room that no longer had anything left to lie about.
"Do you think he ever found out what he wanted," Courtney said, quietly, into the silence.
"I think, right at the end, he finally did," Jasper said. "I think that's the only reason he looked the way he did when it happened."
Courtney studied him for a moment, the first real, focused attention she'd given his face since William's news two chambers back. "You're talking more," she said. "Since we found this one. I noticed it start somewhere around when he cracked."
"I think tracking him gave me somewhere to put it," Jasper admitted. "The grief. I've spent an hour just — following a thread, the way I always do, and it turns out following a thread is easier than sitting still with everything else. I don't know what happens once we run out of generals to track."
"Then we won't let you run out of things to focus on," Courtney said. "There's still one left. And after that, there's a whole house that's going to need you present for whatever comes next, whether it's grieving or fighting or just getting through the next ordinary Tuesday. I don't think focus has to end just because the tracking does."
Jasper considered that for a long moment, standing in the settled dust of a chamber that no longer had anything left in it to lie to anyone.
"All right," he said, finally. "One more. Let's finish this."